-One-
My face glowed intermittently; with each puff, an orange
glow grew and disappeared in the dark woods. Without the sun or clouds for a
blanket of warmth, cold rained from the heavens down onto my little Arkansas
cabin. I was sitting under a maple, though you couldn’t tell. The leaves had
long since migrated south, and the bark was blacker than the night sky. Only a
memory of the tree allowed me to know it.
The English tobacco tasted like peat, and the old pipe
burned hot in my hands. Across the valley, lights dotted the mountain. Yellow
dots meant warm houses, while the white incandescent lights marked the
industrial chicken houses. In this part of the country, you see a lot more white
lights. On top of the mountain, a yellow light reigned king, peeking through
the valley.
I leaned back in my chair and looked at the stars. The last
time I had done that was in Hampi, and I could feel that warm stone again,
rough against my back. They looked the same then as they do now: like glitter
strewn across the inside of a black bowl. The devilish fingers of the maple
clawed at the sky, and broke apart the constellations. I couldn’t recognize
anything until the sky rotated just enough around the branches, and revealed
Orion. I flashed to a place very far away from my hermitage in the woods.
Sometimes memories can be too painful, so I was glad when
the maple took the belt away again.
I looked around for other familiar faces in the sky, when a
plane crested over the roofline of the house. It blinked red and white, and
floated away towards a distant city. It moved without sound at first, but then
seconds later a low rumble ran across the valley, like the tail-end of a
thunder clap.
The sound was interrupted by the barking of a dog.
“Ehh,” I mumbled through the smoke. It was probably Kevin;
the neighbor’s dog was a menace of sound, barking loudly into dead nights. I
didn’t actually know his name, but Kevin seemed to fit pretty well.
The leaves rustled in the distance behind me. I knew that’s
what the dog had been barking at, but now could only wait to see what the
darkness would bring. Was it a squirrel? A raccoon? An escaped convict with a
penchant for cold-blooded murder? My mind raced as I peered into the forest.
The rustling approached. Slowly, a shadow took shape. It was
taller than I expected, ruling out rodents. As the shadow left the tree line
and entered the grass behind me, the intruder became clear: a sleek and silent
doe had joined me.
-Two-
My lips were falling deeper into the amber ale, and it was
slowly disappearing. The brown bubbles had to travel a shorter path with each
sip. The glass was thick and cool. I bought this one with three dollars, and
left a couple more for the eyes behind the counter.
When I returned to my godforsaken table, she was saying
something about what she planned to do with her psychology degree. I had stopped listening after her rant on homework.
“I seriously just hate school!”
Her tirade began and my attention stopped.
As her words fell on top of me, her eyes darted around the
room, and her hair bounced with a calculated bob. She wasn’t there for me, I
wasn’t there for her, and maybe we both knew it.
I scratched my thumb over the table. It was the same table
in every college-town bar in America. It was small, deep brown, and coated with
a veneer that behaved like a wax. As my thumbnail ran across it, it clumped and
accumulated under my nail.
Great, I thought, I get to keep a part of this shit bar with
me.
“I mean, right?” Her lips curled around the blue straw, and
her eyes waited for my response. The crudely mixed vodka and cranberry
travelled up into her word machine, and her eyes began a smile that her newly
cooled mouth completed.
“Ha,” I laughed, “yeah I guess that’s true.”
She jumped back into her vain monologue.
I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be in that bar,
in that city, or in that country. As I sat there and pretended to be interested
in a dead conversation, my mind was still racing through the Mumbai streets.
She flashed her eyes, but I saw her
eyes. The beer was a local Arkansas craft, but all I could taste was
Kingfisher.
In my car across the street, leather gloves sat in the
passenger seat. They were crusty and stiff, dried out from the wet ditch I had
dug earlier in the day. The front windshield was cracked, but I didn’t have the
money to fix it. I just let the frost crawl inside on cold mornings. The floor
mats were covered in dirt; Arkansas clay that had finally dropped from my
boots.
Inside, at the beginning of the evening, I had tried to
convince her that I was helping run the family business. But the reality of my
car and thrice worn shirt showed otherwise. I was a young Ivy League graduate
who had failed to take on the world, and now I sat in a bar with a crusty blue
collar in mid-America.
Just a few months ago, I was on a rooftop bar in the urban
heart of the frontier land. I was where my home was nothing more than a whisper
on my own lips, and on no one else’s mind. With an old fashioned in my hand and
a Banana Republic tie around my Chanel flavored neck, I was explaining how I
could seduce a leading Bollywood actress. The lights of a city growing at a
breakneck pace dotted the space between my colleagues’ heads, and a sea breeze
from the Indian Ocean cooled the sweat forming over my body.
Now, I held a craft beer in my blistered hands. I wasn’t
talking, and was listening to a girl complain about the price of salmon at
Sam’s Club. Around us there were countless conversations, none of which went
deeper than that, nor further away. India was less than a whisper on someone’s
lips, because I was too sad to say it. The world outside the bar ended at the
state line of Arkansas.
“So I was thinking that I’ll be a human resources person
when I graduate.” She waited for my impressed approval.
“Oh yeah? That’s awesome. I think you’d be good at that. You
can certainly talk to people.”
“Aww thanks! Yeah I don’t know, talking makes me happy.” She
twisted her head and curled around the blue straw again. I think it was
supposed to be cute.
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