stranger's photograph

i find her in a box of photographs that lies open on some stranger's table. she stands far in the background, turned away from the camera. the setting sun illuminates the profile i know so well.

in the foreground, an attractive couple stand with arms outstretched toward the camera. their fingers forever rest upon the button that will open, then close the shutter. i recognize them as the hosts, friends of friends of friends. they have welcomed me into their home though i do not entirely understand the cascade of relationships that connects me to them.

i hold the picture closer. they are underexposed. the automatic shutter setting has mistaken the sun as the subject of the shot. and beyond them the whirl of those wild strands of her hair dance on the evening's last light.

she's shifted her weight shifted to her right foot, as if she has turned away suddenly. as if we have just missed seeing one another.

i recognize this posture, the simple line of her neck as it slopes down toward her shoulder. she hides smiling lips against her hands, as if she holds some great secret there. as if, by knowing yet not acknowledging the camera which beholds her, this moment suspended in silver halide will forever be only for me.

this is, of course, untrue. it is a stranger's photograph found in a stranger's house. i do not know anyone in it.

tall grass

you walk through the field at dusk where the august heat still lingers in the dirt against bare feet. the tall grass whispers as you pass by, its tops dancing across down-turned palm.

you are not alone

you stand perfectly still, perfectly alert. a snake in the grass, overheard, recedes like a stranger's conversation until finally it fades—as do all summer's dreams.

summer rain

our love lasted exactly as long as that warm summer rain that began to fall at twilight. we ran, laughing, along the half-abandoned foot paths that meander aimlessly through the decommissioned navy base. we took shelter beneath an old pine tree whose needles beneath our feet made the entire earth smell new. we crouched there against its trunk, drinking whiskey from paper cups, wrapped in the sound of the rain all around.

i told you that i didn't understand how anyone fell in love anymore, that maybe love was an anachronism in the modern age. you laughed and asked if i really believed that. yes, i said, i do, though i knew i was lying before I'd even finished the words.

i kissed you then and you didn't point out the contradiction. i kissed you as drops of rain fell down through the branches, cold against our naked arms.

you asked me if i had a cigarette and i said no, i don't smoke. good, you said, i don't either.

i walked you home then, your hand in mine, and when we reached your front porch, we embraced. i watched you walk up the steps, unlock the door, and as i turned to go, i heard the turning of the latch.

the rain faltered, then stopped. and the world was silent, silent, silent.

crash

in this moment, the air is crowded with the things that make up your life. your right hand reaches out, as if to gather them to yourself while your left grasps the wheel.

ground glass suspended in a lattice of plastic molded to the bridge of a theoretical nose, the curvature, to ears set an average distance to the back of the head.

the beginnings of tomatoes you picked off the vine, small and unripe, as if to deprive the world the small joy they might come to represent in time.

a handful of coins that, no matter how long they might accumulate, will never amount to much of anything.

salad forks and bread knives, those approximations hands and teeth.

a book you intentionally forgot to return; a miniature, nearly imperceptible act of spite.

these fragments you disassembled, removed from the context they once resided in—now you reach for each in turn.

but you are held back by a tremendous force, a band running diagonally across your chest, squeezing the breath from your lungs. you watch as all these things clatter and slip through your fingers, crashing against polyurethane foam and glass before coming to rest in the footwells and under the seats.

and then everything falls still.

you are on a bridge that, through some trick of physics, bisects the placid and tempestuous natures of the lake it floats upon. the sound of water is indistinguishable from that of the traffic that flows by you in all the highway's lanes but the one you're stopped in. behind you, a man steps out of his car, approaches, then raps on your window.

but in this moment, you think only of how these pieces will be put together once more, in some other place at some other time.

highway

he got into his car one evening in what was to be the last of his restless, idle summers. the highway, familiar and comforting, stretched out before him. but when he reached the off-ramp that would have taken him to that place where listless teens knew to gather on nights like this, his hand faltered on the turn signal, and he drove beyond the glowing center until even the streetlights all lay behind him.

it was still a small, simple town then. passing beyond its commercial hub, the highway split into a few main roads that sketched the shape of a town until they emerged from the tangle of houses and convenience stores as narrow highways once again, connecting town after town, as far as the state line and beyond.

he followed the familiar contour of the road that wound through an older district, built during world war ii and largely forgotten since. he drove across tracks whose trains and their inscrutable schedules had made him late to school at least two days each year. he had watched each passing train like a force of nature, as uncontrollably strange as the rolling thunder that would suddenly blow in over the valley.

the thunder seemed somehow connected to the region's particular geography, though he could not understand why this should be so. what did thunder have to do with plains and basins that it would not with mountains and coasts? but in the years since he'd left, he'd never known it to be quite the same anywhere else.

as a child he had laid still in bed, listening to it into the night until he could stay awake no longer. it seemed to him then that it would never end, that they had entered into a permanent state of trembling awe. he was always astonished to find it gone in the morning.

the road inevitably led to an elementary school and its field across which he had once aimlessly run with no idea of himself—and then again later with a purpose and intentionality, over and across lines burned into grass by gasoline.

and so he found himself in a parking lot he'd been dropped off and picked up from every day for a period in his life, and yet had himself driven into for the first time this night. he stepped out of the car, heart full of an optimism like a promise that would be fulfilled some time later and then reneged upon a certain time after that. he imagined he finally understood the trajectory that brought him from this very place and then back.

he walked across the field, then back. he got back into his car and vowed to the cooling summer night that he would remember this moment, as if it were a sacred thing. as if, by its unwavering return, it was a thing to which a man might be faithful to.