After you left last April, I hung around like a fool, or a phantom haunting the gates between departures and arrivals. And that joke about going to the courthouse–the one we made to distract ourselves–echoed in me like a coin dropped down into a well. But sooner or later I forgot about all that.

The other night I looked at a man in a robe on the television, in black and white. And he was saying that God had spoken to him through flashes in a thunderstorm, the secret to traveling back in time was about raising vibrations. In order to get back and stop Boothe shooting the President in that theatre, the real trick was vibrations. They shaved his head right there in front of the camera and put electrodes over all the major parts of the brain. And they ran a current through him so loud I thought they might have overshot Lincoln. I thought that he would go all the way back and that when he opened his eyes, he might be someone else entirely. But only the scenery changed–in one of those dissolves. And he was okay. And, in the end, so was the Union.

And yet, I’ve actually been thinking.

Maybe there is a vibration where we did go to the courthouse instead of the airport. And that wasn’t the last April for us but the first in a long line of them. We were so young and thought we had time. How we laughed at that one before we said goodbye: A good joke. Good in the sense that it might have saved us forgetting.   

 

FDM

A moth flies into

the kitchen wet with rain:

a white kite fluttering.

FDM

The soft ambient hum of the old wood cabinet television set went out, killing the preacher’s sermon mid-sentence. Herman sat up in his chair and peered through his thick lenses. In the stillness of the dark, he could see Jimmy-Sue eating the sandwich he’d prepared for her and slowly taking her pills. She did not seem worried. What’s wrong, she said because of his looking. Herman shook his head — exasperated, and set to looking for candles or matches, shuffling as he went.

Out from the dark, of the too big house, Jameson began barking. There was a sudden and sharp knock at the home’s side door – out to the mudroom and cars. Herman jumped. He cursed the dog. Then the door’s knob was turning and creaking in the old wood. Now Jimmy-Sue was concerned, looking from the door to Herman who went to the junk drawer in the big smokey wood armoire and pulled out an old pistol that wasn’t loaded. “I got a gun in here. It is loaded and everything else. I’ll shootcha. Clear through.” he called.

The door knob’s turning stopped dead in its frame. There was nothing else that night except for the television that lit up again a few moments later. And also the hair on his arms that stood on end. Herman let out the air from his puffed up chest, his shoulders slumped. Jimmy-Sue seemed to be watching the television without any sign of panic or discontent. He was getting tired of caring for her and was not sure if she even remembered him on some mornings.

On another night, Jameson was barking and crying in a horrible panic and scratching at the door in the far back of the house that had been the front door when he and Jimmy-Sue were children but not since the interstate had been put in. When Herman swung the door open, he felt a cold panic size him. In the place where she had planted her flowers, a strange beast shrieked, its wings were invisible brown against the purple dark. It shuddered violently, taking shambling and deliberate steps. But a breeze lifted up between them and Herman saw its wings fill up with air like two hideous paper kites. And it was gone. The news reporters were discussing the sighting of a humanoid moth-man. But Herman was at the nursing home, sitting with Jimmy-Sue, asking her if she remembered the swing-set she fell out of, gently giving her pills with water and a sandwich. -FM

At the tollbooth, there was finally some chance to stop and think about the choices he’d made in rage. Breathing, sighing — rubbing his face to keep his hot eyes from welling up, Elliot sought a way to turn his red truck around. His tank was low– down to a quarter or less and he had not seen any stations coming up along the road behind him. Out ahead, orange lights, like beacons for another world, cast a pale promise of gasoline and maybe a rest stop. A big wooden arm blocked the road at the booth.

There at the tollbooth, was a halo of light cast by the neon trim canopy. Here an old man crossed his arms at his chest where there was a nametag fixed. The toll taker’s name was simply: Bud. He had a gaunt face and spotting skin. Elliot rolled down the window, waving. “Can I turn around?” Bud shook his head and said: “There’s nothing back that way. If you try you’re going to break down before you make it to the nearest pump. I can’t tell you about the road out there. I haven’t been up that way in — oh — forty years. Something happens with the time. You think you’ve got a firm hold but then you realize that it might actually have the hold on you. I can pay the toll if you’re willing to make the run.”

Then, Bud took two quarters from the pocket of his pressed work shirt and he put them into the color-chipped toll receptacle between them so Elliot could watch them slide away into a clicking dark forever. The arm in Elliot’s headlights lifted. A parallax perspective of road and trees stretched on . . .

And those orange lights. And those orange lights.-FM

It’s gonna be a thunder-plump. He said it just to say something to her. Anything. Abigail ignored him while she lounged across the bench of his Chevy. Her tears were dry now. It seemed to him, at least that the worst was over. She played her fingers over the mirror puddle, dreaming of a way they might go back to the beginning. It began to rain all-at-once and heavy as ever.

Mortimer Goodson, set out in search of the witch. He kept the sun at his back so that the air was still cool, and the mare still strong and eager. They pounded the dirt paths cut into the greens and browns until they found her, singing simply and walking free. Her feet were bare, with flowers on her dress. And though he told her to stop, she smiled at him and walked. Like a shadow on his vision, wherever he looked, there walked Lillian, her body ahead of his . . .

Stop, he told her and yet she walked. While he was watching, landmarks passed that shouldn’t have. As if the mountains and the coast and railroad town had been pressed together. When Mortimer Goodson took from his saddle and pulled down his hat off his gray hair, he found his skin had grown tight, and the fingers on his hands had grown long and thin. His eyesight was no longer good, but he could see behind him that he could not make the return.

Gently, she put her arm through his. And though, Goodson resisted, Lilian held onto him: Do not despair. I can use the time you didn’t, she promised. Don’t despair.

-FM

I have slipped this note into your pocket. You may not remember me. . .

I found, at Donna’s cocktail and pumpkin carving party, that it was difficult to remember home. I could remember the small things: the way the morning staff at the McDonald’s by the interstate took at least twenty full minutes making a fresh cup. Or the way strangers broken-down on the highway’s shoulder were a friend to anyone who could spend the time to help.

The placement of town on a map was ill-defined in my mind. Surveying guides and electronic route finders, the roads in that area all seem to criss-cross and snake over themselves but always land in different bergs or townships with no mention of the place, just the green values of trees. There no airline tickets sold in or out of Whistle Wood, no train tracks that run along through my vague memory of that small cluster of houses. And as you might expect the website links are all ‘Error Pages’. Facebook is useless if you can’t remember the names of faces. Each fading like sparks snapping off from the end of sparklers and lost in the dark.

But I remember you in the dark.

Do you remember the blackout, while you and I were both at Felix Whitt’s party? The way everyone poured out into the street to see if the world had ended and some of us rushed out into the dark because we hoped it had? I really can’t be sure it’s you. But I think you and Edna and Luisa and I slid into the back of Felix’s Datsun and we drove looking at all the houses with the lights off and parents standing or arguing in lawns — looking so different and ugly in Felix’s headlights. Sweating in the summer heat and their pathetic looking clothes. And later, the Caruthers’ horses that had gotten loose, all of them streaming out over that shitty wire fence and just spilling into the interstate with us — around our car, breath steaming the glass of your window.

Is it okay that I’ve forgotten what it felt like to just drive on those long stripes of highways forever? And that I can’t remember when or if I ever stopped driving?

If you can’t remember me or Whistle Wood then will you at least please return this letter to me safely? -FM

We will never know

until the night we finish,

the cost of “farewell”.

-FM

Teresa in the mirror

frowned. The Frankenstein costume

fit badly over the little girl’s round

stomach. While Desean

tried cutting and sowing the places

that pulled at her. Needles

clenched in his jaw while he thought about the nasty things the

boys would say about his, Teresa,

his beautiful

little girl. His hands

were rough from all of his

careful work sanding

glass. -FM

Some cops he drank with, Roy and Bruce, liked to laugh about it because they had the idea that firefighters didn’t do much besides look like heroes and take all the spotlight. But Arthur didn’t think it was any kind of funny that an arsonist was getting up in the middle of the night to start and fan blazes. First, at the middle school where Arthur dropped his son, Oliver off every morning. Then two days ago it was out at the Walmart parking lot in the middle of the day. Yesterday it had been a cluster of leaves in the drained swimming pool at Veteran’s Park. When they threw sand on the small tongues of flame, Riles laughed. He fished an Iron Man action figure, melted and deformed, out of the blaze. Put that shit down, Arthur said. That’s not that funny.

Tonight he and Riles drowned the fire out on a burning reelection campaign poster. Again, Riles and the boys were all laughing about how funny it was, while Arthur just shook his head. And he spit. Every Halloween it was something, Arthur thought in the gray early morning when he was driving home. Wasn’t the world scary enough the way it was? Lights in the sky, poverty, and nuclear aggressions weren’t enough? Arthur thought about his own self. He was scared when he thought about the world. Damn scared when he thought about the lights in the sky.

When Arthur pulled up to the house he paused before using the garage door clicker. Out of batteries, the box of plastic was unresponsive. When he got out, walked the distance up the driveway and to the door, he noticed the lights were on inside. He filled himself up with wind and he squared up his shoulders. Then when he opened the garage he found Oliver, looking scared. He had his warm jacket on and Arthur’s aluminum can of gas in one hand and Arthur’s framed medals in the other. Sonuvabitch, he said with the shallow breath left in him. -FM