But that I’ll just mess up my own heart and mind with memories that aren’t even mine.
Because I’m a train with several wings.
And the stops we make are to all sorts of different places at the same time.
The steam stack release like time machine clouds… Puffing.
The whistle long and guttural and hopeful.
People pattering about on the platforms in clothes appropriate for the various times.
But I have no idea where to get off or if I even can.
I’m somehow glued to the seat like in a dream.
All I can do is look out the window and scream.
But then I settle into the movement, a verdant massage.
Like somewhere in Italy, the sky is hot, the clouds are sweating, the blue is melting.
My guts are wallowing in upended nerves, I need to catch my breath for just a moment.
The conductor walks by and hands me a package wrapped in yellow.
He tells me not to open it until I get to my final destination.
“In case it’s a bomb,” he bends and whispers. He straightens up and reaches into his pocket and pulls something out. “Peanuts?” he asks.
“If only there were an ocean,” I answer. “I’m afraid of choking.”
He takes offense, snaps his heels together and walks off. I can hear his voice in the narrow distance trail off. “Peanuts…”
I look out the window to remind myself I’m on a train and not an airplane, but then that’s where I am wrong. The meadows of white clouds below my feet correct my thinking, my dreaming, my pure reality.
I look down into my lap and I am still holding the package wrapped in yellow. I don’t care what he said, and I open it anyways. The sound of ripping paper wrestles some others from sleep. Some moan and groan and look around. There’s a small box beneath the paper. I hold it to my ear, and I can hear something skittering about and breathing.
I open the box and a yellow canary flies out. It flutters all about the cabin. It bumps into people’s heads, chirps, and claws. Other passengers are flailing their arms and hands and teeth. One man tried to swallow it. Another man was screaming and tried to open the emergency exit door. Because of a bird? A canary? What a fool, I thought. And yet another man had to punch him in the face to knock him out and tame his irrational outburst.
Then the turbulence came as we were descending into… Denver, I suppose. The Rocky Mountains can be a bit rocky. The toasted landscape below is topped with a tab of buttered pollution. It grossly melts. The skyscrapers poke through it all.
I get that weird feeling in my stomach as we quickly come down, the ground is rushing by, the wheels hit and there’s that momentary rough nudge. The voice of the pilot comes on over the sound system. Most of the time, you can never understand a damn word they say. But this time it was clear. “Nailed it!” she said. The other passengers laughed and cheered. Had we been in some sort of danger? I wondered to myself. I guess it didn’t matter anymore.
Inside the terminal of Denver International, I was the only one remaining at the luggage carousel. I watched it go around and around and around. There were no more bags. They finally shut it down. A man came along. His head was down, and he was sweeping the floor. Then all the lights went out and it was very quiet. I ignited the flashlight on my cell phone and began to walk. My footsteps fell heavy and loud on the tiled floor. I was always the last one to depart.
Oswald Madness awoke to the sound of an automated voice announcing the next stop on the G Line. The train was mostly empty except for a few heads gently moving to the rhythmic sway of the metal machine burrowing through the guts of the big, big city. He looked out the large sunny window beside him and the world rushed by in sequential camera flashes, blurry photos of man’s rape of the landscape developed in the new progressive and technological grunt.
He pushed himself up in the seat for he had been leaning. He looked down at himself. His clothes were the same, his hands were the same, yet he felt crumbled and misty headed for some reason. There was a woman ahead of him with a plume of brown cascading hair bowed out at the sides and it made her resemble a flared and heated cobra. She was sitting with a young girl beside her. She had the same color hair but scraped with a shining tightness against her head and with tidy bottle brush tails at the sides kept in place by butter-scented bands. They talked softly to each other and smiled, feathery laughter dangling in the dangerous air. Oswald wondered what they were so happy about. He searched deep inside himself with a soul shovel to dig for his own happiness but came up with nothing but dust and crumbling crumbs.
And as if the girl suddenly sensed him fumbling around in the back of her head, she turned around for a moment and looked at him and smiled. Oswald was struck with the thought that she looked familiar. Then she turned back around and continued chattering with her mother, or whoever she was. Then the woman turned around and looked at Oswald as well. Her face revealed that the inner workings of her memory were clicking along like the core of a clock as she tried to fit the piece of him into her own scattered jigsaw. She quickly resolved that he was nothing of any significance to her and she too turned back around. When the train came to a jolting stop at the next station, the woman and the girl got up, steadied themselves against smudged silver bars, and went to the door that opened with a hurried sliding whoosh.
Before she stepped off, the girl turned back to him and waved in a silly, teasing way. Oswald noticed she was wearing a Nirvana t-shirt. Oswald scrambled to the seat on the other side of the aisle and watched them as they gathered themselves together on the platform, hoisting packs and checking fuzzy pockets. He pounded on the mouth-stained window, and they looked up at him with wondering glances. But the train started pulling away and Oswald could only watch as they quickly got smaller and smaller and then vanished, swallowed up by the deepness of Denver.
Oswald Madness gathered his things and departed at the Arvada Old Town station. He watched as the train took a deep breath and then rolled off toward the metal blue horizon. Other humans were milling about there at the station’s park, staring into phones or the bleached-out sun. Some of them were lonely, he could tell. Others were full of life and fire and love and hope and crippling fear. No one noticed him as he walked among them. It was solitude in the songs of the soldiers, and then he smelled coffee, and he saw the place on the corner with the big windows and metal tables outside haphazardly arranged under blue awnings flapping in the mountain wind. His face felt burned and dry, like stale toast of rye void of oleo. He pulled the door open and went in.
Oswald sat at a wooden table with his steaming cup of Cuban coffee with one pump of Irish and another pump of French vanilla. He was the only one alone, he noticed. Everyone else had a partner of some sort, or a trio of friends or family or whatever they were. He blew on the milky brown slick lake on the topside of his drink and took a sip. It was hot against the tip of his tongue, and he wondered why he didn’t just get something iced.
Something vibrated in his pack that sat on the seat beside him. He retrieved his phone. The screen displayed the words UnknownCaller.
“Hello.”
There was a girlish giggle on the other end.
“Hello,” he repeated. “Who is this?”
There was another girlish giggle, and then a staticky, warbling voice came across. “Did you steal my Christmas mustard, Mr. Madness? I can’t seem to find it anywhere. How do you expect me to eat my meat without any Christmas mustard?”
“I don’t have your Christmas mustard,” he sternly replied. “Why would I steal anyone’s mustard?”
There was a pause as someone whispered something to someone else, somewhere else. Then the voice returned at full force, not in the invisible background. “Because you’re a… Messed up person. Just take a moment to look around you, Mr. Madness. Go ahead.”
Oswald scanned the coffee shop and all the other beings there, human or whatever they were, had wide eyes of green marbles, and they cast all their frivolous doubts and misgivings upon him, not in audible words, but slick, piercing thoughts.
The youthful voice came again, now flecked with irritation. “Can you taste their judgment, Mr. Madness? Can you taste the mustard seeds in their mouths?”
Oswald pulled the phone away from his ear and pressed the end call icon. He looked up at the people again, and their eyes had returned to normal. They were no longer looking at him or judging him. They were merely not noticing him at all. He took a few more sips of his Cuban coffee, grabbed up his pack, and went out of the humble dust and plant strewn dimness of the shop and into the sunlight of the day. Oswald stood on the walk just thinking about how he should soon head over to meet his friend at his new butcher shop on the square for the big grand opening celebration at 3:13 p.m. He sat down on a bench under a tree and unzipped a pocket on his pack and dug around for the announcement he had printed off. He couldn’t find it.
That’s when a woman came scrambling out of the coffee shop and came over to him with purpose. She was wearing a white apron and she was holding something in her hand.
“Hey mister,” she said, and she held out a jar. “You forgot your mustard.”
Oswald looked at her, confused. “That’s not mine. You’re mistaken.”
“I saw you with it. It’s yours, so here, take it.” She thrust it toward him. “You can’t just leave mustard laying around a public place like that. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Oswald refused. “I told you it doesn’t belong to me. I don’t want it.”
“Take it!” the woman demanded.
Oswald got angry and stood up before her. The woman’s eyes suddenly swirled marble green like a mood ring in astronomical motion. “For the last time, it’s not mine!” he bellowed, and then he slapped the jar from her hand, and it crashed to the ground in a shattered mess of glass and an oily creamed smear.
“Now look at what you’ve done!” the woman yelled, and she stomped off in a huff. Halfway back to the door of the coffee shop she turned, pointed, and said to him, “You better clean that up or the litter patrol will be on your ass!”
Oswald bent down to the ground and inspected the mess. “How the hell am I supposed to clean this up?” he wondered aloud.
Then the girl from the train who was wearing the Nirvana t-shirt was somehow suddenly knelt there beside him looking down at the very same sloppy disaster. She reached out, grabbed his wrist and pulled his hand back away from the broken, leaking jar. “Just leave it,” she said, and she looked at him and tried to smile. “I’m sorry all your dreams have been broken. I’m sorry your life has been a token of suffering. I told someone important to fix it… But they didn’t.” She stood and looked straight into the mountain wind as another train pulled up to the platform across the way. She nodded her head in its direction. “You better hurry before it pulls away and leaves you behind again,” she told him.
She started to walk away, and Oswald stood up to watch her. It wasn’t long before she turned some misty corner and was gone. He suddenly forgot everything that ever went wrong in his world and quickly walked to the train platform and squeezed in through the doors just as they were about to close. It was empty and quiet save for the mechanical chimes and robotic voice of the invisible conductor. He took a seat beside the window of the approaching brightness, the approaching darkness, and all the electric beating hearts of light pressed tightly against it guiding him to endless places and ways.
The man was identified as Oswald Madness, a drifter through time and space and now under special scrutiny in a locked room down in the hidden bowels of Denver International Airport. Two men from security stood around him. They were both wearing white dress shirts and red ties and sunglasses the deep dark color of alien eyes. The younger one was sucking on a colored toothpick. The older one had his foot up on a chair and was twiddling his thumbs while he looked at the detainee with a dubious stare.
Then he cleared his throat. “What business do you have in Denver?” he asked.
Oswald looked at him and then the other before speaking. “Leisure.”
“Vacation?” the younger one asked.
“Something like that,” Oswald answered.
The older one brought his foot down off the chair and walked slowly around the small, brightly lit room with no windows. “Something like what? Could you be more specific?”
“I’ve come to visit a friend in Arvada. He’s a butcher and he’s invited me to the grand opening of his new shop. That specific enough for you?”
The younger one chuckled. “Do you enjoy the complete and utter annihilation of others?”
Oswald made a what the fuck face. “I don’t understand.”
“The knives Mr. Madness,” the older one chimed in. “We discovered the knives. In your backpack.” He glanced over at his partner. “What are the knives for?”
“I told you. My friend is a butcher. They’re a gift for him. To celebrate his new way of life.”
The younger one laughed again, broke his toothpick, and threw it into some invisible space in the corner of the room. “Just how did you get through security in Milwaukee with a backpack full of knives?” he desperately wanted to know.
Oswald was quiet for a moment. “Security doesn’t ever see me.”
“So, you bypass security somehow?” the younger one said, glancing quickly at his partner.
Oswald looked at him deeply. “No, they just don’t see me. I stand in the queue, I politely wait my turn, I go on through. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
The older one went over to the younger one and whispered something. He shielded his words with a hand thinking that would keep Oswald from hearing what was said.
But he heard anyway.
“Have them pull surveillance from Milwaukee…”
There was a light knocking and the heads of the two interrogators snapped toward the door.
“Oh, shit,” groaned the younger one. Then he looked at Oswald. “Whatever you do, don’t piss her off when she asks you questions.” He went over to open the ugly door, and what appeared in the frame like sudden magic was something Oswald had never expected. It was the young girl who had been sitting in the airport food court and staring at him.
She looked at the two officers. “Leave me alone with him,” she ordered, and they quickly hustled out of the room. The door closed with a heavy, metallic click. The girl slowly circled Oswald like he was prey. She didn’t look like she did before. The conservative religious sect garb of yesteryear was replaced by a loose-fitting snappy navy-blue pant suit, and she wore a crisp white shirt and had on a red tie like the other two. Her hair, the color of a lemon-yellow sun, was pulled back tight and the excess pinned neatly into a circular mass on top of her head, and it looked like she was wearing a cinnamon roll for a hat. She wore black-rimmed glasses over her small eyes that hung below her oddly oversized forehead. Her nose was like a rabbit’s and her small mouth poked out like a swirling peppermint candy. Her stern look made Oswald nervous, but at the time he wanted to laugh at her because she was swimming in those clothes, and she made the harsh room smell like bubblegum.
The girl stopped moving and sat down in the chair opposite him. She looked so small and awkward in it, he thought.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Who are you?” she shot back.
“You must already know.”
She leaned forward and put her small arms on the table. “I know a lot of things,” she said. “Most of all I know that you have disrupted the vibrations of my particular plane in time and space.”
“Look,” Oswald began. “I was on an airplane to come see my friend in Arvada to help him celebrate the launch of his new business. The next thing I know, the world goes weird and suddenly I’m here being accused of whatever I’m being accused of.”
“Bullshit,” the young girl said so plainly and straightforward that it forced Oswald to take her more seriously. “That sounds like a very normal story but there is nothing normal about you.”
“Where are your parents?”
“I am the parent,” she snapped back.
“You’re in charge around here?”
“You seem so surprised, Mr. Madness.”
“You’re a kid. How old are you?”
“Right now?”
He studied her intently. “Yes.”
“12… Yesterday I may have been 54. I never really know until I get there.”
“I don’t really get what you could possibly mean. Can I get a lawyer?”
“No.”
“But it’s my right.”
“Not here.”
Oswald pulled on the restraint that kept him chained to the table like an animal. “You can’t do this!”
The girl stood up and made a face to the camera in the corner of the ceiling. She made a strange nod with her head. A moment later two people entered the room, a man and a woman, and they were garbed like doctors. One wrapped something around Oswald’s head to keep him from spitting and screaming while the other one quickly injected something into his arm with a long needle. The girl happily smiled while watching the green liquid enter him.
The sound of the jet airplane’s engines had lulled him into a half sleep. He was drifting in and out of a panoramic dream — something about floating on clouds — and then when his head jerked hard enough to snap him back into wakefulness, he looked out the small window next to his seat and saw that his dream had come true.
At that very moment, he wanted to crawl through that impenetrable opening and just fall like an angel into those mushroomy blooming puffs cut now like vibrant jewel prisms by the perfectly angled falling light of the day. There was a ding sound in the cabin and then an indecipherable voice came over the sound system. He could feel the plane beginning to dip and soon they were swallowed whole by the very same clouds from his dream come true. And when they finally emerged from the bottom, he could see the land below, wide western meadows and low rocky ridges and far off into the distance he saw the snowcapped peaks that Colorado was so famous for, and they sprang out and up from a mirky soup of yellow pollution hovering over a city called Denver.
He moved through a pulsing hot throng of people on his way to the mile-long escalators going down to where the train arrived that took travelers to the main terminal of DIA. Even though he had no particular place to be at any particular time, he walked fast, constantly adjusting the backpack he carried with him because it kept slipping. People zoomed by him in both directions. The voices all mingled into one loud hum in a hive.
He dashed into a crowded men’s room to relieve himself. He had to wait in a line to use a urinal. Once finished he washed his hands, splashed his face, tried to comb his hair into some semblance of order with his fingers. He studied himself in the mirror for just a moment because he thought it was overly vain to look at oneself for too long. And for some reason it made him uncomfortable to look at himself, as well, almost embarrassed. That’s why he always did it quick. He decided he looked very tired and moved on.
Once back into the rush of the main thoroughfare, he slipped out and took a seat in the mostly unoccupied waiting area of a darkened gate where a flight to Detroit wasn’t set to depart for another two hours. It was a quiet reprieve for the time being. He lifted his pack into the seat beside him and retrieved his cell phone. He squinted as he looked at the screen. He took it out of airplane mode and waited for the technological pipes to clear. No calls. No messages. Nothing erupted now that he was back on the ground. He was almost glad for the fact he wasn’t popular among any crowd but his own. He took a deep breath and tried to stretch his neck by bending it from side to side. He could almost hear the tendons strain and crackle.
He sat still there for a long time, his thoughts getting caught up in the traffic of human beings continually parading by like a perpetual mountain stream. Some moved fast, others dawdled. Some had a trainload of luggage behind them, others merely a single bag slung over a sore shoulder. He wondered about where they had come from and where they were going. Why were all these people moving so much? What was with all the here and there? What great grief or passion was calling to them? His life in comparison seemed so much slower and simpler. But was it? Not really, after all.
He glanced at his diamond digital watch from Hades, but then realized it didn’t really matter what time it was. He was at that place in life where time was something that only other people dealt with, not him.
Then for some strange reason his thoughts drifted to childhood in the lakeside burbs of upper middle crust Chicago and about the Christmas mustard his Aunt Sharlene used to proudly serve with her platefuls of fancy meats and breads and cheeses during the warm, crystalline holidays. Aunt Sharlene was always wearing a dress, he recalled. Even if she was cooking eggs and bacon at 6 a.m., she had on a dress. Back then he even thought that she most likely slept in a dress. Maybe she did. But the mustard, that Christmas mustard. It came in a fancy glass jar, and it had a fancy foreign label and lid and Aunt Sharlene boasted about how she got it from this peculiar owner of a deli in the brick and gold shopping plaza in the neighborhood because he thought she was something special and would know exactly how to use it as if it were fragile magic. His Uncle Drake always frowned when she brought that part up because she would always throw something in there about how this particular and peculiar deli owner was also tall, dark, and handsome. His Uncle Drake was none of those things.
But the mustard was something special in exchange for the pricks of jealousy, as well, he supposed. And his Uncle Drake would lovingly slather it all over his rye bread. It had a bite to it that was somehow extraterrestrial and made the person eating it feel like they had traveled somewhere very far away. The man’s imagination had always been bright, and he believed the Christmas mustard must have had come from Saudi Arabia or perhaps Yemen or even Tatooine. But why would he think something so foolish? He shook his head at his own youthful naivety, and then he was suddenly hungry for a sandwich even though he knew that no one would have any Christmas mustard in the airport.
He settled on a faux New York deli type of sandwich place that pretended it was authentic but really wasn’t — merely corporate fantasies for sale. It was crowded and hard to move around inside the little box in a long line of other boxes aglow with money suckers. His broken velvet eyes the color of underwater gold scanned the menu for something that wasn’t gross. He settled on a New York Clubber — roast beef, turkey, ham, Swiss cheese, bacon, lettuce, spicy (not Christmas) mustard, black olives on a crusty crunchy dick-like stick of white bread cut and spread open like a lover’s legs.
The pace of the place was frantic, and the man’s nerves began to tick and twitch as the people pressed in on him, the mingling of sandwiches and skin like uneasy sex in a musty dark cellar, and he reached forward to pay at the counter quickly because the pressure was on him. People were watching and waiting and staring at the stranger from somewhere else. He felt like they all hated him.
He found a small table in the very center of the food court outside the deli joint and the roar of people eating and talking and slurping and bitching and babies wailing was all around him. He unzipped his backpack and reached in for an orange bottle of pills. He uncapped it, shook out two white bars with score marks and tossed them into his mouth. He washed them down with a bubbling iced Fresca.
He unwrapped his sandwich and laid the paper out flat. He opened a bag of salt and vinegar chips and poured them out onto the paper. He brought the sandwich up to his open mouth and bit into it. He chewed and as the flavors and textures mingled, he looked to his left where he saw a young girl in a periwinkle blue dress and her hair in pigtails sitting at a table all by herself. She looked very different from everyone else. She looked like she belonged to a strict old religious clan that rebutted the ways of modern, sinful life. She looked like she should have been in a barn, knee-high in hay, not inside one of the busiest airports in the world.
The girl was staring at him for a long time for some strange reason. Did he have something on his face? He instinctively reached for a napkin and wiped it across his mouth. He glanced over at her again. She had weird eyes and she looked unsettled. He put down his sandwich and sucked on the straw connected to his plastic cup of Fresca. A strange man and woman dressed similarly to the girl suddenly appeared at the table and they set down bags of food and cups of drink. She looked up at each of them in turn and smiled. Then she said something to them that he could not understand through the cacophony of humans communally filling their guts.
Then all three of them turned to look at him and their faces were dusted with disgust. He watched them watch him through the clouds of humanity. He couldn’t understand why they were looking at him that way. What did the girl say to them? And why? He had done nothing wrong. Was it because he was so different from them? Had she read the inner linings of his soul and discovered there was a reason why he was now drifting listlessly through time? Did she discover that he was merely a living ghost after all, and it upset her balance of beliefs and familial rituals set forth by her spinning God?
He quickly finished eating, gathered his trash and stood to carry it over to a receptacle to dispose of it. When he did, an eerie quiet fell upon the food court and seemingly the entirety of Denver International Airport. A billion heads turned to watch him with scathing glances. He moved slowly to the garbage bin and dropped in the remains of his meal into the wide hole. No one else moved or spoke. He hoisted his pack over his shoulder and gazed at all of them.
“What do you want!” he screamed out.
And when they just continued to stare and not say anything, he backed away from the coital mob and made his way back onto the main thoroughfare of the concourse and walked as fast as he could. The people there too now stared at him, watched him with sallow unfamiliar eyes like he was some murderer on the loose. He quickened his pace as the swarm thickened. He started bumping into bodies, pushing bodies, kicking at bodies. He pulled the pack off his shoulder and started swinging it at the people closing in. He hit a young woman in the face, and she fell. No one screamed but instead they just hummed like a hornet’s nest plump with menacing insects.
And then he ran. He ran as fast as he could and the tunnel like artificial air of the airport whooshed by him in an effort to keep pace with his speed. He glanced behind him, and the people were floating toward him effortlessly. He glanced in front of him, and there he saw that a thick wall built of human beings was erected to keep him from passing. He suddenly stopped and looked from side to side. He saw an emergency exit door and made for it. He pushed on the thick silver bar and an alarm immediately began to wail. He ran down the jetway that was untethered to any airplane. Once at the end he could taste the open air and he saw an attached metal ladder in which he could use to get to the ground, and he swung over and onto it and climbed down.
Once his shoes hit the pavement he ran and ran and ran until he was breathless and limping. A jet loudly swam above him and then he was suddenly surrounded by white cars with flashing blue lights on their rooftops and men in uniforms quickly jumped out and corralled him. They pushed him to the ground and made him lie on his stomach. They handcuffed him. They yanked him up and led him to one of the cars and shoved him into the backseat and slammed the door. He was in a cage now, and he was headed for another cage. He was sure of it.
And what I mean by that is… The mercury red was dripping through the lights of the downtown bars – it was blood running through rainbows and icy chalices clinking with the rhythm of this night beat, the smoke curled its fist and whirled on out into the streets – we were looking for things to do in Denver and we were most definitely hip and super fresh. The sky was dark, wet and gray the rain was coming down in spittles, and the cold beacons burst forth from the skyline towers and we breathed exponentially as we shook with cold outside the place where the band was playing hard and loud and the women were drugged up tight, they were all looking for a fight erotic clashes in unfamiliar bedrooms searching for the light switch in some unfamiliar hall… and we wandered, Soledad the sailor and I, into the billiards parlor on the corner where all Christmas shopping was kicked to the curb and mean looking men were grasping sticks and swearing and swilling beer
So we caught two seats at the bar and were lost in the noise when something caught our attention a brooding and bulbous man with wispy hair, atop a head shaped like a golden pear
He was clutching a magnet and a metal clam reciting poetry all nonsense something Spanish and insanely divine about Albuquerque and nutty Nob Hill and the love he held for well-groomed dolls and it was a whacked-out scene and we wondered, Soledad and I, if we had shot ourselves up with some mad horror show voodoo and simply had forgotten… but it was all real as the man shed his black leather jacket and made his way confidently to the smoky stage, under scattered lights and stood before a crowd who ignored him, and so he tapped the mic with a hint of nervous fear and began to speak… “and what I mean by that is …” and it went on and on from there, like someone had plugged him in a bit too long, his fiber optic cables all juiced up and so the incessant talk came on like a flood about the place he loved and the games he dug and the restless nights that drove him to kill…
So Soledad and I just sat there at the bar sipping our Parrot Bay rums watching the stitched up 5-minute idol rant and rave and his tsunami of words followed us out the door and down the streets and we rejuvenated our mission to find things to do in Denver when you’re hip — and super fresh Soledad wanted to climb a tower, I wanted to find an all-night bakery when from out of a crack in the buildings came a flash, because we were hip, we were super fresh and we had become immaculate icons of this new human race, we could no longer afford to walk, we had to run…
We had hoped to have some orange apples fall from the sky but all we met up with were detour signs it went suddenly backward to Halloween and we thought Denver was playing a trick on us but we liked it anyway so we tripped it to some mad cathedral on this eerie hill in the middle of town it was this great spire of grass and rock and trees and torn down fences and from this vagrant, fragrant vantage point we could see a million trillion lights all bubbling up from the floor of this town and for a second we didn’t feel lonely we felt hip and super fresh as we found things to do in Denver and then something somewhere suddenly came with a burst of singing and it was like some mad hipster had broken free from his cell and was bellowing forth every ache he had ever felt…
So we stayed on that hill not really talking, but rather dreaming of what our lives would be like — tomorrow and we were afraid of the sorrow that might come but then we realized we couldn’t worry about that because somehow, some way, life works itself out and whether or not we would be strung up with diamonds or drown in the yellow dust we were here right now in Denver and damn we were hip and super fresh.
By
Aaron Echoes August
An online journal of fiction, essays, and social commentary.