The Advantages of a Small, Small World...

Knowing no Better



Theirs was the only movement. Nothing else dared stir. Even with the sun set, the heat was oppressive, thick. Their silhouettes cut lazy swoops in the evening sky, dark blades thrown silently into the late August heat. Knowing no better, he called the birds night hawks. It suited their graceful rising. Like loosed souls, he watched them be carried, upward, into the rose and gray blooms, the cicada singing their passing.

Night hawks, he would call them, knowing no better.

This Morning



     In his sleep, the long fever broke. When he woke and went to the back door to let the dog out, he was startled by the change, by the cool air that greeted him. After so many weeks of bearing it, you expect the oppressive heat, the perspiration, the air laden with water, thick and hardly breathable. You begin to think that this is how things have always been and will always be. You adapt.

     The sky was perfectly clear, the sun just rising. The dog held its nose high, sniffing, as if in an unfamiliar place. He breathed in deeply too, the new, crisp air; shivered. Through his veins it felt as though some warm and electric liquid pumped. His body sang with possibilities. Thank you, he said, as if he had carried the month-long heat in his own body, as if the morning was a gift, a second chance at life.

On Gain

     He had acquired a dog. For now, anyway. It was the neighbors. They left it behind, or so it seemed, when they sold and moved from the trailer on the hill above him. He didn’t mind. It was a fine dog: loving, well behaved, clean. It surprised him how ideal a pet the animal was after living where it had, in the squalor and drugs of that trailer. He refused to give his neighbors any benefit of doubt, credit for the dog's good nature, guessing instead that they couldn’t beat the kindness out it.

     The dog was a male of mixed breeding, red with a hint of black saddle. It had the knot of a bloodhound on the top of its skull and the manipulative eyes of a Labrador. It slept on his bed as he wrote, snoring softly at times and bear-like at others, but soundly and contented.

     He had acquired a dog. For now anyway. And he didn’t mind at all.

On Being Startled

    

     At times, his size would surprise him when he looked in the mirror. Fat hadn’t crept in around his middle. Nor had he put on any awkward mass lifting weights. It was just that, at times, he expected a boy of ten or eleven to be staring back at him, and the man he found instead startled him some. He would squint at this man, cautiously, as if through a keyhole, admire his lean muscles; flex them, as if he had just been transformed—as if he were still a boy, assessing his future.         

     They were close enough now he could hear the falling. For weeks, it had only been the faint hum of the saws that let him know they were there; the passing by of trucks, loaded down with logs. They had started at the back and moved forward, working their way out of the old woods.

     Why he could not separate his heart from the sound of those trees hitting the ground, he didn’t know exactly. He’d fell his fair share. But each he had mourned, and every stick was utilized. This… This was slaughter—carcasses stacked like whale, like buffalo. No one would kneel before these giants and apologize, send their spirits off with song.

     Perhaps that was the pain he felt. Not the loss of the trees, but the lack of respect in taking them, the carelessness, the separation. How could they live with themselves, these men, doing what they do? They couldn’t possibly have hearts. He hated that he was unable to stop them, that he was helpless against their greed. Perhaps it wasn’t pain at all he felt, but fear. Fear, that in the nearing end, he would be little more than a tree.