To get there, you follow a passage, not like this sentence is a passage, but instead, like a line is a passage, and you know that the road is there because you can see the houses, and you look up and down the line and see the telephone poles with the telephone lines that snap in some breeze unfelt, at least by you, and listening, you hear the party lines hum with gossip and pig futures.

Do you see the eyes? They’ve been there all this time, just staring at you, as if they’re waiting for their cue, and you think you know what this is all about, that you’ve seen this written down on scraps of paper that were crumbled up and tossed in a trash can, where you repeatedly dug them out and smoothed them on your knee while mumbling to yourself that, really, it’s ok to move on.

Well, the mouth, you understand, it’s just a souvenir, picked up at a Stuckey’s store somewhere in West Texas, where afterwards, you pulled out of the parking lot and back onto the road, snapping your eyes up from the mesmerizing pull of the telephone lines as they stretch from pole to pole, rolling down into the curve and back up, click, and down, then back up, click, keeping time with the purr of the tires on the blacktop, and beyond that you see the flat darkness of the fields, corn rows fanning out in the curve of each line, and before long a house interrupts this flow and you see your own tired eyes reflecting back at you in the glass.

You quickly roll down the window just to feel the cool breeze and you stare straight ahead and somehow you know that this image is just a passage moving through this curious American landscape and that, if you look away now, you might just miss that someway, somehow, here we are.

(This story is a riff I wrote on the opening sentence of All The Kings Men by R.P. Warren)

Margaret Ann Withers

Margaret Ann Withers