The Road

*
 

"In the morning it was snowing and they went on. Desolate country. A boar hide nailed to a barn door. Ratty. Wisp of a tail. Inside the barn three bodies hanging from the rafters, dried and dusty among the wan slats of light. There could be something here, the boy said. There could be some corn or something. Lets go, the man said.

"They pushed on together with the tarp pulled over them. The wet gray flakes twisting and falling out of nothing. Gray slush by the roadside. Black water running from under the sodden drifts of ash. The pieced farmland still visible in the murk. Tall clapboard houses. Machinerolled metal roofs. A long barn in a field with an advertisement in faded ten-foot letters across the roof slope. See Rock City.

"From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril, and all else was the call of languor and death. He thought of his wife. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward and listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. "

Freeze this frame.

Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned."