Beginning

Tall fields of brilliant green husk and golden corn flowed by in an endless line, the matter of the living things rising up towards the hanging sun, yellow-orange and glazed-looking from the heat haze puddled across the air, languid and thick.  Ahead, the long dirt road extended, ever-rising towards the empty horizon, grown further by imagination with so little of any great stature tangible to mark to the eye any true distance.

The truck was moving fast, there were no speed limits back on roads like these, with the dirt scattering loosely beneath the worn tire treads, pot holes part of the character, the culture, the actual substance of the road.  To this road, to those who drove it, the name pot holes didn’t even come to mind — it was just the road.  The wind rolled slick and smooth, clinging slightly like watered syrup to the silver-blue frame, settling for seconds in the dents, the dings, the battered carapace of the great steel monster which rumbled and whined with its growing age like its fractured grill were rotting teeth giving it cankerous pains.  Dust clung to the hood and hull like a thin, permanent skin, like it had been painted on with a thick brush made of the finest dirt the Mid-West had to offer.  The bed of the truck was empty save for a couple large duffels amorphous in shape, contents shifting slightly as if growing, slowly, into something greater and unified, so when the safety straps were severed and the bags unzipped and opened a single cohesive creation would emerge, an amalgam of all the varied sharp edged, soft sewn, man-made objects now stored in the worn and tattered, dull green canvas bags.  They looked set to burst, slightly forlorn, as if all inside was all that was possessed and that all was meager despite the appearance of overflow.

The windows were rolled down, letting in the wind which caught and played at his hair as he sat, the fingers of his right hand clutching lightly to the top of the car through the crack, the tips tapping against the top — a faint tempo, constant and unchanged by the speed of the car, like the chirping hiss of the insects in the fields unmoved by the moving thing, the sound of scrabbling dirt steady and unaltered by increase or decrease of rapidity, the sound of wind one long loud drone.  He watched the fields, blue eyes half-squinted, half-closed, body at rest against the faded seat black and grey cloth seat cushion, his dirty dirt-blonde hair lapping against his forehead like waves pushed by the tide and current of the wind as it slid inside the cabin like water, like snakes.

The fields rolled on, the tall stalks waving back and forth, pulled between, to him, the wind pushing against them, trying to drive them back, and the force of their movement against it.  The stalks wavering, the inescapable gravity of their progression tugging at them, attempting to uproot them and  carry them along in a long parade of refuse and debris in their wake, victorious finally against the the wind — a triumph theirs, far into the future when the wind would cease and they would arrive at their destination, carting the souls of all the things passed along with them in the bed of the truck.  The radio did not play a song, he didn’t speak, nor did the man driving — a man thicker, his skin set and hung slightly, worn and darker tan, a light black stubble running along his chin and around his cracked lips dangling slightly open revealing his yellow-white teeth.  His brown eyes looked forward, rivetted there to some sight unseen, his breath light and slow and patient.  The boy turned his eyes from him and looked out at the horizon.

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TBC