Gainer Road, Fear

Summer lasted about three hours.

I'd waited as long as I thought I could before I left the house. I'd called you so many times, and you never answered. If we'd had pagers then, or a cb radio, we might have made out like bandits. Somebody said, "They're coming..."

"Who?"

It took so long to sink in.

The sound of them arrived. The special laugh I'd borrowed from somebody else and was just beginning to master failed me for the first time.

Out there where homes were yet to be built. Unincorporated area, interrupted vanity. I saw me in the reflection in a windshield, the hair I'd worried over and a round moon above my shoulder, right before we went down.

***

It is not true. You never called. I thought you thought you would. But you never did.

***

"If I could go back..."

"Going back is a dinosaur in a looking glass."

"That's it. That's the other thing I saw. In the windshield. Right before. I'd forgotten..."

"I was in the trees."

"Yes...you were."

"Do you know that feeling where you're about to figure something out, you're right on the verge of realizing something you've wanted to realize for years...."

"...And then you don't. Yes."

"Through it all, I love us."

"And I'm beginning to as well."

"You began to a long time ago. Now you just are."

"I'm so scared."

"Only you can remove that."

***

You thought you looked so good there for about three hours. Historians won't debate the issue.

The insides are slippery.

It was freezing. You wanted to walk faster than you were able. You felt it coming before it was.

You seized up then.

You fell, and it was like a wave coming over you all at once, and yours was an utter giving in. Going under.

***

call

***

You wake up

The dimensions of

A sound for no sound

3 am,
do not worry--

I am right here
beside you

all fine things timely