Sorry for the title, I'm in a bit of a bookish, metaphorical mood. I took a good bit of time off from writing (fiction at least) and I've put back on my waiters and baited the hook and done a little fishing. So put on your literary pants and chew on this short little passage. I love how one paragraph, about no man from no place can put us right in the nucleus of humanity.
The sunshine was always welcome during the first weeks of spring. A pleasant change from the cutting winds and itinerate snows of winter. The cold still bit in the mornings, but then the sun dried up the dew and warmed the face and it felt like you were on good terms with nature, that this was natural and right – man being outside getting his food by the sweat of his brow like he had since Adam went and fucked up in the garden. Then after a few weeks the sun went and got hot and it felt good first thing in the morning then it began to burn and you felt the itching and scratching as you started sweating. Then you start wishing for rain and there is no rain and gets even more scratchy and dry than you feel under the sun. There is no rain to settle the dust and every step you take and every revolution of tires kicks up dust that gets in your eyes and you feel between your teeth. The sun quits giving and starts taking – taking the very life out of the ground. And instead of looking out at the sunshine and thinking how pretty is you think how you’ll do anything to stay out of that light. There’s no shining, just blinding and blighting.
Martin looked out over the fallow field from his favorite chair in the TV room. The last rays of the day proved the field amiss. Precarious, dry clumps of sod were visible where a lush field of wheat should have been – clumps that when you picked them up they fell apart in your hand. The waning light cued up the crickets. Martin had to yell over them to be heard by his wife in the kitchen.
He walked into the kitchen with his empty glass. He opened the cabinet over the oven and pulled down the bottle. The bottle had less than a finger left in it. He drank the remainder straight from the bottle and dropped it on the floor. He rummaged through half eaten bags of potato chips for another bottle.
“What you mean throwing that bottle on the floor? You’re lucky there ain’t glass all over this floor. You pick that up,” Winnie said.
Martin continued to rummage through the cabinet.
“What you done with my whiskey?”
“I ain’t done nothing with your whiskey. You done drank it all. Now pick that bottle up off the floor.”
The crash of the bottle against the wall roared over the pulsating crickets. Martin watched the shards fall to the floor like drops of rain that had never come this year and then lifted his eyes to the amoeboid amber stain left on the wallpaper next to the framed pictures of the farm.
Winnie turned from the stove to see Martin at the wall staring at the picture frames. There were two: both aerial views taken from a helicopter during years of surplus. Years when they could afford such luxuries. The one on top taken during the summer, appearing fecund and verdant from across the room. The other, taken during the winter, looked like a patchwork quilt with squares of different shades of tawny and brown. Martin looked intently at the pictures. Then at the whiskey stain. Then back at the pictures. He turned and looked at Winnie with famine in his eyes and commenced to pick up the pieces of glass with his bare fingers. As his fingers closed around the glass he felt the pop of glass penetrating skin. His hand involuntarily slacked and the glass fell back to the floor. He sat back down in his chair and Winnie brought him a napkin.
“Hold this on there tight and staunch the bleeding.”
“I wish to God I had some more whiskey.”
With the napkin still stuck to his finger, Martin walked out the door, headed to the bar in town.
This was where the thirsty dead came to drink. And everyone drank and drank and everyone was still thirsty, like a crew on a stranded ship driven to drink the saltwater and getting thirstier and thirstier.
Please keep in mind when you are reading, that none of these people represent me. The purpose is to make you think and analyze your own soul.
