glen road

Glen Road crawls through empty countryside for seven miles. White bungalows with screened mosquito eyes squat beside the road and tug at me with memories, picketed gardens are torn by the wind and overrun by weeds. The tall grasses weave into the night. Giant pines creak and acknowledges my passing. We only want to scream like this when we know we’re out of earshot. But fatigue has sewn my mouth shut and I know there are many more things out here that are listening.

Benton is a broken little place carved into the mountainside, a secondhand ghost town. 

There is only one church left; an old Methodist with a splintered steeple like a cripple’s finger, abandoned. The sun has bleached it death white, its graffiti, the art of amateurs and passersby, is faded. Jesus was here, they claim, and they might be right. On the Fourth of July, junkies swarm here like ants, crowding in with boom boxes and ecstasy from the city. They sit out in the long grass, the crickets orchestrating the night. The world seems painfully unseen now, it stares back at you with eyes of a refugee and you wonder what it’s hiding from.

    Every summer, Benton is transformed. It’s the pollen floating in the air and the empty buildings in the fields swaying gold. It draws in the starving artist type, eager to colonize a clandestine haven. But in the winter it dries up again, vanishing into stone. Winter, and the orphans are stranded again, sleeping in the hay loft of that big red barn, frost crawling all over their skin. 

The Reservoir marks the barrier between this emptiness and the people. It glitters coldly in its stone nest. I remember the night nine years ago when the little bridge was taken away, papers said there’d been a murder, a body had been dumped there. Word of blood in the water radiated shock into the town and a thousand doors were shut by the sweeping hand of hysteria. But doors never stay closed in the summer.

Weeks passed and panic leaked away, the people could go back to sleep. Years passed and Wilson is no longer plagued by guilt. And Jordan is still wading through the water, a tiny angel, not yet home.

Wilson’s deli is on the corner where Glen Road swoops up into town. The neon sign sputtering, pleading to the country dark. Open until midnight. I can hear the bells on the closing door. He’ll be shuffling around in the back; he still has to take the money from the register, his thumbs smoothing out the bills, before he retreats upstairs to his color TV and his creaky mattress and places them in his metal box. He still has to read the paper for the second time that day before he can fall asleep.

Wilson has been my friend since the summer he found me, six years old and shivering in the dark. I’d climbed up the fire escape and knocked on his window. I stayed the night, eating chocolates out of tinfoil, listening to his old painful fairy tales.

I step up to the window and tap the glass with my finger. Wilson steps out from behind a rack of magazines. His face is withered and white. Maybe I shouldn’t have come this late. I go to the door, but he doesn’t move. He puts his face closer to the glass. His eyes flare, terror explodes in his mouth, then some sort of strange despair, his body deflates. He backs away from me, shaking his head. I pull open the door and smile weakly. I ask him what’s wrong.

He stands rooted to the spot, his body trembling. I come closer and he recoils. I ask him if it’s the way I smell. His face contorts now, anger, fear, disbelief; he glances up, as if to god, and then darts behind the counter. Then the trembling stops. My skin turns cold then, my ears pounding. He slumps forward, and blood rushes across the counter. It pours through his white hair and onto the floor. It drips off his fingers. I watch it spreading quietly across the floor, claiming what was his.

    My eyes cannot close and so they open wider.





the sleepless know the most said George in the bar dust his halo caught in the neon they witness the magic moving faint across the pavement see the faces in the sodium glow of streetlamps I listen to the nerve quiverings under his eye and watch his teeth flash in and out of throat darkness

you hear what I’m saying? I’m saying they’ve been chosen.George leans close his halo sagging like the old If only they’ve been chosen to see their eyes cannot close.



The black eyed susans sway and push as if to gain momentum. The sun, dissolved into the grass, sinks low into the pines. The grasses melt to black. The black eyed susans quell their rebellion for the night. The sky opens and the spaces widen, comfortable again, unseen.



Barbed Wire, Denim, Pocketnives and Roadkill.

Disappearences into the Dust.