Confounded in an odd little town. |
An odd little town in the desert where the length of your shadow has nothing to do with the height of the sun, and so your shadow can be long when the sun is overhead, or it can be short, or even non-existent when the sun is low. Puzzled, you ponder this outré vision, this conundrum—do you consider yourself in some alternate reality? Is this the Twilight Zone? Mere mortals have shadows all right, yet said shadows conform to the laws of physics. Here, though, in this wee Arizona town, physics and natural laws are to no avail. Shadows are elongated as shadows go, overly long like some one-dimensional morphed rubber man stretching out ahead of you. And so you shake your fist at the sun, you look to the cloudless sky, pent up, and plead for an explanation, yet you get none. You turn to the town itself as you vie on the edge of madness, on a cliff of interrupted levelheadedness. Is it the dryness that abides in arid surrounds? Or is it the grizzled townsfolk eyeing from peepholes in boarded up windows, or from vantage points high in multistory buildings with missing shingles and dangling gutters? First you feel a kick within due to that longish, “You,” projecting ahead over dusty streets, yet the novelty soon wears thin like a balsa wood broom gnawed by a hungry hound dog. A setting sun affords no consolation—wherein a shadow would be, there is none; and so you wax nostalgic for the “lost” you, that two- dimensional soulmate who has lived with you since day one. Now you weep due to his absence. He is gone—all that remains is sun and sky and this odd desert town with its hidden eyes and secretive faces and its riddle of shadowy vicissitudes angering you no end. The laws are at this town’s whims—you are more than yourself, you are less than yourself. Time and space become as one. 40 Lines Writer’s Cramp 9-1-16 |