Share this:

The boy had been watching a cloud of birds swerve drunkenly across adjoining fields and settle on an arthritic oak that he’d started a one-sided staring contest with. Then the rain started screaming back. It was dusking and he longed for a hood and a pint of something from Vermont or Colorado or one of those places where drink was perfected to combat weather that made you feel uncomfortable and alone. The birds—ravens, he wondered, or crows?—were acting too spring-like for this time of year. It was early fall, and he considered that no species was exempt from the uncertainty of what it should be doing.

The night before, the boy studied his father as he ate a bowl of soup, leaning into it like a complicated math problem he didn’t intend to solve in one sitting. In that empty threat light of a drooping sun, his father’s hands were large, cracked and calloused, knuckles fat with the Midwestern cold of pre-dawns and late nights of birthing calves. And it occurred to the boy that the man hadn’t a day of rest in nine years.

They sat across from each other at the wooden table he helped his father build when he was a boy and his mother was pregnant with another and the father said the old table wasn’t sturdy enough to support the appetite of three men; they’d better build a new one. And now the boy studied his father from across that same table, as a man studies himself in the mirror upon waking one day and suddenly feeling old. The boy thought of his own hands and his own posture and before the last stabs of light and his father tipped the bowl, finally, towards his tired mouth, the boy decided that this was not his life; he was not yet this man; and he was no longer a boy. So he left.

And as he sat half-heartedly against the guardrail, studying the scattering, swooping, uncommitted roosting of birds, it was then that the girl showed up. She slowed and pulled to the side of the road, straining against the unrelenting protection of her seat belt to roll down the passenger window and ask, horizontally, squinting through the intrusive drips, “Where are you headed?”

He couldn’t tell her he didn’t know where out of the embarrassment that not knowing made him feel. Instead, he looked her over as she waited, extended across the dampening front seat, for the name of a state or even a general direction. She had kind cheeks and she seemed like the sort of girl who would sing to her children and not yell at them for things like muddy boots in the house, and he could only reply to a question she hadn’t asked: “Ansel. My name’s Ansel,” for that was the only truth he could offer at that moment, through the spitooning of rain against the car.

Advertisement