Currency

The draft from the big trucks is almost enough to blow you down. Especially because you are thin legged and sparsely framed. A backpack pulls at your shoulders. Full of useless things that you will slowly get rid of as the burden bears down upon you with the increasing stubbornness of gravity. Blisters form on your feet and your lower back compresses. Sore. Your head a beehive of narcotic honeycomb. The warm wind from the trucks quickens your step as you head north. For a moment you question where you are going.

Sodium vapors burn on the horizon like earthbound stars. Lampposts and bulbs of vacuum sealed glass holding them there.  Affixed.  Thirty feet above the ground. Illuminating but a spot. A single space where one can see nothing beyond. Like a torch held close to a painting on a wall in a dark room. You see only what is trapped inside the frame. The faces around you left unseen and unknown. Just the heat from their bodies warming yours. Like the sun lighting the sky and warming your skin. You see only what is shown. Feel nothing but what is touched. Your empathy with space dissolving once you are unable to see the vastness of its darkness.

You stop and stare across that space. Looking to the dim light. The mist rises from the torn soil of winter pastures whose crops were ripped away by machines. Their iron hand. This mangled earth. The brute force of harvest. Land left flat and unhindered by brush, stone or tree. You can see for miles as the road behind you grows longer.

You wonder if that’s you under the tangerine light in the distance. That little spot of darkness seeking the heat of burning gasses. Moving against the edge of the earth alone and unnoticed by anyone but you. You, yourself watching from here. From there. Alone. Both wondering which one will kill the other first.

Asleep in a field now. Your slumbered body wrapped in layers of sodden cloth. Your figure interrupts the freshly whited landscape of the Central United States. A crystalline sheet of frozen snow now covers the whole of the Midwest. More will come when winter sets.

You rise and see slugs have crawled beneath you in the night. Seeking out your warmth. Your shelter. You can see the shape of your body outlined in the snow. The earth beneath you protected. You can hear the gentle crunch beneath your boots. It barely drowns out the sound of traffic as you walk.

There are crows in the neighboring field. Their beaks break through the powdered crust of snow into the frozen earth. Scavengers.  The grass has turned yellow and wet and hangs limp. Cows rip it from the ground with flattened teeth. Necks bent low. Hooves cracking cold, hard ground. From this distance they seem small as they move through space. Slow and heavy like thimbles of lead. A crow flies east.

You throw your backpack over the fence and climb between the barbed and twisted wire. You feel the corrosion on your hands as you make your way through. Pressing down to give yourself space. You should have brought gloves. The metal harsh and uncaring against your palm. The air grips your fingers in a burning cold vice. You flex them in and out of fists and blow them with the warm breath of your lungs.

The sun is smeared and misshapen casting barren landscapes in soft light. The day so dark that you are shadowless. It has gone somewhere else. Abandoned you. Sitting someplace warm waiting for you to return. To attach itself again to your feet and mock your every move. No matter how small or how sleight. And if you never return? What happens to shadows when their bodies die?

You see big trucks turning in the distance.  A diner.  Steam and fumes fill the atmosphere of the parking lot.  There will be coffee there. Food, shelter and warmth. You will take what you can. Whatever they will let you have. Whatever you can steal without being noticed. Little things that you hope they won’t miss.

Cars pass you by. You see them there. Families encapsulated in the warmth of their own company. Safe from the world all covered in steel and glass and pistons firing from spark and petrol. Tiny explosions perfectly timed. Rubber on road. A child looks out the back window his hand wiping the wet away as though saying goodbye. The brake lights illuminate just long enough for you to believe they may stop and come back for you.  They won’t.

The heat of the diner lets the blood leave your face. Shoulders ache. Stiffening as the weight leaves you for the floor at your feet. The stool at the counter squeaks as you sit. Air escapes from the foam cushion as you relax your body into the seat. Back slumping forward.  Head barely held in place.

You stir sugar into your coffee. More than you would normally use. Cream pours into the bitter darkness refusing to merge.  It swirls like a galaxy distant and foreign and full of its own life and death. You stick your spoon into the cup and the deep-dark black is overwhelmed.

The waitress brings the bill. You stare at the numbers that have recorded your debt. Blue ink bled upon paper. Molested by her pen. You reach into your pocket but you already know. You knew when you saw the trucks turning into the diner. You knew when you opened the door and heard the ringing of that small, brass bell that announces the arrival of someone new. You have always known it. This one thing. That you have no currency for this.