Sun Tunnels
By
G.C. Collins
They both knew it when Dad finally died. Miriam was in the shower, watching the water cascade off her body with unfocused eyes, listening to His words echo in the back of her mind, and then – silence, like after the desert swallows a gunshot. Grief settled in slowly, first in revulsion to her morning coffee, then the way the trucks woke her up at five in the morning, seemingly every morning. Finally, an anger in the lost cause of spring when the cold motherfucker of a winter held on tight to the days.
The yawning, terrible silence dredged up old memories preserved in the amber of terror. A long time ago, He said: First, you will mourn me for seven days. Miriam set up a tent in the backyard, stringing the heater’s power cord through the basement, and slept there for seven days, chasing coyotes out of the yard at dawn. The grief hardened into buckshot and remembering was like biting down hard on it.
He said: Second, you will bring the coin that I marked for you, and bring it to my body. Miriam pulled out a completely ordinary dime from a balled up sock in her drawer, catching a ragged sigh of relief when she realized that she hadn’t lost it.
He said: Third, you two will watch over my body and take the violence back with you. Miriam took all of the liquor out of the house and dumped it in her trunk of her rusted Ford Taurus, where it rolled and clanged with every turn. It took two and a half hours to drive from Twin Falls to Brigham City. Aaron, her brother, stood outside his bungalow, overnight bag slung low over his shoulder. In the passenger seat, he wrinkled his nose at her and said, "You look like shit."
Miriam pulled out of his driveway and kept her eyes on the road. Her mouth moved automatically and her voice came out quiet and frail, like she hadn’t spoken aloud in years. She asked if he had forgotten anything. He didn’t respond, turning away. She grew bolder, sisterly annoyance giving her strength, and reminded him in detail about the coin that he almost lost forever in the sewer drain until his older, braver sister went in and could’ve contracted tetanus but got it back for him, “Do you remember that at least? Don't be a fuckhead.”
He said, “You’re being mean,” and closed his eyes, pressing his temple against the cold, frosting window. “And I didn’t forget.”
It was a bitterly sunny noon when they got to Oasis, which was little more than a gas station and a trailer park in a smudged out part of the country. They filled up the tank, bought firewood, and took off on Route 233, toward Montello.
Aaron couldn't help himself and asked, "He’s gone, right?"
Miriam rolled her eyes. They drifted through desert scrub as far as the eye could see, with black mountains low in the horizon. Montello came and went, a collection of bungalows barely registering on the landscape.
"I'm serious, Meems. Tell me you aren’t sitting there, expecting to hear His voice again? I'm always going to be scared that He's gonna whisper again to me in the middle of the night, scaring me half to shit."
Aaron was His favorite but Miriam was always the one He yelled at. In the past few months, His voice had been getting louder and angrier until that night. About what, Miriam couldn't even recall.
She said that she was glad to get some peace and quiet.
They crossed a dried creek, shivers running through them like someone had bulldozed their graves. The sun dropped, reddening the sky little by little until it left light green spots in their eyes if they stared too long in the sideview mirrors. The old, dead town of Lucine passed by like a tumbleweed, the old tires kicking up dust on its main street. When they had driven through here twenty years ago, Dad said that He hated this pitiful excuse of a town, that it was named after the devil itself, that one day it would burn to the ground.
In the sunset, the abandoned airport warehouse rusted in the distance, surrounded by shacks of sunbleached, twisted wood. "I just can't believe it's finally over,” murmured Aaron.
“Not yet,” she said and pulled off paved road and onto gravel. It wasn't far now. The sun was now firmly behind the mountain, but the light bounced off the short, small hills surrounding the desert, keeping the flatland well lit. In the distance, four sections of hollow concrete tubes lay on their sides, openings facing each other like the crosshairs in a rifle scope, starkly bright gray against the dying landscape. The tubes were enormous, easily twice her height and slightly longer than her car. Miriam pulled up close from the west, glimpsing something dark on the ground, framed between the tubes. She stopped after it was blocked from view.
Miriam said, “It's okay. Did you want to see Him when there's still a bit of light, or would you rather keep your eyes closed?”
"Shut up," he said.
She parked and killed the engine. They took in a deep breath of stale, sweet air and opened the doors. The wind immediately buffeted them and Miriam held onto the car for stability. The ground was still freezing but the wind was warming up. The desert could not hold onto any of the sun's heat at this time of year.
Miriam said, “Since I'm older, I'm going to see Him first.” She imagined His eyes, always shrouded in darkness under his brow, and His maw a black hole behind teeth like thick, yellow-stained tablets of stone – all finally closed. He would be on His back, face-up, with light finally reaching those spaces that she could never see – and He would be perfectly normal. His skin would be cracked and weathered like an old man’s should be, His wrinkles deep but not unkind. Not at all like her sun tunnels, veins of light boring through her body in the middle of the night when she had done something bad and He had seen. He always saw everything.
They crept behind the southwestern tube. Miriam held her breath and then her legs gave out. Aaron pulled her back behind the tube. "What is it? What did you see?" he said, wild-eyed.
“Absolutely nothing,” she said, “nothing at all.” A pause. “Oh Christ.”
Aaron looked at her. "Alright," he said, and then got up and quickly disappeared around the corner of the tube.
Miriam scrambled after him. He was kneeling down in the middle of the sandy clearing, trembling. In front of him, He was a blackened body, charred to a gray, leathery ash. He was on his back, legs slightly bent, and one hand stretched out to the sky. His extended pointer finger was glowing, surrounded by a flame, bouncing in the sudden wind like a lazy candlewick.
The violence. An eternal flame.
"How are we supposed to take that home?" asked Aaron. The wind died down and the world was so quiet they could hear each other's heartbeats.
Something inside of her twitched and Miriam reached out to touch it.
"Mimi, don't fucking touch that."
“Shut up. I need to see if its real.” Her voice was nearly gone now.
“Give me a stick.”
Miriam looked around her. This felt like a game they used to play, gathering wet sticks around their campsite, dumping it all into the bonfire, and He would get so mad and they would run away, laughing-coughing from the smoke. Behind one of the concrete cylinders, she found a thin, bone-dry branch with all of its bark stripped off. She started back to the body. Don’t look at his face, don’t look, I don’t need to know what it looks like now, she thought.
Aaron took the stick from her without taking his eyes off of His charred skull. He dangled the stick over the flaming finger, and for a moment nothing happened. Then, the tip of the branch glowed and the fire floated away from the finger. The flame settled, bobbing like a fishing lure, and the body collapsed on itself into a thin, gray powder curling like a mushroom cloud. They scrambled to their feet, covering their mouths with their elbows.
“Don’t let go of that,” Miriam said, watching the flame on Aaron’s stick. Though it radiated warmth like a normal flame, it was not bothering to travel down the stick.
“That’s… Okay.” Aaron carefully plugged the stick into the sand, tilting the flame away from him.
It was almost dark. Miriam carried the alcohol out of the trunk in an armful while Aaron grabbed the firewood bundle. They used the violence to light a fire in a makeshift fire pit made out of impossibly smooth stones found around the concrete tunnel sections. They set up their tent nearby, careful of any embers that the fire might suddenly decide to spit out. She handed him a bottle of rye and picked up a dark bottle of red to start with before moving on to bourbon. It was the last thing they had to do there before we could go.
They drank and drank until the alcohol replaced their blood and when they looked up into the matrix of crystal clear sky, the stars were endlessly falling. Aaron's tongue loosened after a few swigs and he began to reminisce. The grief was moving through them like a piece of bad meat, loosened by exercise and movement, bile rising in their throats, but they didn't dare throw up. Not on this ground. He would never forgive them for such unseemly behavior.
Deep into the night, they said good night and hugged for the first time in years. Aaron threw himself into the tent while Miriam half-walked, half-swayed to the nearest concrete tube. The smooth curves inside made her stumble immediately and she rolled onto her back. There were holes drilled into the concrete that perfectly aligned with some constellation. Aquarius. Cygnus. Ursa Major. Ursa Fuck You. In the cold dark of the concrete tube, the stars shone even brighter, pulsing one at a time, until the holes were like pools of light and it hurt to look at. She closed her eyes. The sound of the crackling logs and Aaron's hog-like, drunken snoring drifted away.
At dawn, Miriam woke up with the side of her face slicked with spit and possibly a bit of vomit. She rubbed at it with a sleeve and got on her hands and knees, the curvature of the tube making it difficult for her to get her bearings.
"Aaron! Are you awake?" She called out, feeling the words tear through her vocal chords as if she was using them for the first time.
An awful, guttural groan emanated from one of the tents.
"Good," she said, newly aware of an urgent buzzing deep within her. "We need to head back and forget about this whole mess. None of it's real." She fell out of the tube and finally was able to steady herself on the flat, sandy ground.
The fire from last night was still going, suddenly dim and pitiful and fake in the growing sunlight. Miriam walked over, feeling braver than she had ever felt, and crouched into a practiced squat. Pulling out a pack of Turkish Royals, she plucked out a cigarette and thrust it into the flames. As the ember swelled at the tip, the fire went out like a dimmer light switch smoothly rolled back.
“Aaron, what do you think would happen if I inhale this?”
“Mimi, what the fuck!?”
Aaron had crawled out of his tent and shambled over to her. “Don’t put your mouth on that,” he said Miriam held the cigarette out to him. Aaron took it gingerly, turning it over and over again in the growing daylight. “When did you start smoking?”
“The day we heard him croak, I got these after work. This is what he’s worth – one cigarette from a seven dollar pack…” The rage caught in her throat. “Tyrant. Asshole. Always yelling, never happy with anything.” She couldn’t stop now. “Never smiling, never praising me. A mean, stupid motherfucker who couldn't do shit for Mom and even less for us. Fuck! Him!” She snatched back the cigarette and prepared to toss it into the morning desert wind.
“Mimi, no!” Aaron was quick to grab her wrist.
“Let me go! Just let me fucking do it!”
“Cool your shit down, Mimi! Just take a breath!” She stopped resisting and loosened her hand. Aaron caught it before it hit the ground, holding it between his thumb and pointer finger. “Jesus Christ! Who knows what could have happened.”
“Let’s pack up,” Miriam said. Aaron watched her, slackjawed.
“Not going to discuss what just happened, Meems?”
“Absolutely not. Come on.”
Miriam cleaned up the campsite, picking up the many bottles casually tossed aside over the course of the night. Aaron balanced the cigarette inside the old-school ashtray that the Ford still had, careful not to let its ember touch anything. They loaded the car in a monk-like silence. Miriam moved quickly, working up a slight sweat as Aaron trailed behind her. When everything was thrown into the car, empty bottles loose again in the trunk, her hangover broke from a lobotomizing nail into a flood of persistent cold, prickling her skin into tight, painful goosebumps.
Aaron broke the silence first. “I can drive back, you know.”
She stared at him. “You can barely keep your eyes open. I’m okay, really. Take a nap and maybe we can switch in Oasis.”
He shrugged. “Fine by me.” He lowered himself gingerly in the passenger seat. “I was being polite, anyway.”
The Taurus started up quickly, like it had read the room and realized it couldn't afford to laze around. They pulled away from the hollow concrete cylinders, tires biting at the dirt and gravel. Aaron watched the cigarette, still lit, glowing in the ashtray between them, until his headache forced him to close his eyes and lean his head against the side of the car.
He began to spill his thoughts, as if compelled: “What do we do now? Go back to our dead-end jobs? I don’t know if I can face another human being after last night. Dad was everything you said he was, but even when we left him, I could still hear him, like a steady breath, like he was taking a nap nearby. I know it’s silly, but sometimes I felt like I had to be very quiet in the car, or at work, or even at home, or he would wake up. I didn’t want to wake him up, you know?” He turned over to his side when Miriam eased the car onto the paved road back to Lucine. “You’re just gonna bear it like he did, I bet. I can see it so clearly… Just working away the days by yourself, doing God knows what, until your heart finally gives out. We’re not supposed to just endure, Miriam. We do what we have to do, but we need to live our lives. Find someone nice, make a family together, and somehow it’ll all work out…”
They were approaching Lucine now. The eastern light was harsh on the remains of the town, accentuating the gaps between the dusty wooden slats, the holes in the collapsed roofs, the rust on the abandoned machinery strewn about. Even the tall dry grass, swaying gently in the wind, cast shadows like splinters embedded deep in skin.
When Aaron fell asleep, Miriam slowed the car to a stop and rolled down his window. She had made up her mind. The sins of their father was not theirs to bear. And that’s okay, she thought. She would be brave for both of them and let go. She grabbed the smoldering cigarette and flicked it through her the window. It bounced off the still-cold asphalt and landed somewhere in the tall grass. Even in the morning light, the grass glowed and the shadows began to melt away.
A few miles away, she chanced a look in her rearview mirror, allowing herself a small smile as the smoke plume rose higher and higher. In a few hours, that smoke would become just another cloud and the ghost town would be just kindling for a wildfire that would rage on forever. By then, Miriam would have spent the dime she had saved for twenty years at the Oasis gas station, tossing it into the tip box, where it became just another coin.
G.C. Collins is a writer living high in the mountains of the US. One day they will finally come down, move to the coast, and fulfill their destiny as a senior surfer/writer.
By
G.C. Collins
They both knew it when Dad finally died. Miriam was in the shower, watching the water cascade off her body with unfocused eyes, listening to His words echo in the back of her mind, and then – silence, like after the desert swallows a gunshot. Grief settled in slowly, first in revulsion to her morning coffee, then the way the trucks woke her up at five in the morning, seemingly every morning. Finally, an anger in the lost cause of spring when the cold motherfucker of a winter held on tight to the days.
The yawning, terrible silence dredged up old memories preserved in the amber of terror. A long time ago, He said: First, you will mourn me for seven days. Miriam set up a tent in the backyard, stringing the heater’s power cord through the basement, and slept there for seven days, chasing coyotes out of the yard at dawn. The grief hardened into buckshot and remembering was like biting down hard on it.
He said: Second, you will bring the coin that I marked for you, and bring it to my body. Miriam pulled out a completely ordinary dime from a balled up sock in her drawer, catching a ragged sigh of relief when she realized that she hadn’t lost it.
He said: Third, you two will watch over my body and take the violence back with you. Miriam took all of the liquor out of the house and dumped it in her trunk of her rusted Ford Taurus, where it rolled and clanged with every turn. It took two and a half hours to drive from Twin Falls to Brigham City. Aaron, her brother, stood outside his bungalow, overnight bag slung low over his shoulder. In the passenger seat, he wrinkled his nose at her and said, "You look like shit."
Miriam pulled out of his driveway and kept her eyes on the road. Her mouth moved automatically and her voice came out quiet and frail, like she hadn’t spoken aloud in years. She asked if he had forgotten anything. He didn’t respond, turning away. She grew bolder, sisterly annoyance giving her strength, and reminded him in detail about the coin that he almost lost forever in the sewer drain until his older, braver sister went in and could’ve contracted tetanus but got it back for him, “Do you remember that at least? Don't be a fuckhead.”
He said, “You’re being mean,” and closed his eyes, pressing his temple against the cold, frosting window. “And I didn’t forget.”
It was a bitterly sunny noon when they got to Oasis, which was little more than a gas station and a trailer park in a smudged out part of the country. They filled up the tank, bought firewood, and took off on Route 233, toward Montello.
Aaron couldn't help himself and asked, "He’s gone, right?"
Miriam rolled her eyes. They drifted through desert scrub as far as the eye could see, with black mountains low in the horizon. Montello came and went, a collection of bungalows barely registering on the landscape.
"I'm serious, Meems. Tell me you aren’t sitting there, expecting to hear His voice again? I'm always going to be scared that He's gonna whisper again to me in the middle of the night, scaring me half to shit."
Aaron was His favorite but Miriam was always the one He yelled at. In the past few months, His voice had been getting louder and angrier until that night. About what, Miriam couldn't even recall.
She said that she was glad to get some peace and quiet.
They crossed a dried creek, shivers running through them like someone had bulldozed their graves. The sun dropped, reddening the sky little by little until it left light green spots in their eyes if they stared too long in the sideview mirrors. The old, dead town of Lucine passed by like a tumbleweed, the old tires kicking up dust on its main street. When they had driven through here twenty years ago, Dad said that He hated this pitiful excuse of a town, that it was named after the devil itself, that one day it would burn to the ground.
In the sunset, the abandoned airport warehouse rusted in the distance, surrounded by shacks of sunbleached, twisted wood. "I just can't believe it's finally over,” murmured Aaron.
“Not yet,” she said and pulled off paved road and onto gravel. It wasn't far now. The sun was now firmly behind the mountain, but the light bounced off the short, small hills surrounding the desert, keeping the flatland well lit. In the distance, four sections of hollow concrete tubes lay on their sides, openings facing each other like the crosshairs in a rifle scope, starkly bright gray against the dying landscape. The tubes were enormous, easily twice her height and slightly longer than her car. Miriam pulled up close from the west, glimpsing something dark on the ground, framed between the tubes. She stopped after it was blocked from view.
Miriam said, “It's okay. Did you want to see Him when there's still a bit of light, or would you rather keep your eyes closed?”
"Shut up," he said.
She parked and killed the engine. They took in a deep breath of stale, sweet air and opened the doors. The wind immediately buffeted them and Miriam held onto the car for stability. The ground was still freezing but the wind was warming up. The desert could not hold onto any of the sun's heat at this time of year.
Miriam said, “Since I'm older, I'm going to see Him first.” She imagined His eyes, always shrouded in darkness under his brow, and His maw a black hole behind teeth like thick, yellow-stained tablets of stone – all finally closed. He would be on His back, face-up, with light finally reaching those spaces that she could never see – and He would be perfectly normal. His skin would be cracked and weathered like an old man’s should be, His wrinkles deep but not unkind. Not at all like her sun tunnels, veins of light boring through her body in the middle of the night when she had done something bad and He had seen. He always saw everything.
They crept behind the southwestern tube. Miriam held her breath and then her legs gave out. Aaron pulled her back behind the tube. "What is it? What did you see?" he said, wild-eyed.
“Absolutely nothing,” she said, “nothing at all.” A pause. “Oh Christ.”
Aaron looked at her. "Alright," he said, and then got up and quickly disappeared around the corner of the tube.
Miriam scrambled after him. He was kneeling down in the middle of the sandy clearing, trembling. In front of him, He was a blackened body, charred to a gray, leathery ash. He was on his back, legs slightly bent, and one hand stretched out to the sky. His extended pointer finger was glowing, surrounded by a flame, bouncing in the sudden wind like a lazy candlewick.
The violence. An eternal flame.
"How are we supposed to take that home?" asked Aaron. The wind died down and the world was so quiet they could hear each other's heartbeats.
Something inside of her twitched and Miriam reached out to touch it.
"Mimi, don't fucking touch that."
“Shut up. I need to see if its real.” Her voice was nearly gone now.
“Give me a stick.”
Miriam looked around her. This felt like a game they used to play, gathering wet sticks around their campsite, dumping it all into the bonfire, and He would get so mad and they would run away, laughing-coughing from the smoke. Behind one of the concrete cylinders, she found a thin, bone-dry branch with all of its bark stripped off. She started back to the body. Don’t look at his face, don’t look, I don’t need to know what it looks like now, she thought.
Aaron took the stick from her without taking his eyes off of His charred skull. He dangled the stick over the flaming finger, and for a moment nothing happened. Then, the tip of the branch glowed and the fire floated away from the finger. The flame settled, bobbing like a fishing lure, and the body collapsed on itself into a thin, gray powder curling like a mushroom cloud. They scrambled to their feet, covering their mouths with their elbows.
“Don’t let go of that,” Miriam said, watching the flame on Aaron’s stick. Though it radiated warmth like a normal flame, it was not bothering to travel down the stick.
“That’s… Okay.” Aaron carefully plugged the stick into the sand, tilting the flame away from him.
It was almost dark. Miriam carried the alcohol out of the trunk in an armful while Aaron grabbed the firewood bundle. They used the violence to light a fire in a makeshift fire pit made out of impossibly smooth stones found around the concrete tunnel sections. They set up their tent nearby, careful of any embers that the fire might suddenly decide to spit out. She handed him a bottle of rye and picked up a dark bottle of red to start with before moving on to bourbon. It was the last thing they had to do there before we could go.
They drank and drank until the alcohol replaced their blood and when they looked up into the matrix of crystal clear sky, the stars were endlessly falling. Aaron's tongue loosened after a few swigs and he began to reminisce. The grief was moving through them like a piece of bad meat, loosened by exercise and movement, bile rising in their throats, but they didn't dare throw up. Not on this ground. He would never forgive them for such unseemly behavior.
Deep into the night, they said good night and hugged for the first time in years. Aaron threw himself into the tent while Miriam half-walked, half-swayed to the nearest concrete tube. The smooth curves inside made her stumble immediately and she rolled onto her back. There were holes drilled into the concrete that perfectly aligned with some constellation. Aquarius. Cygnus. Ursa Major. Ursa Fuck You. In the cold dark of the concrete tube, the stars shone even brighter, pulsing one at a time, until the holes were like pools of light and it hurt to look at. She closed her eyes. The sound of the crackling logs and Aaron's hog-like, drunken snoring drifted away.
At dawn, Miriam woke up with the side of her face slicked with spit and possibly a bit of vomit. She rubbed at it with a sleeve and got on her hands and knees, the curvature of the tube making it difficult for her to get her bearings.
"Aaron! Are you awake?" She called out, feeling the words tear through her vocal chords as if she was using them for the first time.
An awful, guttural groan emanated from one of the tents.
"Good," she said, newly aware of an urgent buzzing deep within her. "We need to head back and forget about this whole mess. None of it's real." She fell out of the tube and finally was able to steady herself on the flat, sandy ground.
The fire from last night was still going, suddenly dim and pitiful and fake in the growing sunlight. Miriam walked over, feeling braver than she had ever felt, and crouched into a practiced squat. Pulling out a pack of Turkish Royals, she plucked out a cigarette and thrust it into the flames. As the ember swelled at the tip, the fire went out like a dimmer light switch smoothly rolled back.
“Aaron, what do you think would happen if I inhale this?”
“Mimi, what the fuck!?”
Aaron had crawled out of his tent and shambled over to her. “Don’t put your mouth on that,” he said Miriam held the cigarette out to him. Aaron took it gingerly, turning it over and over again in the growing daylight. “When did you start smoking?”
“The day we heard him croak, I got these after work. This is what he’s worth – one cigarette from a seven dollar pack…” The rage caught in her throat. “Tyrant. Asshole. Always yelling, never happy with anything.” She couldn’t stop now. “Never smiling, never praising me. A mean, stupid motherfucker who couldn't do shit for Mom and even less for us. Fuck! Him!” She snatched back the cigarette and prepared to toss it into the morning desert wind.
“Mimi, no!” Aaron was quick to grab her wrist.
“Let me go! Just let me fucking do it!”
“Cool your shit down, Mimi! Just take a breath!” She stopped resisting and loosened her hand. Aaron caught it before it hit the ground, holding it between his thumb and pointer finger. “Jesus Christ! Who knows what could have happened.”
“Let’s pack up,” Miriam said. Aaron watched her, slackjawed.
“Not going to discuss what just happened, Meems?”
“Absolutely not. Come on.”
Miriam cleaned up the campsite, picking up the many bottles casually tossed aside over the course of the night. Aaron balanced the cigarette inside the old-school ashtray that the Ford still had, careful not to let its ember touch anything. They loaded the car in a monk-like silence. Miriam moved quickly, working up a slight sweat as Aaron trailed behind her. When everything was thrown into the car, empty bottles loose again in the trunk, her hangover broke from a lobotomizing nail into a flood of persistent cold, prickling her skin into tight, painful goosebumps.
Aaron broke the silence first. “I can drive back, you know.”
She stared at him. “You can barely keep your eyes open. I’m okay, really. Take a nap and maybe we can switch in Oasis.”
He shrugged. “Fine by me.” He lowered himself gingerly in the passenger seat. “I was being polite, anyway.”
The Taurus started up quickly, like it had read the room and realized it couldn't afford to laze around. They pulled away from the hollow concrete cylinders, tires biting at the dirt and gravel. Aaron watched the cigarette, still lit, glowing in the ashtray between them, until his headache forced him to close his eyes and lean his head against the side of the car.
He began to spill his thoughts, as if compelled: “What do we do now? Go back to our dead-end jobs? I don’t know if I can face another human being after last night. Dad was everything you said he was, but even when we left him, I could still hear him, like a steady breath, like he was taking a nap nearby. I know it’s silly, but sometimes I felt like I had to be very quiet in the car, or at work, or even at home, or he would wake up. I didn’t want to wake him up, you know?” He turned over to his side when Miriam eased the car onto the paved road back to Lucine. “You’re just gonna bear it like he did, I bet. I can see it so clearly… Just working away the days by yourself, doing God knows what, until your heart finally gives out. We’re not supposed to just endure, Miriam. We do what we have to do, but we need to live our lives. Find someone nice, make a family together, and somehow it’ll all work out…”
They were approaching Lucine now. The eastern light was harsh on the remains of the town, accentuating the gaps between the dusty wooden slats, the holes in the collapsed roofs, the rust on the abandoned machinery strewn about. Even the tall dry grass, swaying gently in the wind, cast shadows like splinters embedded deep in skin.
When Aaron fell asleep, Miriam slowed the car to a stop and rolled down his window. She had made up her mind. The sins of their father was not theirs to bear. And that’s okay, she thought. She would be brave for both of them and let go. She grabbed the smoldering cigarette and flicked it through her the window. It bounced off the still-cold asphalt and landed somewhere in the tall grass. Even in the morning light, the grass glowed and the shadows began to melt away.
A few miles away, she chanced a look in her rearview mirror, allowing herself a small smile as the smoke plume rose higher and higher. In a few hours, that smoke would become just another cloud and the ghost town would be just kindling for a wildfire that would rage on forever. By then, Miriam would have spent the dime she had saved for twenty years at the Oasis gas station, tossing it into the tip box, where it became just another coin.
G.C. Collins is a writer living high in the mountains of the US. One day they will finally come down, move to the coast, and fulfill their destiny as a senior surfer/writer.