Road

NARRATIVE 4

In record time you found yourself a little less lost,

the vertigo inside your skull humming

like a piece of abandoned electronics,

or a musty kazoo with no music left inside it,

and began trekking back home,

bearing hard right at the skatepark

its disuse filling up with standing rain,

then straight for two miles

past banks of wild, colorless flowers

and in the road there were

piles of dingy squirrel pelts,

and plastic bottles of prescription medicine

and instruction manuals

for vaguely prosthetic devices.

As you thumbed through each,

the yearning you felt

to be made better, more, made no sense.

You could see a man

setting fire to his arm,

which you had to assume was an accident,

as he waved it wordlessly.

It looked like a flag

announcing dominion,

even as he vanished into the backyard.

Dogs were barking and

then they were quiet

and people issued from their homes

passing questions

one to the other

as if this were a shared dream.

You wanted to say

what this place obviously was.

What had happened.

To tell them to return to their tolerable dinners.

To go back inside.

Because the silence had gone

and this at last was loss,

or what you had guessed it might be for a long time.

You wanted to leave.

You did.