A Different Shade of Rural - Charley Mintz (Lovenheim Award Co-Winner!)

The road stretches on for miles in a perfectly flat line, like the perpetual drone of a failing heart monitor. There is no guardrail, only sunbleached asphalt next to

hard-packed dirt. The few bushes within eyesight cling stubbornly to dehydrated soil like belligerent children. 

There are no mountains. 

Isn’t that strange? Isn’t it strange to look to the horizon and see nothing where you normally find yourself cradled in the palms of the earth? For your chin to dip

toward your chest when it usually cranes upward to see the sleeping giants? Isn’t it odd for the clear blueness of the sky to meet the ground beneath your feet,

unhindered by the waves of blue, then blue-green, then green-blue, then green you’re used to seeing?

The ground has no give. There’s no softness of mud and decomposing leaves; there’s only stone-hard soil beneath thin soles. Pain lances up your joints with each

step. Walking on the road would be worse. The air shimmers above the pavement, and puddles reflect the sky above only to dry up as soon as you draw close.

If you pressed your hand to the asphalt, would your skin sizzle or char?

The shadows of the vultures which follow your every step pass over the road in front of you. They are gliding on an unseen wind, their wings spread wide. The

shadows of their feathers spread like fingers at the tips of their wings; they grasp for the hand of your own shadow on the ground before you. 

You do not reach forward. You do not allow your shadow self to feel glossy feathers between your fingers. You do not allow your fingers to be gripped by sharp

beaks and talons, for the carrion birds to peck through bone and flesh and tendon.

You do not reach forward. You keep walking. The birds keep following. 

There is a payphone on the side of the road. You’ve seen these before; there’s one in the town you grew up near. You used it once. It was when you were too young

to have a phone and when you still carried quarters to put in the gumball machine. You needed your mother to pick you up from the playground because you

lived twenty minutes outside of town by car, and the roads weren’t safe enough to walk along. You had been told of too many blind spots and too many accidents.

It’s not like here, where you can see a car coming when they still have six hours left to drive before you collide. That’s plenty of time to make a decision. 

You still don’t have a phone. 

You step up to the payphone and grab the handset. The metal is cool to the touch, kept out of the beating sunlight by the small shelter it’s found itself imprisoned

in. You have no quarters, but you press the familiar buttons anyway. 5. 1. 8…

A dial tone sounds. You listen. 

The sun slips from your shoulders down your spine like a jacket falling off your back. The temperature falls with it. You are your mother; you hold the handset

between your shoulder and your cheek with nothing but the pressure of your face as you untie the flannel from around your waist and slip it back over your

arms. Your hand gets stuck in the twisted fabric. The goosebumps don’t go away just because your arms are covered. 

The dial tone ends. You hang up. Did the call connect? Was the automated voice about to ask for change? Were they about to tell you that The number you dialed is

unavailable?

You keep walking.

There is a coyote who stares at you from beyond the light of your campfire. You stare back.

He is strange. 

His eyes reflect the light of the fire: first the left, then the right, then a third blinks from under the left one. His legs are long, too long, and he is too still. The only

movement you observe is when his eyes blink one at a time. One, two, the first two blink shut, three, the third one blinks open. 

But you’ve never seen a desert coyote before, so perhaps… 

Perhaps this is normal. 

You blink at him in the way cat owners do to beg for a smidgeon of affection from their lofty roommates. Long, and slow. It’s a sign of trust, you have been told.

When you open your eyes, he is closer than he was. He blinks back, long, and slow. 

Neither of you move for the rest of the night. 

There is a billboard lying on its face thirty feet away from the road. 

It looks comfortable. Maybe you will join it for a moment. 

The wooden frame is in the dirt on the side which would have been painted or plastered with slogans. The wooden frame is splintered and gouged where some

animal has sharpened their claws, and the plywood is muddy and discolored. What was on the other side, you wonder?

Perhaps it was about Jesus, or smoking, or some fast food restaurant, “only found here!” or some other such advertisement. Perhaps it was cautionary, or

soliciting, or shocking. 

Or perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps that is why no one has propped it back up. 

Small holes pepper the ground, and you can see eyes from where you walk along the road. You blinked, and the sun had finished sinking below the edge of the

earth, so the sky is still painted periwinkle and lilac where it kisses the horizon. If you look up, the first few stars are suspended in the navy velvet cosmos. 

The eyes in the ground blink at you in pairs.

You are used to this. Back home, eyes blink at you from the treetops as they ask Who cooks for you? In melodic rhythm. They call back and forth in the witching

hours. They solo above the choirs of cicadas and pepper frogs, surrendering their part to the mourning doves when morning draws near. 

They ask no questions here, but the eyes stare in the same way. 

The snake might be dead. It lies with its eyes closed and its forked tongue hanging limply out of its mouth. Its scales blend into the rust-daybreak-tangerine of

the dust around it. The patterns on its back remind you of the handwriting of your childhood friend when the two of you were beginning to learn cursive. 

You might be dead, too, but you still think, so you think you are not. The snake, however, cannot prove that you are thinking, and the same goes for you. Neither of

you has seen the other move. It doesn’t help that you are looking upside down, your neck uncomfortably arched as the top of your head is pressed against the

ground. It puts pressure on your neck and stretches the skin of your throat, to the point where you do not knoe ig you could speak if you wanted to. 

So the two of you, lying beside the road with your bellies toward the waiting scavengers and scorching sun alike, may be alive. Neither of you will know if the

other is.

When you wake, the snake is gone. 

The neon sign in the window of the convenience store says Open in electric blue and red the color of cinnamon candy. This is clearly a lie. There isn’t a soul

nearby to man it. You push the door open and it swings inward with a slight jingle. Where your hands pushed against the glass. You have left smudged ghosts of

your touch. From outside the door, the floor looks swept clean. The fluorescent lighting flickers slightly as soon as you step in, but it stabilizes once both your feet

are firmly planted on the inside of the store. 

Everything is full. The gondola shelving is packed with packets of candy and bags of chips and the refrigerators around the store are filled with everything from

soda to water to beer. Even the wall of cigarettes behind the register is intact without a single carton missing. 

The fish-eye mirrors in the corners of the store show distorted images. In one, you are not there at all; in another, you are merely one in a crowd of people you

are certain you do not see. In the mirror over the cash register, you see yourself but not as you are now. In the reflection, your eyes are too big for your head and

your head is too big for your body. There are sticks and leaves trapped in your hair from when you took a tumble out of a tree in your backyard. When you blink,

so too does this child version of yourself. 

You don’t take anything when you leave the store, even though your reflection over the counter shoves a Twix into the pocket of the baggy shorts which fall down

past their knees as they walk further into their mirror. 

As you walk out the door, you glance behind to see the trail of dust left in your wake, making circles around the shelving units in the same path you took as you

aimlessly circled the snack food like a directionless shark. The tread of your shoes has been all but worn away entirely, so the footprints left behind are solid

shapes undisturbed by the geometric lines you’d usually see.

Your footprints stop as soon as you step beyond the store’s threshold. In the dirt of the desert, you leave no trace. 

The deer which crosses the road in front of you is wrong. You know deer; they jump in front of incoming cars with the same reckless abandon you carry as you

walk on the edge of a building which cigarette smoke curling through your lungs and stealing your breath. The deer in front of you, on this desolate highway, has

appeared out of the darkness in the same way the ones back home do, but it is not like the beige animals who stare at the slightest movement with wide eyes and

twitching ears.

This deer does not stare. It cannot. 

It has no eyes. The wholes where dark and wet eyes should be are empty, and in their place are two dark caverns. You can see hints of a lizard in one, its snout

peeking out of the darkness and tongue flickering to taste the air. 

The deer’s antlers are wild and twisted things, spreading taller and wider than the deer itself. They are decorated with rodents and birds and reptiles, impaled on

the ends of the branches of bone. The display is similar to that of a shrike’s, but these are spoils of prey larger than those of the small songbird’s. Larger bones

hang from other parts of the antlers, suspended with thread and twine and scraps of fabric. They sway with every movement and clink together in the light

evening breeze. Fitting that macabre wind chimes herald a macabre presence. 

You step closer and instead of turning and leaping, the deer moves to meet you. Its breath ruffles the hair on the top of your head, and for a moment, you are

peaceful. It smells like petrichor. It smells like decomposing leaves and wet moss. It smells like the banks of a river after a flood. It smells like home. 

You do not reach out to run a hand through mercurial gray fur. You want to; you ache for this echo of the roots you’ve since forgotten. 

To do so would feel sacrilegious, you muse, wrong in the way it feels to break a moment of silence on a lake when the water is still enough to form a mirror.

Instead, you and the deer stand in the middle of a dry, cracked expanse of dirt until the sun rises. 

The open sky presses down upon your shoulders. There are no clouds to float it above your head, no mountains to act as pillars which the endless plane can

balance, no trees to act as a final defense for when it comes crashing down.

You will die swallowed by the horizon.