By D.E. Kern
It materialized in Chadron, Nebraska, six-hundred miles from where we started,
eleven hundred more from where we needed to go. It created itself from scraps
in a convenience store parking lot, the dust and rocks and airborne tufts of hair
from who knows what and the dried and grimy shit from a million chickens not
to mention the pocket lint from as many travelers just like us. It rolled toward me
like a tumbleweed with teeth, spitting them into the bare skin of arms and legs—
the evangelist of a Gnostic gospel—so I shielded myself lest a wayward stone leave
me vision-less or worse. I had seen the final destination of the hindered in the wild,
spread out in a roadside catalog crossing Minnesota and two Dakotas with four legs
splayed toward the unpredictable summer sky, waiting to be parted out by all manner
of scavengers, neighbors turned opportunists on circumstance’s dime. My wife came
out the store and turned her back on the tiny storm. This was our third year, and she
had grown adept at protecting herself. We had miles on us, the highway variety with
the throttle and window opened up, her nails navigating the palm of my hand, and
the sort with us lurching through bumper-to-bumper frustration as we circled the block
to correct our errant turns. Long distances seemed to heal us—maybe it was how music
works its way into our deepest wounds—or the way they fed my wanderlust, a propensity
for gazing at an Alpine meadow and thinking it was close enough to reach by foot. Yes,
we survived this maelstrom, every damn thing it threw at us, because it was the best of
just two choices. Troubles are like bad cards. Shuffle through and think of the fifty-one
ways things are likely to be better—or simply different. I hit the gas as the Devil succumbed
to inertia somewhere in that tiny lot. My wife was unharmed. My legs stung as a warm
beck of blood reminded me I was alive. We pressed our way into the relative comfort
of state highway traffic. A perfect sky, like a bowl of ocean water suspended over us all,
laughed like a child at gravity. Still, on its western edge, it nursed a calamitous campfire.
D. E. Kern earned his MFA from San José State University in 2011. His poetry and fiction have appeared in the Appalachian Heritage, Limestone, The Owen Wister Review, Negative Capability, and Sierra Nevada Review, among others. He teaches English at Arizona Western College.