Birds called him awake where he slept on the riverbank, a veritable madhouse of caws and chirps and twittering that began with the advent of day and increased with the encroaching light. He struggled against waking as if the day held more than he could handle and he wanted no part of it but hed fallen asleep in some curious aviary walled only by the trees and when the cries grew more strident and persistent he discarded his strange dreams and and sat looking across the river. There was no commerce on it as yet and the surface was calm warped and wonky looking as distressed sheet metal. Far across in distant haze the other shore looked new and unspoiled. There was no trace of man or his works and the countryside looked like the shore of some vague and lovely world only rumored and not yet tainted by civilization. He arose and made ready to go, glancing around once like a man checking out of a hotel room checking to see if hed forgotten anything. He had not. There was nothing to take into the day save Yates and the clothes on his back. he struck up the riverbank. Curious little town built on hills. Winding precipitous sidestreets, you seemed always to be climbing or descending stairsteps. He came upon the main drag where folks were beginning to mill purposefully about then veered south through a warren of shacks clinging to hillsides with parched looking nighvirtical gardens attended with nothing he recognized and through backyards strung with clotheslines where hung ragged graylooking clothes and through front yards past silent watchdogs on tangled chains. No one seems up save some old grandmother s warming in the sun and did not acknowledge his existence. He seemed to move through her in furtive invisibility. Begarbed shacks halfpainted as if their tenants had given up halfway and thrown their brushes away, blownout automobiles deceased and stripped of their viable organs, some already buried in honeysuckle and kudzu. He moved through a land locked in silence. A place that seemed to be reeling in the aftershocks of some cataclysm that had come in the night and whos impact had not yet be assessed. He quickened his steps.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 11:15:57 +0000
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