The Other
This story was published in Devil’s Lake
*** Nominated for Best of the Net by the Editors
In the tent beneath the left lung of the body, not far from the heart. that’s where he huddles, tending a cold fire of river rock and cedar chips. The skeletal figures of trees hide a river that rushes past camp, travels the spine, and vanishes from what he dreams, in the pockets of his dreams, into a city of foreclosures, houses dark like the jackets of blackbirds, leaves soundless in the night. If a person is quiet enough, that person will hear the river. And if a person can think, that person will consider its water, salty and brackish, and how the fish he’d spear if he carried spears would taste of coal and ash, black slippery thugs of muscle. And if a person could know, that person wouldn’t wonder why the fire is always cold. Because to light one would burn the person, burn her strong as oil and tar, rising up her bones in a scherzo of fire. And he, the Other, left no choice but to flee, run sideways from the lung, past the trees, plummet into the river—fire reflecting corinthians on the surface and on the black bodies beneath, thugs of coal, thugs of ash—and sink.