David Antrobus's Blog: The Migrant Type, page 22
February 27, 2015
Frontier
Clearing Over Sideroad 106 - © David SharpeWhat drove us east from our coastal home in the late fall near got us ensnared in the mountains that winter. But we stumbled on the last clear pass with days to spare, vindicated though much depleted. Descending the lee side of that great range, scanning an impossible horizon, we accepted our reprieve with some grace.
"What now?" you said.
"We find some place and hunker down till spring, if there is a spring. We might be in the rain shadow, so the snow...
February 20, 2015
By Nectar Neglected
See him. He is the walker.
The kinked arrow of his wending takes him past the fitful sleep of murky settlements, past the stitched brows of crepuscular forests, his gaunt and stringlike frame a hauntscape for the murmurs of night guilt and uncompromising schemes.
No one has ever seen him in the glare of sunlight, and even during the darkest hours most sense him only as an inkling, like they might a brief visit by a lone black hummingbird in some forgotten back field, by nectar neglected, by nat...
February 13, 2015
American Deadbeat
Why he still drove this 1970 Dodge Charger he could never figure. Wasn't he a little old for muscle cars? Especially now. Now he had a kid an' all. Maybe 'cause he'd never much cottoned to kids, though he felt as scared and lost as one right now.
It's like the world had conspired to trap him: Podunk town, the only main industry collapsing the moment he left high school, football injury eighty-sixing his scholarship dream, prom queen high school sweetheart turning into a queen bitch, escalating...
February 6, 2015
Je Reviens
There was a moment as they climbed the logging road when Max thought they were in trouble. They had rounded another corner when Jasper hunkered in confrontation and bristled and growled with excess zeal. Max stopped and squinted, his heart jackhammering past normal exertion, eyes fixed on the twisted, gnarled stump beside the road up ahead. For that was all it was. Not a black bear. Especially not a murdered hiker. Just a storm-blasted old stump.
His released breath was all the border collie n...
January 16, 2015
Conviction
What did they say about the girl who died? That she was pretty? Delicate of face yet hardy of soul? That she sometimes lisped when excitement took her. That she was bright as a star cluster? That now and again she laughed riotously like a mule? No, they said she was a "beloved treasure." How could they mourn the death of something in which they themselves saw no life? Death itself has no meaning for a "treasure." You might as well speak of a broken clock. They are imbeciles.
She was alive and...
January 9, 2015
Spiders Not Silence
He was out of bed in the huge silent house. He found himself in one of the many living rooms, though not the one with the coal fire, the one beside the impossible kitchen built for dwarves. No, this one was chillier, yet smelled of burnt dust, of old cigarettes, and even older socks. Turned low at this hour, the single electric fire with its three bars could not hold back the spectre of the damp.
He lay full length on a couch, not leather but cold plastic, and felt one of its many thin cracks...
January 2, 2015
Cormorants
A rottweiler behind chainlink stands and swings its boneknuckle head while the couple quarrel by the dismal predawn roadside.
"We're heading back east," she says.
He kicks at the dirt. "Why do you say back east? You ain't never bin there."
"It's just a way of sayin it. Besides, I suffer from lostalgia."
"Huh?"
"Never mind. You won't get it."
"The fuck? Fuck you. Well hell, I'm mostly through talking anyways."
The dog watches from its shadows and emits a low growl every time Dwight glances its way.
"S...
December 26, 2014
Blind
He woke under a sky that was a puzzlement. No immense swan soared across that black night, no northern sigil of a messianic creed, nor even the great why of Cassiopeia. Orion's flapping sheet had sailed on or, worse, was yet to sail.
He wished for clouds. Ghost-white shoals to make of the night a cataract to blind itself to the strangeness of this antic new void.
On the iron desert pan writhed a manshape of sorts, wreathed in a bloodcaul, seeming to search for purchase in a world without curren...
December 19, 2014
Delivered
There are a thousand ways to walk a road. I picked this one. Judge me when I reach the end of mine.
There's a universe in every abandoned lot, every weed patch, all derelict things. Go deeper. Go deeper.
We dreamed of a universe that dreamed us first.
She laughs at me when I cry. And rightly so. This is wretched comedy not noble tragedy, slapstick not cataclysm. I should know better. Like hers, my road is crooked, has wound through thorns, thickets, prairies, caverns, and starfields. We have see...
December 12, 2014
Sorrowing
Dusk comes with a slow dimming, as if the world's sorrowing.
The people move delicately, their motions precise and penumbral, campfire noises distinct. The world seems formed from grainy points that swirl like quenched lightning bugs. The cough of a burro. A deterrent growl. Cast iron pots. The reek of smoke. Human warmth.
The girl, forgotten a moment, rests on a low wall on the edge of the settlement, waiting for the light to leave the violent rim of the sky. Through the trees, the squat sun s...
