Grey Green Blue. Repeat.

Grey stones.

The stones are round and smooth. An unbroken field of grey stones. They clack together underfoot. They are slightly different shapes and shades, but they all make the same sound.

Green trees.

A solid bank of them on the horizon, a wall of dense foliage. Deep, dark, healthy green. It looks impenetrable from here. Maybe nothing is beyond the trees.

Blue sky.

Bright and yet dark. A cold blue. The wind pours out of the sky. This is the sky of fading summer, soon to be fall. It should have clouds blotting it and racing across it, but it doesn’t today.

With every step it repeats.

Grey stones.

Green trees.

Blue sky.

The wind is cold. Bare arms are chilled and hair is whipping sideways. It roars. The stones shift a little with each footstep. They clack.

Grey, green, blue.

Roar and clack.

Repeat.

A girl and her shadow. Her shadow is the only thing that moves across the field of stone. Her feet and her shadow on the grey.

Her eyes are moving from rock to tree to sky, and her eyes are the only thing that moves over the trees. Her eyes and her thoughts on the green.

The sky betrays no movement, save for the hair flying out to her right. Constantly racing but still calm. Nothing touches her skin but the blue.

A clatter, a skid, and she is over the endless grey horizon. She is down the far side and clambering towards the river.

The river is blue, and green, and grey.

Her hands touch a rock, the rock touches the river, the rock touches the sky, the river takes the rock.

She cannot get a rock to skip more than twice. But she can skip every rock twice. This one is not round, this one is not flat. This one is perfect. They all skip twice and the river has them.

Bored of skipping rocks, she rises and retraces her steps. Up over the edge of the endless grey. The river is quiet, she cannot hear it over the wind.

Cold blue sky, yellow glaring sun, trees black in shadow, same grey stones.

There are shadows now, thrown out towards her by several thousand crouching stones. Her own shadow is being dragged along behind.

Over the clatter of stones and inside the roar of the wind, the steady thundering drum of highway traffic from somewhere ahead, among the green-black trees.

Blue sky, yellow sun, black forest, grey stones.

Roaring wind, thundering traffic, clattering stones.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Step by step across the unbroken stone fields. But it is broken. It is inherently imperfect. Green weeds. Yellow flowers. She doesn’t know their names. She doesn’t know the name of anything here.

Blue, yellow, black, grey.

Roar, thunder, clatter.

Repeat.

An end to the expanse. Brown dead grass. Brown dirt road. Brown rusted gate.

Red car.

On Airplanes

People say that airports are liminal spaces, unreal in time and place, a lawless rule and the befuddlement of the soul.

But the airport is nothing to the airplane.

Airports are still of our world, our earth. W still hold connections, no matter how tenuous, to the outside. Family, friends, radio, restaurants and taxi cabs.

But on the airplane we have no one but each other.

The rules of earth are 30,000 feet below us, and we are moving together but separate in the skies. No one cares what you do on the airplane.

Screaming children are ignored.

We share food but not names.

A hierarchy is established via seating arrangement. Not just the separation of first class and mere human beings, but that of Aisle, Window, and Center.

Aisle is both the connection to the outside and it’s gatekeeper, no one passes save with Aisle’s approval.

Window is a mystic, gazing out on cloud cities and fog oceans, a chronicler of “Did you see that?” and “look!”

Center has less to fight for than Window, and less to lose than Aisle. They are the middle class.

Then in these planes that that have a third section of seats, a full row in the Center of the plane. We are a new order. No window, no walls to lean on. A whole subsection of Aisle, Center, Center, Aisle. But we have a higher chance of survival if something goes wrong. So watch the cities pass beneath us, Window. Enjoy the view. It’s only a matter of time.

Sweater Weather

Imagine a grassy flat. The grass is yellow now, summer has drained and bleached the life from it. It is brittle and whispery under your feet.

Imagine that the hill is balding in patches, and cracked dry clay is bare before the sky. The bare patches are grey. The clouds above are white, but they look grey with the sun behind them. The sky has patches too, of brilliant, almost dark blue, but the clouds are covering most of the sky.

The wind is blowing and it is cold. Not brutally cold, but chilly. “Sweater weather,” your brain says, and then says it on repeat. “Sweater weather. Sweater weather. Sweater weather.”

Imagine the smell. The brush pile. The kind of tree, called laurel, or bay, or bay laurel. Imagine the sharp smell of those blade-shaped leaves.

The branches are long and you pile them up, taller than you, now higher than your hands above your head, now further than you can throw.

The wireless radio has some static crackling through the song, but you can hear the words clearly enough. “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose,” sings a woman’s voice. You do not know her voice. You might know the words, you aren’t sure.

The pile is too big, and the man puts on the orange helmet and the orange chaps and lifts the orange chainsaw.

Smell it now: the damp promise of the clouds. The baked earth, cooling. Leaves only just clinging to their branches, the threat of Fall, their fall, not far away. Now the roar and whine of the chainsaw, and you can smell the sawdust spraying from its racing blade.

Gasoline too, gasoline and sawdust.

Imagine the man is your father. He isn’t, but imagine he is. Imagine him cutting down through the huge pile, halving it, halving it again, compressing large branches and their large gaps into smaller sticks, the pile now only up to your waist and a little wider than it was. 

You go back to piling the wood, higher, higher, higher. The song on the radio changes. You don’t know this one either. Even with the chill winds blowing, you get warm piling wood, and so you fold up your sweatshirt and put it with some of his tools in the wheelbarrow. The woodpile grows monumentally again and is again cut down to size.

Not much more to pile up now. Soon he will have finished splitting firewood for winter, and you will have prepared a wonderfully huge bonfire.

Are you imagining it?

Are you? Good.

Good.

So am I.