David Nahm - Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

Leah went to play the piano, but couldn’t bear to hear the sound it made. She heard the girl upstairs walking around, she stopped playing the piano, thought about what she’d written earlier, played a chord, listened for footsteps.

The girl’s grandparents were doting lumps in synthetic fibers. The girl grabbed Leah’s hair and told her that she thought it was terribly cute and that she wanted to cut hers all off as well, but she never did. Leah liked that the girl did not look at her the way that nearly everyone else in Crow Station did. To the girl, Leah was just another friend, a temporary summer friend. Another nobody. Yet, something in Leah made her want to tell the girl all about Jacob, about the reflecting pool, about the boys, about what Leah heard, the voice calling her name, what she never told anyone. Leah wanted to shout it at the girl as the girl was stuffing her pockets with candy and coolly walking out of a gas station. Leah wanted to crack the cement in her throat and scream, I have secrets too and they are worse than a pocket of candy .

That woman woke before the purple night became blue, beneath the bones of branches black and cross-hatched, the damp ground was soft. Quills of unmown grass. That stream ran. The stream that ran through town. That ran from the top edge of town down through and out the bottom. The brown water gushing along moss-browned rock, sun-bleached bottles, crushed cans, overturned clothes washers, avocado green, rusted out, worn, crumbling, washing away in red rivulets in the brown water of the stream. Lifting up, crackling awake, jeans soft with dew, palms pressed out into earth, rising again. A few bare roots, her bag leaned against a trunk. Folded in folds of roots. She crouched at the stream’s slippery lip, leaned. Hands cupped. Two pools. A face shivering. She shivered. Several faces. For a moment she could see herself without knowing herself, raw and bare, and she licked dried sweat from the corner of her mouth. Hers in the pools and the wriggling of muscles in her back. The confusion of birds’ throats. Water waking up. Pulled from a plastic container her makeup and a mirror and put on her face. Cars passing on the street just beyond the break of trees. Wading out, toe and then ankle and then shin deep, but no more, for a moment bare, stretching bare arms and bare chest and bare legs with aching knees and crouching again as the brown water buffets her brown body and splashing water and fresh gashes and cracked skin and then into gray jeans and sweatshirt and everything else into her bag, just in case and up the embankment by the overpass where the cars pass. Crow Station Antique Mall . Shuttered. Cluttered. Dusty window and faded Confederate Flag. No Trespassing Property of the CSA . Wooden cross and brass cross and praying porcelain figurine. A school bus half empty with children from the Christian Home and their faces grace the panes as the yellow beast bustles past, gawking down as she soldiers along. A dip and over a curb and down beneath the viaduct to cross the tracks to the abandoned train station. Bricks in crumbling green and red with loose mortar. Men along the lip of the loading dock of the candy warehouse, taking a break watch her wander. Spit from soft chin. Chuck chuck. Rumble above and the walls creeping with fading names. Slices of howls, howls through her sweatshirt. Howls through her skin. Howls settling in. A group of men clamored her face, but she pulled out of the howl and kept along the sidewalk by the old house cut to pieces with the cluster of plastic things along the dirt yard. A man from church her mother brought to talk to her had howled out from within her and the man her mother married had howled and she kept those too, but the first one had been so distant, its own voice was lost in the chorus of them howling. The old buildings, the paths of the college, the young milling and darting. The young in tangles. Clumps. Weaving. A girl’s French braid amiss, strands threaded wrong, hairs pulled apart, out and tangled. The braid ruined from being rolled on. The arms in legs in arms and arms. The lithe writing. Forgetting. Cars and cars and they looked but those that passed on foot found interest in the gutter. She stomped and stepped and waited at the crosswalks to pass. The passing booms of bass. The petals of treble. The muffled words. The courthouse looms behind the garden. The bell tower. Hands. Long black. Nearly pointing to God. She sat on a bench and rested and watched the people pass. Men in suits. Women in suits. Men in pickup trucks and white vans. Women in skirts and sweatpants with children gaggling along. Young women with long hair and long denim skirts, hair covered. Young men with long necks angled awkwardly. Chins covered in black or blond hair. Lips with downy coating. Goslings. Young women in tight jeans, clutching curves of hips. In yellow jackets with fur-lined hoods. The young with hands to their faces, speaking into their palms. Men and women looking down into their palms. Looking down and flitting fingers skating along. A woman in a floral dress floated with two men behind her. One in a suit. The other in overalls. Comb-over, bearded. The woman looked ahead, but her eyes were elsewhere. She floated. The men trudged. The man in the suit slumped and shivered. The man in the overalls rolled. They went in and by the fountain where the town’s children’s pennies constellated, a young man in a black shirt and black jeans set up an empty bucket and a small amplifier and began to sound the Word. And then along the street, Romans on sign and pillars of marble. BAPTIST CHVRCH. Porticos. Verandas. Ivy. Maple. Holly. Oak. Elm. Blue. White. Brick and brick. Bones of the Earth. The smell of woodstove and exhaust. Sedans pulling from drive, pausing to look at the passing cars and sliding out into the stream and they paused to watch as she stood, waiting for them to be gone, the men with moustaches and without. Bending over. Craning. Growling in the rustling dark. The dark quailed. Had the howling been there at birth or had it been left in her. She was the dark. When there was nothing, it was just her. Weak billowing clouds. Gray sky rumpled like a quilt cast aside. The street ended at the gates of the cemetery.

She listened to the voices as she passed. The voices were on the wind and she listened. Leah Shepherd, on her way to work, sees the woman entering the wrought iron gates of the cemetery. What was that woman’s morning like? Did she live in the woods? Leah never went into the cemetery.

A cluster of nine girls stand in variations on a single theme: waiting. Green frocks and purple leggings and jeans and white blouses and hair pulled up, let down, tied, bound, and askew. Their heads bowed, looking down into glowing hands. In front of the new All You Can Eat Buffet, a Mercury driven by a melted old man lets out three old women and then rolls along looking for a parking spot. By the double doors to the buffet, they await his return, clutch purses to ample chests. Point fingers at one another. A young man in red shirt and red pants darts from the office supply store toward his car. Eyes heavy-lidded and hair a black nest. Stocking flat-screens and video game consoles all day and now a break, fingers fumbling for keys so he can sit in his car and pull from beneath the seat one perfect joint.

Black metal blast beats bleat beneath guitars. A major to F sharp minor, tremolo picked. Teenage car songs, teenage love songs, teenage death songs, teenage sex songs. A major to F sharp minor, again and again, no matter how blasted the beats, or how guttural the howls. Pop songs for sad youth. Nearly hitting the woman standing by the guardrail, looking down the embankment.

An anvil crests the trees, late afternoon’s black curtain, and as the rain comes, the girls are gone, the women are gone, the songs have stopped.