David Nahm - Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

In the motel room, he tried to remember what he was going to say. He tried to remember what it was like to be a little boy. What could he say? In the mirror, he watched his lips move, but made no sound. There was someone next door he never saw.

“So after that, he wanted to go over to Western Steer. So we went and an hour became five, can you believe that, five hours and we had these Jell-O shots, or maybe we’d already had those and we just had beer, but lord, lord, lord five hours. It should have been over and she was with us the whole time, pregnant, you know, just big, just about to burst and all I could think about were the Jell-O shots and how I shouldn’t have, you know, just shouldn’t have. And then I don’t even know whose house it was we ended up at, but, you know, it didn’t matter at that point and she was just on him, riding, all night, her mouth going so fast, and I seriously thought about sleeping in a ditch or something just because at that point, when we were in the house, whoever’s house it was, I was just like, you know, ready to be done with everything, baby or no baby or whatever.”

The young couple in their first home marveled at the two raccoons in the moonlight of the backyard. The young couple could not conceive that there would ever be a time when they would not be in their house watching raccoons through the kitchen window. There had been one raccoon on the deck, eating the cat’s food, and when it registered some motion from inside the house, the young man putting his arm around his young wife, it ran down into the yard, pausing for a moment to make a sound and the second raccoon ran out of the darkness and together they trundled off. To the young couple, this moment felt as though it would exist forever, this life they had, and even when he sat by her bedside in the hospital, slipping in and out of herself, looking much changed without her teeth, he felt as though all he had to do was to rise from the chair and look out of the hospital window, steadying himself on the sill so he wouldn’t slip again, to see those two dark creatures who had long since returned to the generalized life of the Earth.

“You have to see it.”

“Wait, wait. Tell me again what you saw.”

“Listen. Okay, so I was walking through that one field behind Indian Hills, you know?”

“Yeah, where the Old Country Club is.”

“Yes, but I was past that, I cut through the field, passed the old pool, through the trees, down the hill to Clark’s Run, and I followed it for a while. I was just killing my day, right. I had on my Walkman.”

“What were you listening to?”

“DJ Screw. But wait, listen: so I walk along and I come to this one part where it gets wide and calm. It is totally quiet. Then I come around this bend and it was real quiet and that is when I saw it.” He tried to explain what he saw, but the incomprehension on his friend’s face silenced him. So they went, cutting across the same fields in the same place, but there was nothing there.

“I don’t know. Maybe I was wrong or something.”

“This is like that time you tried to get me to go into some cave you found because you said there were some clothes or something.”

“Now that, my friend, was true. I totally did. I found this cave and inside there was a little shirt and pair of pants and saddle oxfords placed on top of it like they were placed out by a mother. There were other things, too, like—”

They walked on, trudging through mud and muck. They turned a bend and saw a bull upside-down in the branches of a tree. A perfect, pristine bull, legs like columns in the air.

“Once, I fucked this girl. After we did it, we were laying there and she started to tell me about when she was a little girl visiting her grandfather’s farm. It wasn’t a big farm. He had a few cows, grew some corn. The usual. Out in the pasture there was a pond. Kidney bean shaped. That’s how she described it. Kidney bean shaped. She told me that one winter the pond froze over and a cow tried to walk out across it but the ice was thin and the cow fell through, or part way through. The hind and udders stuck up through the ice, but there wasn’t anything that her grandfather could do about it. They couldn’t go out on the ice and get it or they would fall through, so they had to wait until spring. When spring came the cows hind and udders began to grow green with moss and small white flowers. I don’t know why she told me that while we were flopped there. Her mouth smelled like cinnamon.”

The stars offered no solution.

One of the security guards at the hospital died. A young guy, just out of high school. He’d always wanted to be a police officer and he took criminal justice classes in the morning at the community college and worked the graveyard security shift, watching the halls through the night, making rounds of the rambling building on the hour. One morning, a custodian found the young man’s body sprawled on the tiles in the maternity ward.

Then, just as people were beginning to move on, one of the nurses went out on maternity leave and gave birth to a baby that everyone heard was ‘different’ though no further description was given. There was much hushed discussion of ‘the poor thing.’ All mentions of the baby’s name were followed by ‘bless its heart.’ In any case, the nurse never came back to work.

Soon after that, after the first of summer, the boy went missing and the newspaper was full and everyone had something to think about for a while.

The restaurant’s name taped to the window in sun-bleached, bubble letters. The wall behind the cash register encrusted by dusty family photos in tarnished tin frames. Card tables covered in butcher paper. Handwritten menu with Bible verses. The warm smell of frying wafted like cat hair on an updraft. Swirling tendrils of hot dog and chili and hamburger and french fries. Mouthwatering haints of unhealthy desire. The owner watched through the window, hoping the filthy woman walking toward the door, her face caked with colors, was not about to enter and ask for food like the men do sometimes, hats in hand, hairy faces downcast, playing a part. Luckily, the woman, striding in her filthy sweatpants, knees and seat stained with what the owner hoped was mud, battered backpack slung over slumping shoulder, just walked on past the window and the owner felt tension that she did not even realize she was feeling release. She turned and watched the men at the table in suits chewing and staring at the young woman waiting on another table.

“Listen, they drive by real slow. Listen, there are lights outside all night. Listen, there are wires under the ground they put. I know that: They try to take my land, they stand in my road. All twenty of them held me down. God just don’t do stuff like that. The Earth is just the Earth. Look me in the eye and tell me how them waggertails got in the bucket then?”

In that last moment, the brilliant catacombs of space, the gathering light. The girl in the purple dress is a parasol. She held out her hand, cupped, ready to catch rain. The streets were half clusters of disappearance. Half clusters of broken wives.

The girl took Leah by the hand and they crawled over the fence. Cheeks and shoulders dotted with drying salt-sweat. Flickering eyelid of a deer, the pink tongue of a toad, the mirror of sound. Beneath a pregnant galactic vista, an eternity of pauses, never more than a sheet drawn across the sun. Fallen trunks of trees, hollow and rotten and some boys that the girl met at the movie theater. Leah leaned forward and she breathed hot breath and saliva back and forth with a boy from another county while a few feet away the girl watched and laughed, having dared her. The air was in bloom with the splendid riot of the bright green cow shit that surrounded them. On the other side of the pasture, the slumping wall, dry stacks of stone and beyond that, the Old Country Club. Air licked the thin blades of dry grass. The boy hooted. Leah felt like weeping, but kept thinking of the girl watching. This or another Sunday of doing nothing but watching Hayley Mills movies in the living room while her mother slept on the couch. She never made it to the Old Country Club to read the graffiti. Never beyond even that, to the sunken stream, blocked from sight by a break of trees, crackling water full of garbage and shaded forever. Hayley Mills looked at her, but she could not hear.