David Nahm - Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

Her palms and fingers were pink. Her fingernails black crescents. Broken rock’s jutting chins swaddled in lichens and small plants. Pale yellow, yellow-green, green-brown. Roots knobbed and gnarled. Dipped and rose, rocks and mud. Dead leaves — red and orange. The nothing made a sound. Nothing scurried about at the slap of her soft shoes. The trees crowded out the dimming rays of the white sun. She walked by the stream. She walked past the last turn of the stream, and kept walking, beyond where there was a path. Something red fluttered in the distance.

Leah saw a table. It was round and covered in a bright blue cloth.

The quaking of spring wriggling out of winter clouds black draped cracks of purple light quivering up from the ground power-out houses dead in the eyes and after the trembling stopped she drove through her neighborhood in her blue car to see uprooted trees and tatters of green leaves littered across wet pavement a dead crow and she killed the headlights for a moment and was in complete darkness.

The next night she stayed up until dawn but nothing happened worth staying up for, a new sun born above backlit firs but it was a faraway thing.

The light that comes through high windows is different than any other kind of light and it reaches through an empty room.

The hunter green Jeep was nearly black parked at the edge of the gravel. It was deep night and below the bending branches of the bare trees, the starless sky was meaningless and void, in her blue car, Leah cruising slowly along the country road, following bending fences and falling rock walls. It had passed into being Sunday at some point. The clock in the dashboard suggested an hour that was wrong and had been wrong for years.

She coughed, took a sip of the soda she held between her legs and felt a sudden caul of exhaustion. She passed the spot with the Jeep twice, parked at the edge of the woods. A small, soft night.

In her blue Bug, Leah Shepherd circumnavigated Crow Station at night. Cassette in cassette deck, she pulled from the parking lot of the apartment complex out onto the empty street. An empty world. Streets lit by streetlamps, perfect puddles of pink light periodic in the still darkness of an autumn night. And then the church and the gate to the cemetery and the college and the viaduct and the train tracks and the Christian Children’s Home and the county school and then the bypass. She sat at a red light, bathed in red light, listening to the engine idle and the cassette rewind. When she was at home, when she was at work, even in her memories, she was what she’d always been, this daughter, this sister, this woman. Only in her car in the blank hours, in the empty streets of the dark county, could she be some other thing. Or nothing. This humming barrow, shrouded in the endless looping of the cassette tapes of her favorite songs, popular songs purchased from mail-order companies.

She turned off of the bypass and took a route along a twisting road into the heart of the county. In the dark, her headlights illuminated the fences of pastures and they flickered by in the corner of her eyes. The world that existed was only the two protrusions of light along the gray blacktop. She passed obscure pull-offs, gravel spots by bushes or down by the lake. Sometimes there were cars parked in these places, teenage couples seeking refuge from prying eyes of over-protective parents. Sometimes, two or three cars, parked with plenty of space between, the only lights those that glimmer from inside the obscured windows. Sometimes a car is parked and she could see someone standing alone in the dark, leaning against the black trunk of a black tree, the only light, a carbuncle smoldering at face-level and a hand disappearing into the dark. How did she look to this person? Was she just another figure in the dark? Another sliver of shadow? And then by some magic, her winding and weaving would lead her back again to the bright edge of Crow Station. Its pink reflection against the sky, the inside of an eyelid.

Leah pulled into the parking lot of a gas station and fished enough change from the console to purchase a bottle of water. As she came out, she noticed an orange car pull in. Leah slipped into her seat, but didn’t start the car. She watched a young woman park at a pump, fill the gas tank, standing still as the pump’s meter flew and then walk in, slowly, through the brightness, into the even brighter of the small market, to pay, face indistinct in the light, hair short, small hoop earrings glinting. Watching this woman, Leah sipped cold sips that made her teeth ache. Her still warm car tick tick tick ed as it cooled in the cold air. The young woman came out, got in her car, and drove off. Leah followed.

Through the middle of town, heading north. The lights were green. The streetlamps vanished ahead of the orange car in one point, some distant end of town. Past the churches and grocery stores on the north end of town and the country club and over the old blue bridge that crossed the lake, into the dark of the county again. She kept her distance. It wasn’t difficult to follow. There wasn’t anyone else on the road. Leah sang along with the cassette. The road wound and there was no light other than the headlights of the cars. She would lose it around a corner, but on a straight away see its distant red signature. Where the trees did not overhang the road, the moon granted the void around her some depth.

The orange car turned right onto a thin gravel drive. The trees were close and indistinct. Leah turned off her headlamps. She could see the taillights ahead and the partial moon distinguished gravel and grass. The orange car stopped in front of a small house, a small yard cut from the thick woods around it. She stopped her car at the same time, back in the trees, in the deep shadow, but with the house and orange car in full view. The car’s headlights set the small front porch of a ranch house with white vinyl siding aglow. The front door of the house opened and a man came out. Middle aged, perhaps late thirties. It was dark and the bright headlights against his face washed out his features, so it was impossible to tell what he looked like beyond the fact that he had short hair, a T-shirt and jeans on. The car’s lights went off and the young woman got out. She trotted up to the steps and he stepped down. They embraced, kissed. She handed him a plastic bag and he held the door open for her.

The night was blue. The sky and air and trees and gravel were all blue black. The only other color was the one window of the house that was on — the warm light inside was yellow. From the car, she could see into a small living room. Watched them cross the room, speaking to each other. The cassette flipped sides. They were gone for a few moments, in the kitchen putting whatever was in the bag away. Then they were back. They held each other again and stood there, her head coming to his chin. As she watched them, she could still not see the young woman’s face. Even when she was turned toward the window, it was too indistinct. She wore a blue University of Kentucky sweatshirt that was baggy but she could see the outline of her breasts underneath. She wore dark jeans. She stretched her legs and feet to reach the man to kiss him again. He had thick legs and waist — probably a former high school football player. Probably didn’t get a scholarship to go to one of the big schools. Took some classes at the community college and helps his father out with his painting business. The young man was handsome — his hair tousled and his face open and pleasant. He already had lines around his face from smiling. They just stood there in their living room, holding each other, not speaking or moving, not even swaying. Still. And she watched until with a staccato kiss they released and walked out of view. Leah flushed, thinking about how this young couple would never have access to this part of their life, to Leah watching them kiss. In some far off year, when they were old and reminiscing, they would remember those young days when they lived out in the country, in the woods, in that little house and how they would kiss and hold one another and strip each other naked and roll around free from everything, and they would never know that along the edge of these memories Leah sat, just out of view, her face bathed in the little light that came from the dashboard.