David Nahm - Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

The music was barely audible over the babble. Everything that exists now has always existed in one shape or another: This line of people, this snow falling, this light from flickering bulbs overhead. All have always been and would always be, forever and ever, no matter what Leah hoped. The throng around her closed in and no one moved and she felt too warm and too close and too tired and could see the glitter of the snow outside, but she felt calm. He isn’t Jacob , she thought, Jacob is gone , and she felt as though her chest was so heavy that she was being pulled to the floor, to the center of the Earth, but even as she thought this, she knew, Jacob still existed somewhere. She knew that those blips and pulses of energy that made up his body still existed somewhere in some form. They had existed since that one flickering instant when all creation rushed forth, a hurried breath, the first exhalation, the original unwinding. Those blips and pulses, spirals of sound and light, waves upon waves, points with no dimension, sighing about out amongst the clicks and whirrs and shimmers and howls, slowly cooling and sowing bits and pieces that would come together at various points as sand and light waves and Doric columns, rainwater in a culvert or white hair falling into a white sink, across all creation, through all history, of the Earth and elsewhere, to that small town to become her brother and they still existed out beyond the light of the parking lot, in one form or another, alive or dead, whole or disincorporated into nothing but dust and ash, but existing still, out in that very snow storm and she was part of that body and that blood and stood still beneath those harsh lights waiting for the man who claimed Jacob’s name, who pulled Jacob’s skin over his skin, to arrive and take all that she had. The first Word of all creation, carried across all time to a little boy in a tie standing outside alone, suddenly too far from home, the crumbling dust of stars, the silent reaches of space, the empty streets, the old homes covered in ivy, windows shattered, doors locked, the boy calling her name, calling, Leah! Leah! Help me. Leeeeah! She could hear him, his high voice outside as she sat inside the house, arms folded, angry and refusing to play along, Jacob yelling for his sister. All matter had conspired to stage that moment and Leah had refused it. How often had she listened to the night for that voice, to hear it one more time so that she could run to the window and call out to it, to run outside and see him and save him, this thing that she could never tell her parents, that she could never tell anyone. The vibrations of that voice, weakening and dissipating and eventually nothing more than the whisper of dry leaves on dead branches.

She was sobbing outside of the grocery store as the parking lot emptied. She stood in the bare light of the grocery store’s sign, the leering head of a pig. Leah got into her blue VW and drove into the night and white wind eddied around her. But she could not wait forever. The snow was covering the road and the shoulders were already lost in the falling white. The snow flickered in the headlights as she sped down a country road and she thought about her parents’ house, how it had looked when she was young with no furniture in the living room except for one wing-back chair, gold and purple, and how she and Jacob would play in that vast empty space, pretending it was their own private planet. The black night and the white sky and the lines of light writhing. The room mostly just held the shapes of the sun cut by the window panes as they moved across the floor, mutating from rhombus to rectangle to rhombus, which they would sit on when winded from wrestling. The black night and the white sky and the muffled growling of the tires. The sky was clear and poured in through the windows like water from a cracked aquarium, fizzy streams eager to escape from one world to the next. Bathed in light the children felt slower than anything. Their toys scattered and Jacob holding the toy car she’d given him for Christmas. The one he insisted on sleeping with. The black night and the white sky, the sky white from the gleaming falling the headlights breathing them aflame and the lights pulling up behind her. She would hide the car to make him cry and pretend she found it and he would throw his arms around his big sister and thank her. The cold on her neck turning for a moment and hearing him and seeing him disappear back into the dark night and the white sky writhing around her and the razor tongue of the evening wet islands of falling sky on her cheek and the radio still crooned old love careless love lost love gone honey gone dear gone forever they can be like we are. Leah! Leeeah! Where is my car!

Lost in the noise of the falling snow, Leah lost control of her car. It fishtailed as she overcorrected, terribly present in the moment, aware of what was happening and then the car left the road, she could feel that there was nothing around her for a moment, and then came to rest, nose down, in a ditch on the side of the road. She listened for a moment, felt a dull pain in her side where her seatbelt caught her and turned the car’s engine off. It clicked as it cooled. She groaned. After several minutes, she regained her breath and then reached into her pocket for her cell phone. Her pocket was empty. She leaned forward and scanned the floor of the car, but didn’t see it. She got out, tried to get on her hands and knees and search the floor of the car, but her side hurt too much. She was panting. Her lips were wet. She touched them and her fingers were daubed in blood.

A car was coming. She saw the rays of the headlights crowning the crest of the ditch. She walked up to the road and saw the car coming and waved for it to stop. It came to a halt a dozen yards from where she stood. It sat there idling for a moment and then the driver got out and walked around the front of the car. Leah called out to him, thanked him for stopping. He stood in the beams of the headlights and Leah could not discern his features beyond that he was balding and wearing thick-framed glasses. The headlights lit wild strands around his ears. She called to him again but he didn’t respond. The man was singing to himself, softly, Leah was certain of it, or perhaps his stereo was still on in his car, and though Leah could hear what he was singing, felt a glimmer of recognition in the melody, she could not place it, but she thought of Jacob lying in his bed, counting the cars that passed the bedroom that they shared and she called out to him.

“Hello?” The man didn’t move. The melody and his lights like the lights across the cracks of their ceiling. “I’ve had an accident.” The melody and the light and something inside of her unwound and her hands were trembling. They remained like this for a moment, the man’s shadow long between them, a faint song, Leah feeling more and more pain creeping through her body, the melody just out of reach, his shadow like a carpet laid out before her. He stood there and she could see his chest moving slightly with each breath in to wide cage of his chest and she felt faint for a moment and her body swam.

With a jolt she was aware that she’d become lost in some long thought, but abruptly felt sharp-edged and alert. She looked at the man. He’d taken a few steps, closing the gap between them. His hands were behind his back. He’d stopped singing. The music was gone. There was only the sound of his engine idling and nothing else. She could see nothing beyond the horizon of his headlights. All that existed were these few feet of gravel shoulder buried in new snow, the streaks of snow falling between them, tiny fires in the highbeams, and his shadow at the center of it. She took a step toward him, her pain gone, her body no longer trembling. As she moved toward him, he retreated, moving back to the side of his car. She called to him again, her voice rough and cracked. “What do you want?” A salt crowned crest rose in her and she repeated her question, a warm rush of blood in her throat. The blood and grime felt filthy on her hands. She could feel the drying smears on her face. She tried to wipe it off of her face with the back of her hand, but only succeeded in making her skin more aware of it. Something told her that her back hurt, that it wanted to bend, but she couldn’t feel it. She stood straight and breathed the cold air’s metal twang and started to laugh. It felt as though her mouth was wrenched wide open and that she was crawling out of herself. Her fingers curled into fists because they could think of no other shape.