August

Fade in: America. Widespread lands, the kind that tickle your heart and remind you where you grew into being. The room falls silent, and cold, but the characters sweat through the humid summer, you freeze. When at last it fades out, over receding Midwestern highway, over unending spaces and suggestive mile markers, my limbs tremble.

Oh, but how much darkness lies in our veins. How the blood runs dark, and thick, and poisonous within them and moves in its viscous trails along the limbs of the family tree. You end the night with tears, but they are not selfless sorrows for the characters you believed; they are self-centered cries for a family you could never heal. Not at six, not at thirteen, not at thirty. All you know is you gave up one day and decided that running was the only way to keep your head above water. You've been breathing well for years, but then, you never even get your feet wet.

We drowned the moment in beer, afterward, White Horse on a Saturday night and you allow yourself to resent the 20-year-old drunks and their ways. It is easier than resenting the unanswered questions within. There is no solving this, you hear a voice say. Why create a family when all you know of it is pain? We get too drunk, in the end, I half-run down Hudson to the warmth of my little room in the village.

See the plains spread out around my rolling list of credits.

Deny every word on the page.