Tell me a story

           A low pressure system was pushing an array of clouds shaped like whatever children dreamed them to be across a bruised sky. If you looked up, which city dwellers rarely care to do, the business of living in a city is most decidedly unrelated to the skies, you would have seen a flock of geese in a fairly uniform V, flying somewhere else for the winter. If you were brave enough to dream, it was easy to picture the geese angling down through gentle breezes to rest in some rice paddy, flooded by winter rain. And in that paddy, if you continued to use your imagination, which I’ll grant you is a largely useless thing to do, a viscera of purple light might be reflected in that darkening water where the geese aren’t swimming or shaking the water from their backs. The foothills are in the distance, golden where the sun still shines, ravines lined scraggly looking trees, oaks or junipers.

            In the valley, near where the geese are shaking water from their backs, the thin line of the highway travels straight, and an array of cars, flick on their headlights and turn on their wipers to brush away the bugs that congregate near the fields, only to die upon the windshields of the cars that pass by. Are the drivers lonely? I don’t know. I know only that they are driving across a thin strip of highway into the loneliest and loveliest part of the evening, just after the sun has gone down, but the vestigial light still gives a brief tour of one more failed day’s work.

            I don’t live there anymore. Nor do the people about whom this story is actually written. They say that when you leave a place behind, you carry it in your bones, but we all know that is not true. You carry it in your mind, in your failing and unreliable mind, along with the other fragments and ephemera, like what washes up on shore at the beach, treasures only if a child finds them, or if the light strikes them and they glitter.

            The low pressure system pushed the clouds into the sky and by nightfall, the stars were obscured. Would God have moved the clouds to make his promise to Abraham, or did he wait until it was clear? What does the answer say about the nature of Divinity? These are the sort of questions that a city dweller might ask in lieu of looking up at the sky.

            He’d been at the library all morning reading an assignment on the nature of reality as constructed through the prism of Wittgenstein’s early theories about language, later redacted. Descartes was a cheater, slipping the I in before the second statement, which is really quite easy to ignore. Wittgenstein was a bit trickier, because yes, okay, if one’s being honest, it is possible to see that there is no such thing as a tree. But rather, that language constructs the idea of a tree, thus making it a tree. Why couldn’t the root systems be something entirely different? Well, because they belong to a tree. Theories, like many pretty people, had the bad habit of being interesting only for the first few minutes.

            Elsewhere, the real world had been trundling along, like a freight train through some endless tunnel. As a child, he’d always held his breath when his family’s van had traveled through a tunnel. Once, just north of the Bay, he remembered holding his breath for too long and passing out in the back seat. He’d awakened, a few moment later, to bright sunlight skittering off the water, dazzling him, awakening him back to life.