Washington Ouija
When he left he saw himself from the sky, his head in its visored white cap juttering from one spot on a map to another like the planchette of a Ouija board.
T. Sulfur air, insane raining slopes. He found a job, lost it, scrounged a ticket at the bus depot—the waiting a seance of cracked, molded orange plastic seats—and hunkered back over the Cascades to the place that had never seemed to spell home.
W. Wide flat streets, peeling facades, dry clods of scabbed August. Wheat, cattle, dust, sentinels of silo and poplar. He filched some stuff from his mom's, got cash from a pawn shop and hopped a plane. Oval window's view of his clouded fortune.
B. The rectangle's far northwest corner. Jeweled aqua, ferries, old brick. He tried shucking oysters, sliding them down his throat, a semester of state college. The planchette bumped, slithered away, pointing with its upside-down heart shape towards NO.
F. The name bestowed on the beater he bought: Eff-all, a salt-rusted Caddie. He drove away from the college town without a plan, northern mist in the rear window. F's wheel turned in the direction that still pulled his fingers like a magnet.
E. After snow in the passes, he found a job inventorying groceries, sleeping days on F's gnarled back seat in every IGA parking lot in G, O and S counties. He woke at MOON: half smile nestled in the shade of NO's corner, to count boxes of cereal, hemorrhoid cream and canned beans until SUN: top left, a ray-encircled, mustachioed smirk. When working the adding machine he pinched his cap's brim in the middle to wipe sweat off his grimed thumb and index; the cap's color came to resemble the vanilla of faded Bakelite.
Grand C. He woke one afternoon, car shuddering, its iced window blurring the crimson of an under-manager's jacket. Scrub bushes, rock hills, silver crescent of dammed water beyond. He stayed for a time in the under-manager' claustrophobic oil heat and kindness, snacking on instant mashed potatoes, until a warm spell when he hefted his backpack. He thought of the largest two words on the board, under the numbers, bottom center, that always signaled the disappearance of the spirit. Drove F away through flat slush.
From above, he watched himself creep forward, back, diagonally, the fingers at his edges trying desperately—as his beard grayed and the MIRACLE ORACLE slogan swirled around the central trademark—to understand the message.
***
Some of the kids he'd known from W had gone on to college, but few ever left the state. Hell, most of them didn't leave town. Acid rock, malt liquor, tagging the old school bus ditched off 261. Occasionally even getting to the Little P, sleeping rough to the laughter of the waterfall's roar, leaving a scrawl of wrappers and youth. Fads like pet rocks or pretending to get advice from a board game. Later, drag racing and finger fucking, part time at the 7-11. Those who did leave got called eggheads, slickers, sell-outs, or else it was said darkly, "they'll be back," or, "any guy thinks he needs to leave never belonged in W in the first place."
***
P. Cowtown. Near the state's east edge. The spring thaw revealed dappled green hills and mooing. F, in a cloud of steam, gave up the ghost; he heard about his mom the same day. Hitched west, over the pass in a 16-wheeler next to a bald trucker whose ear looked like ripped leather. Made it to the Pacific, 29 in his pocket, age YES answers NO.
A. barely a season on the sanitation crew of a cranberry processing plant; one afternoon he mistook the coastline at sunset for a wave of gold wheat field, pined for the SUN drying his sweat. The huge W fronting his high school.
5. For a ride in the back of a pickup. At Lake C he got sidetracked by houseboats, T-shirt shops. Stole a motorcycle some goof left running outside a year-round X-Mas store. Whooshed past slat fences. Painful 95 blue, heading towards his hometown, thinking was that upside-down heart with its mystical clear plastic eye ever going to spell anything that meant more than this.
W. Grabbing the key from the realtor, he ditched the bike and met in the street—just like he had never left—a kid from W High. They had YES for a bottle of J so they drank. Walking erratic in the middle of the road, they turned, turned again, and came to the house he'd grown up in.
5673. He and the kid leaned their backs against the front door. State Street. Sundown splashed orange against both their faces, a hawk swooped. They passed the J back and forth. The front yard choked with dandelion and thistle. When he was younger he'd swiped a racket, the weeds' seed pods bursting and scattering in all directions, desired nowhere and yet still existing, mysteriously somehow essential.
"You ever wanna, like, GO?" The kid spelled it out. "I mean, really G. O.?"
He remembered, then, that he'd never liked the kid, always thought him too earnest. That every year W High became smaller, although the number of students stayed the same. That he'd despised those content to stay when they no longer had to, how they seemed to have no curiosity, no wonder, no desire to for the game of beyond.
GOOD BYE. He unlocked the front door, breathed the familiar brown smell of the house. Couch, drawers, socks, scattered coins, a bent television antenna, some quilts. Kraft dinner, Comet, the cracked brown Ouija box on a shelf, the kid still passed out on the porch. He took off the dingy white cap, squashed it onto the kid's head. Saw that he wasn't a kid at all, but gray-haired, pot-bellied, and motherless like himself. "Get lost," he said, a real MIRACLE ORACLE. The only spirit his need, the only state, his own motion.
Kimm Brockett Stammen's writings have appeared or are forthcoming in CARVE, The Greensboro Review, Pembroke Magazine, Prime Number Magazine, Crack the Spine and many others. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart and Best Short Fiction anthologies, and she won 2nd Place in Typehouse's 2019 Fiction Contest. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, KY.