Summer Cold Front
The two moons of our headlights focus ahead on the warm summer highway, one we've never traveled. In an unmarked curve, beams of the full eye above hang like icicles as we come to the only house where snow is falling, the lawn is white, and the roof is buried nearly to the chimney top. Nothing but shadows drift across this freezing place.
An optical illusion, I say. The chimney breathes not a smoke signal or spark to show that someone is tending fire.
We slow down but keep idling homeward where ours is the only sweating house, where our porch light burns darkness and cold away, where windows are closed to heat waves and freezes, yet even conditioned air is always near the boiling point, and there is a draft with fingers of ice.
Here in our car slowed by a sudden freeze in an alien neighborhood, a single puff rises from the snowcapped chimney as if someone has given up the ghost. We look at one another and get homesick.
You who have never been cold turn your head and shiver, turn off the air conditioner, glance back at the snow light drifting further behind us, and sigh: Who chooses to live and die in bitter cold? Maybe they can't take the heat.
I break out in cold sweat, see white flakes of light coming down in the direction of home. Even ice can burn, I recall, stepping on the gas, changing the weather.
An Idle Heart
Ex-Captain Solo, a simple man, wakes up with a complicated problem. He passed out at the bottom of the bottle last night, but this problem is a pain he has never felt before. It aches from a motion that seems to be coming in like the tide──strange, because he knows all about headaches, hangovers, and even the pain from stupor sleep on the deck in his underwear beneath the sun for hours.
He’s always controlled pain by ignoring whoever caused it. Somehow he cannot turn his back on this one like all the heartaches that he either slept off or drank to sleep, anonymous like the way he preferred to talk through doors or give the silent treatment to his friendless life. No, this is a hard knot that hurts in all directions and everywhere at once, a knot no sailor can untie. It is tight as a rope that seems to be pulling him somewhere and holding him back at the same time, though he hasn’t moved from his bunk today. He hasn’t checked to see if he’s gone off course, but itwouldn’t matter since the boat engine died months ago and left him to the will of the currents in a ghost ship crewless and all alone—but not lonely, he says, the way he’s always wanted it. His first mate went overboard, walked the plank long ago into faceless memory.
This new nagging problem makes a sound, sometimes like a botswain’s whistle, sometimes like a ship’s mast creaking. If only it had a shadow, so he could see what shape it’s in without touching what made it. It can’t be changes he’s made: Nothing is different in his little cabin; hehasn’t cleaned or moved anything. There is so much trash and leftover plates and bottles lying around that nothing could move if it wanted to. It’s not a stowaway rat rustling around this undergrowth either. He hates rats and is pretty sure he’s clubbed them all.
He’s hoping this problem will go away, so he won’t have to get up, because he’s seen enough ups and downs of the sea and sun for a lifetime. There comes a point where sunrise and sunset look the same. But in these dead waters, it’s looking now like only another hurricane could wash his troubles away, or maybe just pour saltwater on his wounds. If only he had the youth and skills of a young boatswain now, he’d outsail all troubles of the world, keeping the sun at high noon, using his own arms as oars if he had to, instead of knotting them up around his chest. If only he could win back his navy stripes and win the battles at sea again. If only he were that young man whose looks could always kill. Now all he has is this problem and the whistle of wind in empty rum bottles.
Silence isn’t supposed to be loud and feel tighter and tighter, almost at his throat. Something is guilty of disturbing the peace: His heart makes a cracking noise; his back moans like a shipwreck, but these are not the sounds he cannot abide. The one that bothers him is seductress, silence that is painful and long lost at sea, yet whispers now like a distant wave beneath where the North Star should be. Maybe it’s just frayed nerves, not the frayed rope I’m at the end of, he jokes to the helm tied too tight to turn. And then the sound of crashing waves washing in-out, in- out, leaving behind a deafening silence that finally drops its cold anchor.
The sound of a heart that’s stopped beating. The sound of the ocean in its shell.
The Death of Stuporman
I dream in black and white newspaper columns of a citizen who has no known influence but dies under lots of it in the shade of two staggering pines while sleeping in his flea-market hammock with 11 empty bottles and a 12th one still dripping.
Civil authorities say it wasn’t an overdose of Budweiser. They suspect suffocation caused by sticker shock from the surgeon’s bill balled up in his fist.
Before Undertaker slinks in to drain his blood―because in this dream embalming takes place onsite―the wind has wrung out the deceased, twisting and sewing the hammock around him like a thrift store burial gown.
Inside this wrapper, the beer-soaked Sunday newspaper still hugs his face, prints today’sheadline on his forehead. His wallet is missing but that’s because it’s probably empty instead of stolen. The cat sleeping in the dead man’s lap is a suspect in the crime, as are some early birds scalping his hair to build nests.
Ignoring cops, cats, birds, neighbors, and undertakers, the dead man seems to be somewhere else. This upsets the late-arriving mail carrier who is always agitated when someone moves without leaving a forwarding address. So Mailman goes postal, pulls out his stamp gun, drags the cat off and shoots him nine times. He tells Undertaker a dirty joke that makes him die laughing. He somehow tars and feathers the thieving birds. He burns like witches the two trees that hold the citizen up. He scares the cops and all other creatures into stupor.
Only the wind gets away.
Only the hammock lets go, and the debtor dead man rolls downhill like a log, while squeaky wheels from Rood Electric fill up his answering machine with threats to cut off his power.
Robert S. King, a Georgia native, now lives in Lexington, Kentucky. His poems and flash fiction have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including California Quarterly, Chariton Review, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, and Southern Poetry Review. He has published eight poetry collections, most recently Diary of the Last Person on Earth, Sybaritic Press, 2014) and Developing a Photograph of God (Glass Lyre Press, 2014). His work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of Net award.