Sloan is straight-backed in a folding chair and digging her toes into the sand. There are itchy crumbs of the stuff in the netting of her swim trunks but the sensation means nothing right now. The Pacific looks taupe through her Suvasols, and it’s frothing a little bit, the wind is teasing the waves, luring them out of marching order, and it’s chilling her bare chest, salting and feathering her hair, but she’s watching Clara play in the water. They are post-apocalyptic lovers. Mostly what that means is that they keep to themselves and are very careful not to get fed up with one another. They live very deliberate lives; there are things that absolutely must be taken care of, and they take care of them. They siphon gas and take useful junk out of dusty houses. They have sex in a truckbed and watch sunrises with their shoulders pressed together. They possess a pragmatism that, they think, is in no danger of becoming gloomy. Now Clara walks back to Sloan on her tiptoes and kisses the bridge of her aquiline nose, but Sloan keeps staring forward into the sea. Slowly reaches her hand out to touch Clara’s. And they hang like that for a while, Clara facing the trees, Sloan looking for something in the waves.

Sloan shot a man yesterday. They first saw him leaving Cove Orchard, saw him turn onto the road behind them. He followed about a half mile back all the way along Route 26 and they lost sight of him around Elsie. And when they stopped to make camp in Necanicum and heard tires crunching up the gravel road and saw the white Chevy Blazer nosing its way towards them, Sloan told her lover to tuck into the woods and lie down on her stomach. And when the headlights switched off she raised her gun over their truck’s hood and shot him through his windshield. His eyes were puckered shut and his fists were balled tight and he was leaking gently through his t-shirt onto his blue jeans. He was dead. Necanicum is probably an Indian word but to Sloan it sounds Roman, and sneering, and it tickles something unpleasant in her spine. Clara had circled a town called Sublimity on the map with her blue pen, the two of them on a picnic blanket with legs intertwined, wrapped up in each other in Idaho. Sloan's knees balked in Oregon. Her face opened into the ground, tears, spit, shuddering delicate threads shimmered hanging from her mouth. She heaved but nothing came. Wiped her mouth, clicked her rifle’s safety back on with a shaky wet thumb and yelled to Clara in a voice that shook too. The evening bugs picked up again in a slow crescendo. 

The sun is high over Cannon Beach now, but it’s November and clouds sink to the earth this time of year like dead whales, and everything’s damp and grey. Sloan’s wearing her shades anyway and Clara combs the wind-knots out of her hair with her long pretty fingers. The situation speaks for itself and neither tongue stirs. A week ago they stood in the middle of a clearcut and it was so still that their hearts beat heavy in their ears to stave off the unholy silence. Clara is wondering if it’ll ever go back to being like how it was and Sloan is wondering when her mouth will stop tasting like old metal but then she feels Clara start to quake from the cold, and she tucks her wings and drops like a stone back down to the here and now. And she puts a towel around her lover’s shoulders, and folds the chair, and they walk on their heels back to the truck. 

The outlaw is snoring in his rocking chair. He’s lugged the thing to the top of a parking deck and pointed it at where the sun will soon set. This morning it sat unrocking next to a potted fern on the porch of an azure little bungalow in Virginia Highlands. The homeowner ran her fingers slow through her bangs while the outlaw heaved the chair into his wheelbarrow. Thin bluish daylight glinted off of his chrome-painted plastic spurs as he swayed down the street and she stood bathrobed in her doorway, watching, until he rounded the corner. Now his hat is pulled down low over his face and it rocks very gently in pulmonary fashion. Who is the outlaw? What does he want from this world? Does he have a pinched, squinty kind of outlaw face like Jack Palance’s or Lee Van Cleef’s? It would be a serious breach of cowboy etiquette (which outlaws, while being on the opposite side of the government’s law, still tend to abide) to wake him up and ask. He does not have a pony or a six-shooter or a harmonica. Two teenagers rattle up in a chipped yellow sedan, three parking spaces to the left of the chair, and make out for a little while, unbothered by the outlaw; he’s part of the scenery. They leave right before the sun’s done setting. The sound of the car wheezing back to life wakes the outlaw, but he doesn’t move or think about anything except how the last scraps of tangerine sun feel on his neck.

Focus Group

What are you going to do when the world ends? 

“I’m going to plant a flower garden. I’m going to grow vegetables. I’m going to raise chickens and name them after characters from Russian novels.”

“I’m going to find everyone who’s ever wronged me and blow ‘em away. Just blow ‘em right away, whoooooosh, like a great wind.”

“Sit on the porch.”

“Do you think it’ll be soon? I have a lot of people to apologize to. Good God. What a… wow. What a life. Jesus. I need to go home, right now, I need to… Good God, I need to make some phone calls. I need to make things right.”

“And the flower garden, it’ll be wildflowers. A great big field of them. I’ll tear up all of the driveways and make one giant connected lawn, all wildflowers.”

“Blam. Blam. Blam. Like bottles lined up on a fence. They don’t stand a chance.”

“...”

“Oh God, oh God. Hoo boy.”

I want to pry your fingers off the steering wheel

I want you to pump the brakes and kiss me

We should pull over right here

We should have turned a thousand miles ago

The lines and signs and signals all blur to mush

I want you to slow down and touch me

I want to cover your eyes with my palms

We should pull over right here

We should have turned a thousand miles ago

Your knuckles are so white I think I’m going blind

We want some things to work smoothly. We want quality control. We want tight tolerances, metal sliding against metal without sparking or screeching. We want to draw the bolt back and have the shell fly out at the same angle every time, and we don’t want the barrel to warp, or the firing pin to blunt, or the glass to lose zero. Some people want the whole world to work on this principle. They want skin and hair to work like this. Or maybe they want metal men, sliding against each other. Metal men fucking each other noiselessly and fruitlessly. When I think about your skin and hair I get too happy to work smoothly. I am so in love with you and I am going to spark and screech about it until someone unplugs me. 

On the plane today (11/22) I bore witness to a number of little optical miracles. The sun coming through the windows at weird angles doodled halos, streaks, bubbles, arcs, eyelashes. Speaking of: a really special shadow cast by a man’s rhythmically blinking lashes from the side, like a strange sea creature, filter-feeder, a jungle plant with plant-muscles, snatching flotsam from the water or snapping bugs out of the humid air. And gently quaking spots, perfect circles, more perfect than anything I can touch with my fingertips. I wondered if these fleeting little things were not real. Why not? Things linger or flee, no matter what they are, and maybe for us the things we can grab and squeeze and throw seem to stick around a lot longer than the little mirage-comets blinking in and out of focus in the bright sun, but, I mean, if we go to the front of time and stretch our mind allllllll the way out to the very back of it, then what. Maybe there’s no world out there at all really. Or at least not one with a capital-W. Maybe my eyeballs are little green and white and black worlds. Probably not.

Something was left behind and then forgotten about. A nail rotting deep down under the soil next to animal bones, poisoning the earthworms. You feel like you’re going crazy because you swear to God you can taste it in the wild strawberries, smell it in the magnolia flowers, just at the knife’s edge of what you can sense, right before it bends off into fuzz and nothing. Rusted so that its definitions are shaky, bloated like a corpse, like dead metal can be. I need ninety thousand hours of conversations on tape. I need to fill notebooks and scrawl all over walls and I need to chart the patterns. Something is here, already here. Been here for a long time. Finding it is a matter of patience. There are things that we want to blurt out and we ought not to, we want to jump to conclusions. Hold your tongue boy. We ought to deliberate. Hold that thought, hold it, close your eyes and turn it over and over and over in your fingers, turn until your wrists are numb. Your devil wants you singing, wants that chain flying out of your mouth so fast you don’t even see the knot beating up your throat. Hold your tongue, boy. Run your hands along that rusted old thing, find where it went bad. Find the snarl and grab it tight and before you move your tongue you better know your wound, better than you know the dirt under your fingernails, better than a mother knows her child.

Can you make all of the iron shavings point the same way? Can you make them sing? Can you make them sing beautifully? Can you touch my lower back? Can you sing to the shavings? Can you stand up straight in front of them, your back to the audience, and conduct them with a steady hand? Can you cook something filling? Can you say “I love you” without it sounding a little bit fake? Can you soothe some wayward shavings backstage before the big moment and wipe their nervous tears away with your shirtsleeve? Can you speak softly and firmly? Can you get along with my mom? Can you say “I love you” without it catching in your throat? Can you sit in silence with me happily? Can the shavings trust you? Can you tell me that it’s going to be alright when I wake up in the morning? Can the shavings trust you with their lives and their hearts and their voices and will you do right by them? Can you kiss me?