“So what’s your story man?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Dude, we’re going to be stuck here for a while. We better get used to each other. And what better way to kill time.”

“Kill time… Seriously?”

“Ironic right? ” he chuckled, “Sorry, couldn’t resist.”

“Alright. My married life was getting a bit, um, mundane. So my wife and I decided to spice things up a bit.”

“Tell me you weren’t having trouble down there buddy? Coz if you were, you just might be better off here.”

“You want to tell me the story or not?”

“I am sorry. I didn’t mean to poke you. Aherm. Please continue.”

“Sigh. So we decided to take a trip to nowhere and you know do it out there in the open. Under the open sky. We thought it’ll be just the right spark we needed.”

“Wanted a spark and got a full blown lightning, eh?”

“You can say that again. So we reached here. Which is the middle of nowhere. We got naked. Fooled around a bit and then she said she’ll go grab a condom from the car.”

“And she grabbed more than a condom.”

“You bet. The next thing I knew she was holding a gun to my chest and boom, shot right through my heart.”

“And dumped you in this swamp. This blows man. I mean death sucks as it is. But getting you here for sex and shooting right through your heart. This really blows man.”

“I know. At least she could have dumped me someplace nice.”

“Yeah, like Disneyland!”

“I meant someplace that wasn’t muddy and stinky.”

“We’re allowed to go places where we’ve been while we’re alive but we have to get back here by sundown. So its not all bad. You can still go to nightclubs?” He grinned.

“You’re having a fun time aren’t you?”

“Hey, there’s not much to do around here, is it? So I’ll take all the fun I can get. Besides when I first saw you, I just thought you were some weirdo, running naked. Now I know the whole story.”

“About that. Since I died naked. Will I always be like this? Please tell me thats not the case. I mean look at you. You didn’t die in a playboy robe did you?”

“May be I did. May be I didn’t.” He disappeared.

“Dude. Not cool.”

The fog lights of the heavily dented sedan flickered as a last attempt to illume but did not succeed. It was not the first component failure suffered by Lillian’s car and whatever that remained screamed for an overhaul. At least, the dents were present before the nth hand purchase. Several taunts, close shaves and breakdowns later she planned on to save to buy a new car. So, Lillian decided reach work early each day so that she could clock in more hours.

Before she could mouth a curse, a Mack rammed straight into the bonnet. The bumper pivoted the car for a quarter of a circle before the hood squashed against the truck’s windshield. It all looked like a perfect choreography, straight from an action flick. Gravity pulled the weight of the car and the vehicle retraced the arc. The driver of the truck, fatigued and maybe inebriated decided to flee the scene. Lillian had not passed out by then. She realized that she was pinned down to her seat. The shock took her voice away and the tattered covers were slowly soaking up red. Lillian lived for another four hours till traffic started when the fog cleared.

The post mortem report ascertained excessive blood loss as the cause of Lillian’s death.

The car was almost as good as it was before the accident except for one vital component when investigators confirmed that the seat belt that was one of the few working parts of the car which malfunctioned after the impact and did not retract out.

Forgetting is the greatest boon granted to man. But like a lot of things in life, we don’t realize the importance of something we have. But she did realize the importance; and this realization lasted every moment of her waking hours. Her past haunted her, quite literally so.
She didn’t remember when it all started; but whoever she could remember entering her life in any way was there, right before her eyes. They appeared from thin air at their own will and then disappeared into nothingness. A horde of grey silhouettes followed and surrounded her everywhere. Her first boyfriend, the man who left her on their wedding day, her illegitimate daughter, her dead best friend, the little girl whose father she had wrongly fired from his job, they were all there. They stared at her through the fog that they were engulfed in, said things to her, mouthed foul words. They also sometimes gently advised her; advices that she never took. She never let too many people come close to her, she never let too many people enter her life because once they entered, they never left.
As a child, she often told her mother about the strange scary people surrounding her, waking her up in the middle of the night. She never understood why her mother couldn’t see them; they were all right in front of her! It hurt her tremendously that her own mother didn’t believe her, she was sweetly told to stop asking for so much attention. When she still wouldn’t give up on insisting that she didn’t lie, she was beaten into silence. She then stopped mentioning it to anyone and lived her entire life in the presence of those silhouettes. They watched her smile, tears, laughter, anguish, disappointment. She never had any emotion for herself, never a moment alone.
Foul language, curses and abuses didn’t really affect her. She had heard a lot of them to reach where she was right now and she didn’t regret that. But having abuses hurled at you during every waking moment is not quite an amusing feeling. She was now a tired woman and so she decided to talk things out with her constant companions. Her past came back to life, not that it had ever completely left her anyway. She realized how many mistakes she had made in life, how many things she had lost just because she didn’t talk things out. She didn’t regret anything; she wouldn’t change anything in her life even if she had the chance now. But speaking things out with her past helped her greatly. She saw her life from numerous eyes.
She lay on the hospital bed all day leaving only to use the bathroom. Bland, tasteless, love deprived food was brought to her thrice a day. No one came to visit her but she didn’t even need anyone else now. She was at peace with her past.
Someone knocked at the door and a pretty young nurse entered with her lunch. “Good morning Mrs. Johnson”, she said nervously. “I am Samantha. I have joined just today. I’ll be your new caretaker now. Hope you’ll be comfortable with me”, she recited the previously rehearsed line and left the room. Mrs. Johnson smiled as Samantha joined her at her bedside, now engulfed in grey mist.

At first, there’s only absence.  A question breaking.  And then—the dull throb of awareness.

Something happened here.  Something happened to me.  Like a cavity in my tooth, I prod the thing with my tongue.  The hole widens; the nerve retreats.

People are everywhere.  The suggestions of people are everywhere.   Pointillist people.  Pixelated people.  Peter piper picked a peck of

A woman screaming.  Across the . . . field.  I envy her the sharp cry of pain.  The climax it stakes.  A child drifts by, dragging a stuffed animal.  Is this my responsibility?  Do I know this child, her glassy-eyed bear?  Before I can act, she is pulled through the grey curtain.

I sit down.

“Hello there.”

I look over.

“Hi.”

“Nice weather we’re having.”

I shrug.

“Bit hazy for my taste.”

He laughs.

“I used to live in England.  So.”

“Ah.”

“Are you waiting for the next flight?”

“No.  You?”

“It’s rather taking its time, isn’t it.”

“Yes.  Rather.”

I haven’t the foggiest of what he’s talking about.  But I find I can still be agreeable.

“You don’t know why you’re here, do you?”

“Yes, I do,” I say.

He nods.

“Tell me, friend.  What’s the last thing you remember?”

His hand-his hand-his hand on

“Nothing,” I say.  “I remember nothing.”

Peter Piper picked a peck . . .

“I see.”

. . . of pickled hands.

“It’s impossible to see.  There is nothing to see.  Therefore, you see nothing.”

He shrugs.

“It’s here if you look.”

“Excuse me.  I think I’ll wait over there.”

“So you are waiting for the next flight.”

“Yes.  No.  I’m waiting on my . . . tooth.”

I shake my head.  That can’t be right.  But he nods and starts to whistle.  An old Civil War tune.  Yet he said he’s British.  Or was.

My head is starting to hurt.  I need to walk.  My footsteps are vacant.  I drift like the child, I drag like the bear, but no one gets any closer than when I first started out.

Time is a crater.  I walk in the valley of moons.  The shadows of tides fight over me.  I let them all pull with the ghosts of their hands.

Mist has a weight.  You wouldn’t think—but yes.  It does.  It collects on my hair, my clothes, my teeth and eyes.  Like a greasy fallout.  At some point, I will become more mist than woman.  I will glow like a grey flame, I will scratch like a Geiger counter.  I will be buried beneath magnets and no pipers will play at my pepper.

Peter.

I look down.

Down at my hands.  There, at the ends of my arms.  They are turning red.  My hands are turning red. Crimson surrounding the nails, magenta at my wrists.  The site boosts the grime from my eyes.  I can see the blood light up my veins.  I look real close now.

I can even see what flowed inside.

And he came on a wave-and we loved on a cloud-and when the time came-he was right by my side.

My tongue touches its root.  I cry out.

We pull up to the gate at 5:30 but have to sit until almost 6, waiting for enough light to filter through the fog so we can make our way into the fields. The marine layer doesn’t usually creep this far inland, but this week it’s been heavy, sticking around, settling into the valleys like wet smoky mud. Probably why the foreman was late.

Paco’s van smells like cheap whore and taco shop and I’m glad to be out.

He’s jawing at the foreman, trying to get an angle. He’s always looking for an angle. I don’t know how you get an angle on a strawberry field but Paco wouldn’t be Paco if he didn’t try.

It’s just us – Paco, Luis, Hector and me – and 4 or 5 older ladies that showed up in a beat-down Astro. They look like Indians – maybe Zapotecs  – coffee skinned, compact, bundled up. They move efficiently, speaking a few words to each other in Chatino. Fair enough.

Paco walks over and jabs an elbow in my ribs. “You like that, cabron? You want to hit that?” I grab some flats and leave him to his sneering.

It’s been the four of us for about a year. Luis and Hector are brothers, don’t talk much, and only in Spanish. Most of what they earn goes back to Mexico, apart from Luis’ taste for Budweiser. Hector has two kids, though. Goes home for Christmas every year and comes back with two new pictures. Paco – I don’t know where he came from. I’ve heard him tell a half-dozen different stories and none of them sound true. Someone in Fresno told me they thought they recognized him from a wanted poster in Texas, which wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t think he’s dangerous. I can just see how his mouth and his angles could have landed him in something that went way over his head. It might be why we always work the edges of the season, off-peak – always a week early, a week late.

After a few hours I stop and stretch. The fog is still thick. I’m glad. Good weather. I can hear Paco singing a corrido but I can’t see him. Glad again.

I pull a book from my back pocket and flip it open. Harvest Poems, by Carl Sandburg. Picked it up at a yard sale a few weeks ago. I always have a book in my pocket. When I get a new one I leave the old one in a laudromat or on top of an ice machine or newspaper rack. They probably mostly get thrown out, but I always imagine someone else picking them up and reading them, wondering where they came from.

Luis is standing right in front of me. Fog is tricky like that – makes me forget. Can’t see anybody all morning and all of a sudden someone steps out of nothing and there you are with your book in a strawberry field like an idiot. He can see I don’t need more flats but leaves me some anyway. I shove the book back in my pocket and start picking.

My back aches, so I bend my knees more. Pretty soon my legs ache. Paco always says I’m soft and he’s right. I’m from Pacoima. I’m second generation. I graduated high school and played baseball and used to write stories my English teachers said were good. Even took some classes at a community college, but that wasn’t going too well so I hooked up with my uncle to work the central valley. Just for the summer, to figure things out. That was 18 months ago.

Towards midday the fog is burning off, thinning out. The Zapotecs have almost twice as many flats ready as we do. We get our sandwiches and sodas out of the van and sit under an old pepper tree near the gate. I pull out my book. I like the poems of Carl Sandburg. He talks about unions and soldiers and Abraham Lincoln. I like most when he talks about work and workers. He was a poet but he knew about sweat and blood returning to earth. What it is to have dust in your lungs and sun in your eyes. He knew the people who dig coal, dig ditches, who pitch shale over their shoulders, looking for a vein of hope. People who sleep outside, hidden between tall clumps of pampas grass, staring up at a low splinter of moon with bellies full of stolen tomatoes.

Paco and Hector brush themselves off and head back out. Luis reaches into the cooler for his after-lunch beer. I read.

After a few minutes Luis clears his throat. “Hector was going to be a lawyer,” he says softly, “He was going to school in Mexico City and everything. Then he got Rosanna pregnant and had to quit. Had to work.”

He takes a long drink and watches his brother load trays of strawberries onto a flatbed. “He would have been a good lawyer.”

It’s the most he’s ever said to me. He reaches into his backpack and slides me a bus ticket to Los Angeles. The way he does tells me Hector doesn’t know. This is between him and me.

“It’s good work up here, but not for you. Paco hates when you read because he doesn’t understand. Hector, he hates it because he does.”

I take the ticket. It’s for tonight.

“You read better than you pick, guero.”

I don’t know what to say. I fold the ticket and tuck it into my book, searching for words. Finally I flip to “Happiness” and read it to him in Spanish, only I change Desplaines river to Rio Grande and Hungarians to Tejanos.

He looks at me blankly for a moment, then light begins to break across his face. He smiles, laughs, hoists up his tall boy can.

“A felicidad,” he says.

“To happiness.”

Jim Boyle loved reading. Words amazed him. He particularly loved reading books about art. He loved how words could make you see or feel, especially feel. Feel what the sculptor feels. Words made him want to write. He just didn’t know how to do it.

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