Inertia

The shadows are shorter in the fog-draped night. I steer left, stumbling and probing with each step inside this absence of illumination. The path veers away from the roadway of streaking light trails, wind-snapped noises of hurried air, and metal death. Feet, find my pathway. To miss the footfall, to disassociate into a dreamy thought, to unattach into the memories of the beer-swilling evening I enjoyed...well, it will mean my death here tonight on the shoulder of an unforgiving roadway encroached by uncaring fog. Roadkill.
I plant my footfall in a more sober way and edge passing flashes of headlights as my boundary, the ditch of my left the foot's extreme for placement. Gravel crunches, I hear a train, I cross a side street and narrowly miss some speeding idiot who sees me finally in his rearview mirror. I'm halfway to the store.

The red clay slips under each step and this part of the journey is the most fearful in that the left side of my stride is a noisy, eerie wooded area. I slip/step faster and note all the clicks, the cracks, the sudden empty roadway, the full wolf moon. I nearly break into a run from uncertainty. I resist. I created this time, here besides these dark woods, on a slippery upward slope of crumbling steps, absorbing the barren lack of traffic and absorbing the lonesome moon's glow.

I surface the hill and into the corner intersection lights and busy actions. I now want to blend into the dark covering shade of the woods now gone; I am an eye catcher, something to notice out of a side window of a car with a blue light bar. I aim for the convenience store. I enter it, I grab this thing that culls me from a mile away at a ridiculous hour and suctions me through gauntlets of dark horrors and fear and possible doom. I lift that container and carry it to the bullet-protected window and smile at the girl behind the wall. I pay and I stall and ask her what she likes in life outside of her job. This odd question causes her anxiety and stalls the line, but I pursue it in different phrases until she knows I require some answer about herself, a human touch connecting through see-through plastic protective walls.

She says she likes to write. I promise to bring her some of my words. I turn and leave the store, the return trip unfolds before the tips of my shoes. I have a weight now, an odd lope to the footprint patterns I trace backwards, leaving the reverse indentations with one side heavier than the other. I have purchased a weapon, a loss to the point of my whole journey if used, for an encounter by the dark woods. I have a flimsy reason for this inane waste of time, money, and safety in the conversational engagement with the protected shopkeeper. I have inward justification, fake and phony and false, but something to help me know that this night is unlike all the others. That this night's dark unwinding of who am I is not only familiar, but normal.

Once I make it back to the familiar driveway, quietly I open the bottle and light a cigarette and sit looking at the wolf moon of January on the bed of my immobile truck.

I drink, I exhale, I redefine ordinary.