Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Epilogue (from Pink Lions)

Jesse S. Mitchell

 novel available  here

Epilogue (five years later)

Sitting on the dark stained red cedar back porch, watching the tiny flicks of snow falling gently down, like a million staticy TV screens, mixing with the gauzy smoke, angelic wings, escaping her cigarette hanging from her lips like the end of the world. Hippocampus straining, mind clear but aching, never again yearning but still trying to keep from burning. Or pouring completely out. Deluge. But now it is all brand new.   And lately and forever and ever more, it will be getting always better.  Poetry.  Living is poetry and sometimes fiction but the fiction is the frictioness part, heavy and grinding.  Recently everything has been gliding, smooth.  Her and Lindsay, a cat named Ziggy, and a cat named Hitchcock. No earbuds in her ears, but she still listens, all the sounds around her and nothing at all that she is afraid to hear.  No hiding away.  There is a cornflower blue truck that rusts in the driveway and heaves and chugs when it starts, which it almost always does even on the coldest mornings. They make art and work the earth and sell produce they grow on their farm patch miles outside of Chattanooga (but half a universe away). And as far as she knows, no one even lives in New York City anymore or even Ft. Lee.
Not so angry anymore but a deferential bloke who sings songs to the few birds left in winter, to the birds, of the birds, probably from the birds and for the birds.  The web around everything is extraordinary.