Long Stop Through Nowhere

Chapter one.

The only thing that the red truck in front of her wasn’t going to do was kill her. Maybe cars in this side of town went slow, you know, like that phrase–slower than molasses in January? Yeah, that’s the one. No, It definitely wasn’t going to kill her. But she had heard her mother say very distinctly that the world was much more stark and scary when you went out into it’s clutches, and cars were one of the things you had to look out for.

“I told you. Practically no one drives here Cornelia, it’s a dead zone. Nobody lives here.” said Peter.
“Then why’s he stoppin’?” drawled Cornelia vacantly.
“Because we were just about gettin’ ready to cross the street, that’s why. Didn’t nobody ever tell you ’bout such a thing as driving rules?”
“Uh…no” Cornelia admitted defeatedly.
“Well then, what are you waiting for? That truck ain’t gonna wait for us any longer! go on, git!”
“You sure, I?…”
“Git! go on ahead, that driver ain’t got all day!”
The brisk morning air suddenly struck the two young travelers as they flittered across the narrow dirt road. Pine trees ran along it’s whole length; an endless wood ran on either side of the mountain highway like a secret hideaway into the endless mystery of nature. But that wasn’t their focus anymore. They were almost on their way to a city, and this was just where civilization had begun to turn up.
A twisted grin began to play on peter’s sun burnt face as they continued walking along the road.
“What’s so funny?” whined Cornelia, who was just about through with her brother’s pointless games.
“You don’t know about the pedestrian’s right of way, Corny. It’s like knowin’ the world goes around the sun. Common knowlage.”
She hated it when he called her that stupid nickname. And she hated how he knew more big words than her, since he was in the tenth grade.
“What’s a ped-est-rian?” Asked the bewildered girl carefully, who was now at her wit’s end. This question only made Peter laugh harder, snorting through his nostrils and cackling like a hyena, which made Cornelia even more outraged. At least, thought Cornelia,we only have ten more miles to go. It was a comforting thought at best.

If seen from above, the whole journey would have seemed startlingly picturesque; A young girl with shockingly red hair walking down a mountain path along side a much older, very red and tan boy dripping in sweat, looking as if they were on some secret spy mission to save the world, hold up the one car traffic of a huge scarlet truck in the middle of the day.

Copyright 2014 Golden Star Poetry
I do not own this photo

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Air and Smoke–Stream of Consciousness #14

Frogs croaking at midnight
a twin heartbeat
like moss engraving stones entwining with spongy hearts that bleed
the question now is who will carry the porridge?
who will listen to Sumter describe the events that followed his desasterous night of frogs croaking, camping in the woods?
who listenes to him, the dusky hours grow long
the day widens into a smile
furrows into a frown
the clown
Sumter,
banned from the camping ground just as the air was warm
in the chill,
he knows the only comfort can come from
humming a silent tune
a tune which he will pick himself
in doing so he sounds just like the twin heartbeats of the two croaking frogs
he must find his little world
he must find it
or the summer will drag him through an endless pit
and he will see himself as a small boy
groping for the sidewalk and the sun
not knowing that the only eventual destination was death and lead,
the spongy twin bleeding hearts his own.
he feels the ground
the moist air lightens his eye
upwards is an unforgiving sky
tinged with something else he cant describe,
but we shall call it a vague
and unmistakable hope.
he clings to the forrest ground, the moss,
like a child refusing to leave behind his blanket.
the porridge is on a stove growing cold
it’s breakfast fire
warming time
but poor Sumter on the forest ground
the enemy of which he made last night
sleeping on a bed of firs and pine cones.
the last of his breath escapes from his nostrils,
tendrils of air and smoke in equal measure
percolate the air
but he is not there with his friends to see the fire or to hear the stories
because he has told them his story
and that was the one story
they could not hear
so instead they decided to shut him off
and he, with his breath
and they, with the fires, keep burning aloft in their own separate ways,
he pains to think of them, the little children he has left on the
other side of the mountain.

Copyright 2014 Golden Star Poetry