Lights

New York City: 138 miles.

Rolling green hills under blue-grey clouds. Still-chipper stream. Highway curve glides in, glances, bends away. A few passing vehicles detour around loud orange cones.

A Delaware County man was struck by a car last night as he attempted to cross Route 17.

They all knew him or at least his name. Damn shame but it happens, shakes the static air.

That night, the restless ones who have spent eighteen or twenty or twenty-two years too long here walk through dirt and stand on toes to see over the hills.

Just stars.

They set off firecrackers a few feet away from bonfire heat, watch the anticlimactic flash again and again in hopes of some elevation.

“That’s what happens when you try to get out of Dodge,” one says suddenly.

“Yeah? Is that why you haven’t tried?”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“He probably just wanted to get some weed in Dover. Can’t believe he still does that stuff.”

“Haven’t you listened to him for the past month?” Ash drops from cigarette. “‘Do you guys ever think about the trees just tumbling down one day – all those old oaks and elms from a hundred years ago – ripping off the hills and knocking you to the ground and before your vision went black, all you saw was that same damn clouded sky?’ And I was like, ‘No, man, not really,’ and he just looked at me for a real long time. Like I was the crazy one.”

“He’s been tripping a lot. Was.”

“Well, yeah. But even when he wasn’t, he was always staring at the sky, talking about how the stars were so…vague and how he wanted something brighter, something he could hold onto.”

“Like what?”

“I never asked…”

Dawn brings frost to burnt wood. No embers. They still linger. Clouds from cigarettes greet cold morning air.

They stand silently, wondering.

The night before:

Sprint stop go.

Sprint-

Police say the driver, a nineteen-year-old female, was not under the influence.

Lights screech against night sky. Horns and shouts – “Watch where you’re going!” Exits nearly missed, wild turns onto narrow ramps, more horns, shaken fists.

You hadn’t meant to leave with just a gas tank three-quarters full, your license, and a flickering right headlight. But your roommates had left for the summer and it was just you and a dirty kitchen and a dingy light bulb. You liked silence only when you could choose it. And that was why you’d chosen to come here: the city without sleep or silence.

Stop-

But not tonight.

Seductive voice on the radio strokes your foot on the brake. Lights soften and caress the hood, windshield, dashboard.

Stopping at red lights reminds you that you’re nearly panting; sometimes too many breaths run over each other, stumble and get caught. The man in the next car glances at you. You glance away.

Your brother might still be out by the time you get home – wherever “out” may be. A bonfire in a field somewhere, at best. Your mom will wake up to the sound of you struggling to unlock the front door. She’ll stare at you, mutter something, return to bed. But there will be pancakes on the table the next morning.

Syrup. The word rolls as you watch car after car bump through the intersection.

Syrup. The repetition gives your mind a pace, purpose.

Syrup – maple leaves swirling in October and stifled to death by snow for all of winter. A silence reverberating off of the fields that burnt your ears the way cold burnt your face.

You screamed once to see what would happen.

Nothing.

It was silent the February day they buried him. Your older brother looked at his youngest sibling’s casket with a face pale as the sky. Your mother closed her eyes.

You walked back inside and heard, of all things, his music box faintly tinkling “The Entertainer.” Last week he’d run into your room laughing – remember you gave me this for Christmas when I was five? The tiny ballerina spun slowly, precisely, one foot perfectly pointed to her knee, arms raised above her head.

“Oh, God. I found that in my closet and gave it to you because I didn’t know what else to do.”

Well, obviously. Laugh. Always laughing – even in his sleep – you could hear it through the walls. I never told you, but I brought it in to Show and Tell in second grade.

“Yeah?”

I made up this whole story about how it was my grandma’s and it survived a huge fire so that the guys wouldn’t make fun of me.

“They should have.”

He grinned. Don’t worry – they still do.

“You’ll get back at them in high school next year.”

Oh, I will!

Go-

The empty walls in the kitchen had brought back the burn.

An hour and a half later, your sprinting breath has turned steady. You see dark hills instead of quiet rooms. New York City: 130 miles. 131. 132.

It might be paradoxical to go from silence to silence, but right now the radio has slid from techno to static to country and you don’t think about the quiet outside of these windows, of the engine shut off.

You don’t think.

You don’t think.

You never see him fall onto the road, only feel him under you. The shudder of metal over flesh – a final gasp.

An instant before:

“We don’t know where he was going,” friends said.

He approached the highway. It would be nice if someone did pass through, bearing two beautiful beams of white-yellow light – fluid, unflinching.

New York City: 137 miles.

He hadn’t thought to look both ways because nobody ever came through here this late at night, or that he should run instead of walk.

He thought instead that nobody else would cross over because their shoes were heavy with a body reluctant to move. Hadn’t he reported their complaints year after year in The Delaware Observer? Hadn’t he seen that black ink only bled with water – did not run on its own – and neither did they?

He hadn’t thought that the stars were beautiful. Once, maybe.

He thought instead that after too many nights of black ink, he had looked up from the desk – looked to the sky for some relief – and saw only sickly droplets fading further and further away.

He hadn’t thought that he shouldn’t have stared upwards towards silence instead of listening for coming rumbles.

He thought instead that if he could climb that hill, any of those hills, the stars would seem less hopeless.

***
Diana Gallagher is pursuing an MFA in Writing and Literature at Stony Brook Southhampton (yes that is one location). In her undergraduate days, she co-edited and published in Transition, the literary magazine of SUNY Cortland.