to Nate
I had found work at The Hybrid Apple Orchard in Iconium where days hooked together like cars jumping one another. At night I shared a gypsy wagon with an elderly tenant named Amos and during the day we would discuss the mythos of the Leafcutter Bee while filling barrels with the Hybrid Honeycrisps, Copied Cameos, and McIntosh Mimes. Isabel would come visit on weekends and during Black History Month our midnights together stretched like sinews in a lion’s jaw. She and I drank Ezra Brooks to computer speakers, the ones where you could feel the thin, grassy notes from Picastro fall like lawn darts onto your ear drums. I told her about the appetites of harvest season, and visitors like Gallagher who brought their own lunch. We couldn’t say much at night, enamored with all the ubiquity roaming the universe. We stared at the pixelated stars in lulls noting how astronomy might seem like bird watching from the bottom of a pool. When I gave her a Burlesque Braeburn she asked for a Parodic Pink Lady, and that blew me away. I liked her for that.
“Can we settle for the Surrogate Gala ?” I asked.
The day we found a lone Hackberry across the warren of Red Delicious Reruns I asked Isabel if she knew what the five o’ clock shadow was symbolic for. She said it was the time of day that all fathers had together and a testament to all traffic lights emphasizing the real colors in the sky. And I liked her for that. Under the Hackberry we sat half-moon-eyed where we found consolation in each other and discussed the stipulations for the new “lazy” world and what it means to be satisfied after guitar solos.
Still loose in the atrophied grip of five o’ clock, I took her to the Iconium convenience store in town. I bought Arrow Root flour and Xantham Gum for a vegan Irish Soda Bread recipe we found scribbled on the back of an old circus poster while Isabel bought the local newspaper and charcoal for the kids that meandered naked around the Feigned Fujis. She read the headlines to me while we sat in my truck waiting for rain to die down: Deer Suspended in Air, New Tax to Fund City-Wide Drum Lessons, Windy and Acerbic. I told Isabel the headlines didn’t sit right, like this town’s got a weight problem, but she wasn’t listening. She was preoccupied with the magic in headlines, tickling an aesthetic in her like the punch line of a joke.
As the rain subsided I felt an ominous breeze pet my neck.
“Did you feel that?” I asked her as I peered out my driver’s window. The rain had stopped. When I looked over, Isabel wasn’t listening; she was pressing the newspaper to her cheeks, smelling the black ink, enjoying the texture of course newsprint against her face.
“There’s only so much knowledge one can acquire in the heat of a moment, in a darkness that is precipitating,” she said nuzzling the paper.
Back at the orchard, Amos had taken a vow of silence that was to protest a pesticide our landlord found on clearance at K-Mart.
“Such integrity was a long service road with patches of abandoned rest stops,” I told him as we picked our way through the yield of Gesticulated Jonagolds. “Even the off-ramps endured a songless silence that could let weeds propagate from one rest stop to the next.”
The silence was dulling after a while, an illuminating monotony that crested the pain in my picking fingers. I asked Isabel to join us after our break, to tell us of her quiet days in Fayetteville or her New Hampshire homestead. She became embarrassed and blushed the color of the Caricatured Cortlands when she couldn’t remember the name of her first horse. She said she wishes there were other things she could forget instead, like when she scored on her own team in P.E. basketball or when she got caught smelling her teacher’s pencil box.
“Is it that birds can fly because they can sing, or they can sing because they can fly?” she asked in a quick digression from her candid memories. Isabel was always into the far-reaching wonder in birds. I broke the silence as I was reminded of a passage from Ecclesiastes.
“Observe the time, fly from evil” I said.
“You can fly from evil but don’t pass the virtue in song,” she said. The rest of the day was spent in a consoled peace by our heightened awareness of birds that flew in shapes that resembled chalk lines around our bodies. Thank you, Isabel.
