Changing Course

The scales are even. Everything I marked in before is now the same as after. Ten years. With the questions that surround the choices before and after, I chose to mark the anniversary with an excerpt from my novel, Tzi'. His enthusiasm for each of my choices can never be matched. May this joy always be as significant as my lingering questions.

--

The dream rolls me over onto my back, not an ocean wave but a cradle.  I exhale, floating.  Voices and banging wind breathe my words.  Just one eye cuts a slice of light, one ear at attention and a familiar step upon the floor.  My eyes can deceive me when it comes to humans, but my nose never does.  Sera walks through the door, her arms too heavy with her treasures, full of our former shelter.  My nostrils can’t hold scents’ thickness, packed tight.  

“Come Solo!  My heart.”

I jump and I run.  I run towards something.  Sera.  I run back to something.  The floor betrays me, and my scar stretches too tight.  My entire being shakes.  The bags drop.  I huddle beneath her spent shoulders.  She arches over me, and we are there, bound together, in a different kind of chest.

Sera pulls items out one by one.  Her hand cradles my second bone.  I clamp my mouth down immediately on all the words I had recorded.  I have only a few more.

“You see, he recognizes it.”

“I guess he does.  I can’t believe you brought all that back with you.  What they must have thought in the airport.”

“Well, so you both appreciate old things that other people don’t.  I’m glad to see Solo survived.  That’s all I really expected.”  Sera looks out of the corner of her eye.

“Well, couldn’t I at least do that much.”

“I know you like him.”  Sera rubs behind my ears.  Her nails dig into my nose.

“He sure is happy to see you.”  The Lord shrugs.  “So, you’re back?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re back.  Now what?”

“I guess that depends on you and your powers that be.  I won’t take Solo away from the land.  I promised him.”  

The Lord pauses at the door.  He picks up a brown bag full of papers.  He leaves the gun. 

“Good day for burning.  I’ll be outside.”

I look back at the piles in the room by the stove now empty of warmth and corn.

Sera must choose.  Sera nods her head.  I run to the leash.  I tug.  Sera must choose, before all the papers’ ash from the burn pile disperses and disappears easily into the clouds in the sky.  

on my nose hairs catch damp earth, supple stems and leaves, meat-stained plastic, metal, beer, and burned papers.  These are adventure’s only taste cast forth upon my tongue.  A motorcycle buzzes past.  My hair stands up straight atop the mountain of extra skin.  I bark into the noise,

“What’s gotten into you?  Does that buzz remind you of a gunshot?”

I eye my road alongside the road named Highway.  Many roads run through themselves like currents in straight boxlike corners.   The far edge rises against blue, often sponged in puffs of white as foam folding on crested waves.  Maybe this is all Sera wants to see.  She humors me with the same words as always.  “I know Solo.  You tell them.  They don’t know.  So many things they don’t know.”  

“You don’t know,” but I stifle the growl. 

The sweetness in the soil masks all the tracks.  Sera clips a new collar around my neck.  Its brilliant shade matches that of the high fortifications that abound in this region.  

“You look good in red, Solo,” nods the Lord.  The medal hangs elegantly.  I thrust out a chest colored like Tecun Uman’s from the spear through his chest and ignore the detail that my wound is located along my side.  Our walk is flat, straight and stretching.  I push.  I yearn to move past the border, past the pines, past the yellow sign.  Sera and I walk crisp, wet miles along the property lines of the estate.  The inner lawns are edged and shaded by a canopy of great oaks no longer only branches cut as talons and bony wings.  The vibrant stain of the barn fortress strains against the freshly scattered green that creeps from the black earth each day.  

Less cold and more light gives Sera courage to walk farther on the upper fence line, but I tug towards the mounds at the corner.  Small unplanned plant tufts spurt like ocean spray from the dirt.  There is no decaying scent.  I do not believe them to be graves like those the Lord digs for intruders.  Finally, I make my mark upon many to serve as guideposts.  I will need to build future surveys from the information I gather today.  Quickly, I move on, more interested in what crossed and lingered behind.  Bright flags dot the ditch.  

Awash on these rising tides, perhaps the mounds are indicators of rocks or shoals beneath, ready to cut our boat apart.  It is loud and not the thunder of building clouds I disdain.  I sense the smoke more than the shake, but Sera turns away from the corner.  She pulls.  Her shoulders slump.

She whispers, “What do you want?  Why do you want to be here?”  She is not talking to me.  She is talking to herself. 

My cheek stays Sera’s restlessness heart, for now.