Pandora's Stone

‘Lost, less than nothing now. Nihilous as a long forsaken dream, errant but almost realized, like life's chance is almost within our control. Is it even love, to be known true within, but delusive and dissolved in coherence of two? To be sumptuously shared yet symptomlessly squandered save the bitter aftertaste forlorn of forgone fatuity? To fade away so finally but linger its longing so incurably? Every love is lost and conquers all of us.’ ‘I've lost the world I knew with you. Now that you're gone, I wonder if I ever really knew you. Have I lost you utterly, will you speak to me in dreams, or are ‘you’ a name I've heired to your absence, the shadows of heart's memory consoling? A part of my beautiful world, a part of the best of me, is lost without you.’ ‘I am lost. Refugeless refugee from the wreck of my beliefs, in deprecating disillusioned retreat over blind beleaguered leagues. Seeking solace in some unknown, far flown from my once known come undone. All my causes proved impervious to success, wreaking wretched effects from the meanest means, with no end, no mend, in sight.’ Shit … I smelled these three coming sudden like a thunderhead over the plains, but inverted: not a storm about to burst, but a clouded vision about to bust. Bent low in emotional arrest – a leaden, malignant, identity tempest – sullen parasite of life's one time, now. The frustrated artist, predictably bankrupt of self-worth just for lacking current work, denied his favorite crutches of love and drug. Cowering under vagrant truths, virtued merely most profuse, relevance supposed by rules imposed for those who need them. Arrogant dictates from the mob prophets of sacrosanctions on art and life. They conceal from him the evolutions of invisible metamorphoses fermenting within, expressions far freer than the artwork they birth. Patience with gestation is outside his wisdom. The enlightenment hunter, dogging bones to armature the soul body, censuring the idealized sensory being to machinations making (uh, no) sense of ideas for being. Pawning principles for all is one, all as is – in deference to disbelief’s ease perceiving all as alone, in a life that needs explaining. Obviously, before humans came along, the entirety of existence made no sense whatsoever. Now this acolyte of acceptance laments the homage she’ll pay to recollect dirt-cheap wisdom from the saltiest of the earth. The thinker who thinks thinking is logic, deduction, reasoning. Using the brain only to calculate the math of language. This one’s faith shattered in trust of man: not his fellows, but his entire species. Fashionably unreligious but vaguely theistic of a mystery that science may yet substantiate as divine order. Maybe it already does … but when he sees how the world is going for his race, assuming there’s a plan precise to heavenly accord, man’s place is coordinated on axes that the rational mind conclusively aligns: fucked. Go figure, none of that shit means shit to these shits. These three are lost in the most familiar of places. I noticed their wearied whipped approach adrift unwelkin winds prevailing against them. Blown back down the peakless heap of idolatrous inadequacy succeeding, denied their reap vindicating righteous wronged, with fledgling relief for their asses, at least, intact. Pigeonholed succumb through ragged recourse, disavowing any path’s promise but this one, back, home. The huddled Fairfield township hugs the bluffs, only across the river cut seen as much of anything. In a sweep of quaintly antique buildings sundry of purpose, signs of life emerge, barely. Small Midwest ville, sparsely peopled, rarely developed above two stories. A single water tower and distant silos except the level rule. A ghosted loneliness haunts the wanderers’ return to the tranquil and/or boring sprawl. An easy pace in boundless complacence of local conversance ordains that change comes subliminally, if at all. At least there’s stuff to look at. The bus depot to the east, centered for use by four tributary towns on a parenthetical plateau, stuns new and old arrivals alike with three hundred and sixty horizon degrees of the flattest conceivable hypno-monotony. A road and corn and nothin’. Here the lonely bluffs are voiced, three poker faces cracked, grapples with pain visceral if not visible. Scattered travelers home in on the diesel beast of collective transit. A fat mother is harried in her hurry to board with her plump darlings. A big man, the lone disembark, squirrels by her brood, brow too beaten to weather her irritation. Slack on his soul’s marionette, his broad shoulders slump with hardly a notion of strength. But a duty-bred capacity to respond to necessity afford him resolve in bearing his baggage. One other stands outside, he sees. The commercial coach leaves the pair half aware, for her vantage is embroiled in a waiting want. He blinks and ponders her reasons as she stares at the visual vacuum of the flatland. His internal conflicts prevent any empathy of her like-mindedness, while the spin of lust politics belies disinterest. From languish of late, his libido aspires to penetrate desire, arms calling to embrace her and fill his – for a while. “Are you waiting for a ride?” Her head tilts slightly, away. Is she feigning ignorance, a willful ambivalence? “Excuse me …” and at last she turns, finally hearing him, her preoccupation evidently not in aversion. Her earthy beauty is quiescent, and his hope ignites to find vanity projections are not the fuel of the cool light in her eyes. “Am I waiting for a ride?” She glances around, confirming no other in view and his confidence in the contact grows as she fixes wholly on him. “Aren’t you Brent …?” “Yeah, uh –” “Brent Holland?” Startled and pleasantly perplexed, he smiles, “Yes, exactly. Do I know you?” Grounded grace of self-awareness, rather than charisma’s conceit, “Probably not. I was on yearbook at Fairfield High.” “You went to ‘Flunkfield’?” “I didn’t go to Felicity and Perpetua.” Nodding with a grin, “Did we ever meet?” “No, we didn’t.” The stutter steps of acquaintance show her hand and he extends then firms his callused grip, her grasp strong. “I’m Allison Kujo.” “Cujo –” Preemptive, “I’ve heard all the jokes, let’s not go there.” “Uhh –” with slight embarrassment for juvenile guilt, “So how did you recognize – ?” “Only two other seniors were in the yearbook more than you.” Noting his inquiry unresolved, “I was one of the underclass editors.” “Oh. I’m glad one of us remembers my promising youth.” Now his focus retrospects, “It seems like at least two lifetimes ago. And now – I’m back.” Reflecting through distaste’s afflicted veil, then catching himself, “No offense.” “I don’t particularly enjoy coming back, either.” Playfully chiding, “Was I supposed to marry my high school sweetheart and settle down to,” her gesture transcribing his tone, “this?” “Can we start over?” “Yes.” Disarming, “Definitely. And yes, I’m waiting for my cousin,” prefaces a soft sigh as her attention lists back to the flat, lost in the vast maize. Some part of her yearns to tell yet begs not to be asked. He picks up on this unconsciously, but forgets her distraction, forgets the signs of her apprehensive introspection, absorbed in his own inner mirror. His sensitivity is a selfish indulgence. “Yeah, I really would rather be … anyplace but here, but …” Relieved to redirect, her satiric tone not entirely evasive, “So, what brings you back to our fine cultural Siberia?” “A.k.a. the White-Breadbasket?” This wins him a sniggle. “That’s complicated,” he dissembles, then, detecting the honesty of her esteem, “Actually, no it’s not: I quit the Peace Corps, and now I don’t have anyplace else to go.” “Right,” obscure reminisce, “So you followed through on your plans from high school … weird. What happened? Did something go wrong?”