The Umbrella of the Future
Sarah finds the clicker, turns on the TV, sips her tea, waits. Cold
mornings lately, the little Sony seems sluggish, slow to wake. Sarah
hopes it’s not dying, hopes this is just a winter thing. Imagines a
small black animal, old, squarish, sedentary. Dreaming colorful TV
dreams, waking reluctantly, shivering a little. Regaining its capacity
for speech first: “Next- Is this the umbrella of the future?” someone
at the Weather Channel says. By the time the screen has brightened,
picture wholly coalesced, they’ve gone to a commercial.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Alder Run
Midnight or thereabouts, on the way home. Climbing the long slow third-gear hill up out of Alder Run, too steep, too rough to make in fourth. A low rolling dust plume rising unhurriedly behind, drifting downslope toward the darkened houses on the left.
Passing the last, imagining what someone lying in bed there hears, or dreams of: An old truck pulling but not hard, reaching the treeline now, the sound of its steady labor growing fainter.
Near the crest of the hill, where the woods give way again to wide fields, a car’s backed into the mouth of a farmer’s lane. The dome light’s on inside; a girl’s sitting at the wheel. Apparently alone, perhaps waiting for someone, she watches me go by.
Be safe, kid.
The threatened storms must have passed elsewhere; it’s clear now, but still warm: A perfect summer night, the kind we used to spend outside, lying on our backs, looking at the stars, talking. Why don’t we have time for that anymore.
Off at the edge of the headlights’ beams, a passing landmark: A rusty stub of capped casing from a gas well sixty years abandoned. I smell new-mown hay, roll my window down the rest of the way.
* Mark Reep says “I’m an artist and writer based in New York’s Fingerlakes region. My prose has been published online in Read This and Gloom Cupboard, and my drawings have been featured in American Art Collector.
