The Salt Fields
Page 10
When you get to the end of the tracks, they no longer converge on a single sharp point. Instead the lines open up and widen the closer you get to stopping. I’ve aged. No, I’ve gotten old. And here I am going blind, with the diabetes surging through my blood destined to take the rest of me away.
My students who became optometrists claim that eyesight blurring and fading over time is the reason one sees ghosts when older, optic nerves tricking the mind with images that aren’t there, but I believe it’s simply the spirits catching up to us. It’s with my mind’s eye, in that little twinkle right beyond the periphery, that I see the clearest now. Some days I sit in my armchair, with the door to my small room open, and wait for Carvall to walk in: big grin stretching from cheekbone to cheekbone, handing me one of his letters as if, all along, he was writing it for me. But he has yet to haunt that doorway.
I’ll wait. I’ll dream. I have enough time now to explain to him that maybe those Black soldiers left him on that European field as a kindness, an act of mercy, to save him from the horror of still being less than once he returned home, in spite of his uniform. Maybe they hoped that, if he lived, he would be treated beautifully somewhere else, and if he died, after all of the sorrow, he would be honored as a hero, as he deserved, even if it were by those on a distant shore.
Standing on the proper coast, you can see the sunrise, but often that daybreak only reminds you of where you aren’t. I never learned how to swim, and I’ve never been on a boat, but I could have walked to France had I truly wanted. There’s always frozen salt water capping the tips of the planet, and nowadays there is certainly enough blood and salt in the oceans everywhere to support my weight. No one I care about, or am interested in, can ever be more than twenty-five thousand miles away—eight thousand, if I were to travel through the new, wet, still-beating center of the earth. I should have kept my father’s almanac just in case.
Once up north, I stopped going to church, but some Sundays I would walk past the storefront services to the beaches, where I faced down the winds and blowing silica grains to gaze over the sleepless Atlantic and the continents beyond. I collected beach glass worn smooth by ancient sands; I imagined slave bodies washed onto beaches this far north. I wanted to melt into some encroaching spirit of salt, but as the waves licked my shoes I would step back more and more—I’d gone as far as my wanderlust would carry me, it seems—until I was in my apartment again, dreaming, pressing my daughter’s picture to my heart, listening to distant rhythms through a small transistor radio. Afterwards I would talk to my wife, tell her about my day, and we would dance until the city lights died for the approaching morning. If I closed my eyes I could feel the water rise against my bare feet and then ebb away like the years, never returning. Sometimes, toward morning, our daughter would join us, her feet on top of mine as we spun until the music drifted into static and I drifted into arid silence, into bed, then to sleep. It would have been nice to have either of them to watch the burial of the stars with.
At times I remember so little of my journey; other times I remember it all. Here’s what I can’t forget. That wounded night alone on the train platform, with no clouds to block the theater of constellations, the moon sitting in judgement, ringed by her court of sharp stars. Everything, my entire life beforehand and all I’d known in it, was comprised of some degree of heat; even after a long South Carolina rain I would dry so quickly that I barely shivered. But the cold from the train station that late night has stayed with me more than any northern winter, like some part of me is now frozen, crystalline, petrified.
I haven’t felt warmth since that night.
Me, at the edges of things. I thought I liked that about my life, how seeing all of the blades kept me from being sliced in two.
But here’s what I ask myself: Am I any different now than I would have been had I not pulled that trigger?
No matter. The world, I know now, is designed to survive you. I figure I spent too much time running away from things I should have been running towards, but maybe running, creating that distance, is what life is all about.
Yesterday I taught someone how to walk again. We were in the rehabilitation area and I was watching him, a man about ten years my senior, shuffling his feet, leaning forward but not truly progressing.
“It’s simple,” I reminded him. “You lift one foot, put it in front of the other, and then repeat until you’re someplace else. Someplace you’d rather be. It’s about renewal.”
You move forward. Each footfall presses the ground, dust you can’t see scatters, and the earth pushes against you until you move ahead.
I used to believe that travel was a form of destruction, and that it was much easier to destroy than to create, but here’s what you never tell yourself enough: destruction is a myth, because things never truly end. Particles rearrange and vibrate and dance elsewhere, as we settle into dust, salt, toujours, kal, next.
About the Author
Originally from Buffalo, and currently living in Seattle, Stacy D. Flood has had work published and performed nationally as well as in the Puget Sound area. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and has been an artist-in-residence at DISQUIET in Lisbon, as well as The Millay Colony of the Arts. In addition, he is the recipient of the Gregory Capasso Award in Fiction from the University at Buffalo, along with a Getty Fellowship to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.
You might also enjoy...
Daughters of the Air
by Anca Szilágyi
Tatiana "Pluta" Spektor was a mostly happy, if awkward, young girl—until her sociologist father was disappeared during Argentina's Dirty War. Sent a world away by her grieving mother to attend boarding school outside New York City, Pluta wrestles along with the unresolved tragedy and at last runs away: to the streets of Brooklyn in 1980, where she figuratively—and literallhttps://www.amazon.com/Daughters-Air-Anca-L-Szilagyi/dp/1941360114y—spreads her wings.
[APPLE BOOKS] • [NOOK] • [KINDLE]
Ship of Fates
by Caitlin Chung
In Gold Rush-era San Francisco, the fates of two women descending from the same Chinese family are tied forever to an ancient lighthouse keeper.
[APPLE BOOKS] • [NOOK] • [KINDLE]
Tales of the Astonishing Black Spark
by Charlie J. Eskew
When a bolt of lightning grants Donald McDougal superhuman abilities, he sees his new power as a ticket out of a dead-end job in his Ohio hometown—but the pursuit of superheroic fame comes with a price tag he may not be able to afford. This satirical debut grapples with issues of power, race, and privilege through darkly humorous social commentary.
[APPLE BOOKS] • [NOOK] • [KINDLE]
THE SALT FIELDS
Copyright © 2021 by Stacy D. Flood
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations used in critical articles or reviews.
Lanternfish Press
399 Market Street, Suite 360
Philadelphia, PA 19106
lanternfishpress.com
Cover Design: Kimberly Glyder
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941239
Print ISBN: 978-1-941360-49-1
Digital ISBN: 978-1-941360-50-7
Contents
Praise for The Salt Fields
Title Page
The Salt Fields
About the Author
You might also enjoy...
Copyright
Table of Contents
Landmarks
Cover
Title Page
Table of Contents
Start
Copyright
d, The Salt Fields