2003-10-31
- 8:44 pm (Samhain Road Encounter)
Garden State Parkway. Concrete rushes under wheels. Taillights breach the
treeline.
Color change. Gray becomes red, a sudden border and absolute.
Blood across the asphalt, 3 lanes across and 3 seconds long.
A shape by the side of the lane, pale smeared crumpled very dead.
Skinny at one end, too skinny and smaller than it should be, smaller than
it was.
How can one creature hold so much blood?
It's coming now, it's rushing up, it's off to one side, it's almost out
of the lane, maybe I can
miss it, maybe
THACK
and tires are lifting and my first crazy thought is did the bone hurt my
axle and my second is
Oh gods I hope that was a deer.
On my front steps, hours from where this night will carry me, a pomegranate-colored
flower
sits in state, held and framed and cradled in the sunken remains of a sideways
jack-o-lantern. A carnation from Norma's offrenda, now my own small gift
to the forgotten
dead. The outsiders, the unmourned, the murders and suicides and restless
unknowing
spirits. The unnamed severed lives that lie in the road, that stain our
vision and beat at our
tires.
You are remembered. Rest in peace.
-Nora
copyright
2003