James Doyle

The kitchen door opens onto dirt and the second half of the country all the way to the Pacific. Rusted prairie trains out of the tall weeds elbow the last century aside, rumble from every direction towards Chicago. My great-grandfather, who would be 150 years old today, put on his one tall hat and took the big trip to Omaha for my great-grandma with the family ring on his vest and winter wheat lying wait in seed. He gave her all the miles he had and she gave him the future I walk around in every day. The mountains were too far west to count so they doubled back over the land and century and the real weather kept coming from them.

I read the palms of the other kids on the field trip to see which ones would grow up to be astronauts. The lifeline on Betty Lou’s beautiful hand ended the day after tomorrow, so I told her how the rest of our lives is vastly over-rated, even in neighboring galaxies. When she asked me how I knew so much, I said I watched War of the Worlds six times and, if she went with me to the double-feature tomorrow, I’d finish explaining the universe. I smiled winningly. The Halley’s Comet lecture by our teacher whooshed in my one ear and out the other.

marches in uniform down the traffic stripe at the center of the street, counts time to the unseen web that has rearranged the air around him, his left hand stiff as a leather strap along his side, the other saluting right through the decades as if they weren't there, as if everyone under ninety were pervasive fog the morning would dispel in its own good time, as if the high school band all flapping thighs and cuffs behind him were as ghostly as the tumbleweed on every road dead-ended in the present, all the ancient infantry shoulder right, through a skein of bone, presenting arms across the drift, nothing but empty graves now to round off another century, the sweet honey of the old cadence, the streets going by at attention, the banners glistening with dew, the wives and children blowing kisses.