Kurt Brown

Doors opened and shut, the director shouted orders through a bullhorn, or babbled just out of the frame. A carpenter hammered flats nearby for the next production. All of this, and more, while the actors blocked it out, already living in that small square of light where silence reigned like a tiny theatre for the deaf. Now, almost a century later, it's peaceful, far from the center of action, the last voice on the street reduced to a whisper, then gone. Not even birdsong as evening's opening credits begin to roll. Only the film, shimmering out of a disc thinner than sound, characters moving like fish in their gray element— less than fish— not a hiss, not a bubble, not even a cry from that dim world of silence doubled by time.

Driving west through sandstone’s red arenas, a rodeo of slow erosion cleaves these plains, these ravaged cliffs. This is cowboy country. Desolate. Dull. Except on weekends, when cafés bloom like cactus after drought. My rented Mustang bucks the wind—I’m strapped up, wide-eyed, busting speed with both heels, a sure grip on the wheel. Black clouds maneuver in the distance, but I don’t care. Mileage is my obsession. I’m always racing off, passing through, as though the present were a dying town I’d rather flee. What matters is the future, its glittering Hotel. Clouds loom closer, big as Brahmas in the heavy air. The radio crackles like a shattered rib. I’m in the chute. I check the gas and set my jaw. I’m almost there.

That kiss I failed to give you. How can you forgive me? The kiss I would have spent on you is still There, within me. It will probably die there. But it will be the last of me to die.