Rebecca Gayle Howell

I follow locusts. I think they’re loyal, but it’s a story. In morning’s bleached streets and nights of tungsten glinting, their fretted steel legs ticker the minutes. What do I know, except I need a thing to walk behind. The lot tagged The Devil, red spray paint, two concrete steps. This is where I go when the heat comes, when no one alive can tell me how to make the day move on. She lies there, the bitch, in a bed convex from her weight. Though it’s dusk, I see she is the color of dirt. Though fleas open new roads through her hair, she is asleep. I hear thunder. Some days it rumbles dry, no rain. I’m tired. The air here, it’s like breathing gasoline. I lie down, too. A razor, a latex glove turned inside out. I curl my body close to hers, my lips, nose to her spine. I close my eyes. I want the mites to leave without me, but they don’t.

Slade was pulling minnows out of the dry river the day we met. Puddles, more or less, was what was left. But what could live wanted to and tried, treading narrow circles, a glide of brittle fins. He wore those rubber boots, though the sun was an anvil, and very little wet; he smiled, I remember that, his nickel smile right at me, his fingers letting fall the small fish muscles into a bag filled with yellow tap. I didn’t ask his name, or what it was he thought he was doing, but we talked, I listened as he taught me to relax the hand just enough. They can smell, he said, the oils our pores release when we tense to catch. You have to believe it, he said. You don’t mean any harm.