Habitation

The long road south, the pavement flat and black as a dash without end, no signs, no houses, the heat like an unseen fog and the sun a swollen crimson clot above fields where frazzle-haired palm trees rose sporadic and unwieldy, the miles of pasture where cattle of every conceivable color, rust and tobacco and ashen, fed and nursed their stumbling young, heavy heads bent to the ground. And insects that crashed against windshield so tiny, no body was left behind. Then a wooden shack where we stopped to pee and the shock of iron-red flecks against bowl, the water placid, unmoved. There was hardly any pain. What could we do but continue on as scattered street-lamps gradually revealed a landscape inhabited once again: the still shuttered windows of bungalows pink as scrubbed flesh, the small dark yards of abandoned Bigwheels and plots of petunias or cukes, the closed, expectant mailboxes and the living already dead inside me.