FREE SHORT STORY - Iron Horse (One boy's wildness ... destroyed)

[NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: What I don't want is misunderstanding. There's enough of that going around. Our perspective is limited, and I find it increasingly difficult to survey the world with one's head rammed up the collective ass. What is this mythical collective ass I speak of? It is the flashing banners, the salesman and peddlers, the white teeth and perfect bodies, the scalpels and the pills, the sound of gnashing teeth and babies crying, and the whimpering of dogs. It is the need, my friend. THE NEED. This story isn't about green energy or conscious heroism. It isn't about the celebration of our antecedents or their rituals. It's about life, you fools. It's about living. And with that ... cue exit music)]  

SUNSET

The natives were draped in feathers and paint and the dead skin of animals. They wore bones and rocks and woven reeds. And how they sang. Long into the night. Honoring the darkness. The dawn. Honoring the heavy winds that tore their hogans, the droughts that starved their goats. Worshipping death and life with equal fervor, those selfsame brothers fused eye-to-eye through the fogged mirror of eternity. They drank and laughed and rutted like the wild things they were. Yet found the time to sit. To be quiet atop the Mother’s rumbling crust and contemplate their place upon it.

They gave with all their heart, until the heart itself stopped pumping. And dead, they breathed ashes into the soil.

Such was their way.

Until.

The man pointed up and down the ridgeline, his face bloody in the sunset. “We need it all.”

He spoke their tongue, but it was clumsy, emoting none of the nature sounds from which the language itself had risen. It was dead in his mouth. Stagnant instead of flowing.

The elder frowned at him, looking back at the children, their children, the husbands, wives, warriors and shepherds, as patient and unassuming as the tall rocks surrounding them. “I do not understand. Who can need a mountain?”

“I do.” The man straightened his strange black garb, open at the breast, white plant fiber fastened with polished round clasps. No color. No identity. “The Iron Horse gallops closer as we speak.”

“Your horse has leave to graze here.”

“The Iron Horse eats steam, old man. Not grass. It runs on steel tracks that must be laid. And it gallops toward this mountain. The Iron Horse must eat.”

The elder smiled. “The Great Spirit feeds all things.”

“Then you will move?”

“Move where?”

“Away. Anywhere.”

“The land does not belong to us; but us to it. For many fathers of my father we have lived and danced and prayed here. Why should any Iron Horse endanger that? Many horses track the land. There is room enough for many.”

“The Iron Horse does not share.”

“I see.” He looked back at the children, the women, all naked, looking strangely at one another. “Go now.” The elder motioned him off with a shake of his medicine cane. “You frighten them.”

The man clenched his jaw. “I’ll go. But be warned. The Iron Horse rides with or without your permission. I am only his emissary. You will find his warriors less forgiving.”

The elder straightened himself, holding his cane like a spear. “We will live or we will die. They are the same to us; a face, and its reflection.”

The man backed up and paused, scowling over his shoulder. “Don’t those women know they’re naked?”

The females crossed their arms over their breasts.

When the Elder turned to face the man his eyes were filled with tears. “Not until today did they know. But you have changed all that.”    

DAWN

The boy woke with a start.

The dream slid off with his sheets, and he was running, hopping on one foot down the hall to slide his socks on. On the stairs he almost fell while slipping on his jeans. They were filthy, but he didn’t care.

Mother yelled for him, but he snatched a pastry off the table and rushed out the back door before she could make it down the hall. Over the fence and into the forest. He heard the clap of wood behind him. Turned in time to see his dog wiggle through a loose plank.

“Hurry up, y’fleabag! Catch me if you can!”

Into the summer, the breeze thick with freedom, the hickory sugar of sunbaked bark. Fields of dandelion and morning glory. Ferns and tangled vine. He ran and climbed and roared aloud, pretending he was a cowboy, that there were raiders come in from an evil tribe, out to steal the women. He broke branches to use them as rifles. And when he pretended to be gutshot, he fell to his back and came alive at the familiar wetness of a sniffing nose.

The sun sank lower in the sky.

He was hungry, and in his hunger changed his game. Now he was a horse, running, running. There was another horse, meaner, larger. A horse that couldn’t share. It chased him into the thicker canopies, where the light barely touched. He imagined himself naked, free, a part of the woods themselves. And he wasn’t afraid when the sky was dark, for he was a part of that darkness. He was the land. And the land was him.

At dinner he felt ashamed.

“Wash your hands,” mother said. “I won’t have that filth in my house. Not at the table.”

He washed, somehow saddened to watch the spirals of dark water disappear. Sinking into a place removed and far away. A place that was still a part of this place, but assumed to not exist. So people like mother could be happy.

At the table Mother said, “Your clothes, too. Don’t make me tell you twice.”

He changed them, not wanting to, but knowing he’d be grounded from the forest if he disobeyed. She’d done it before. Father, too. They didn’t like the dirt or its vastness; preferred lights to the boiling sun. On sunny days they stayed inside, watching the images of a screen. 

Mother smiled when he entered in his fresh clothes. “That’s better. Now sit and say your prayers.” She laced her hands to show him. “Thank God for the meal.”

He did so, wondering why they thanked a God they couldn’t see, while ignoring the land that provided it. He closed his eyes but no prayer came, save the faint earthy smell of his knuckles. He pulled it deep into his lungs, imagined the miles and leagues and universes of stone and tree and mountaintop. The places and things that could never be tamed. He thought he could feel the same wildness in his own heart. An unconquerable strength.

Then the prayer was done.

“You’re father’s working at the plant again. They keep him so long, these days. He’s needed, your father is. There’s so much coal in these hills, and they need a man smart enough to pull it up.”

That sickened him, though he could not say why. He forced himself to smile. “Did you get your hair done?”

Mother beamed. “I did. The second time this week, I know. But a woman has to look presentable. I didn’t like blonde as much as I thought I would. Burgundy is more my color. Claire says it brings out my eyes.”

The boy thought it brought out the flush in her nose and cheeks. She was drinking again, more now that Father was gone. “It looks nice.”

“Well, aren’t you just the gentleman.”

Silence as they ate. A silence filled with aches and pains, with unsaids and unspeakables, and so much shame it hurt his heart just to chew. There was Mother, drinking at the table, changing her hair and clothes, washing the dirt from his body so they might sit here and pretend.

“And what did you do all day? In a forest, of all places.”

The boy looked out the window, into the dark, knowing what lay behind it, what stretched into infinity until it circled back upon itself. The places that could not be bought and sold, forced or compromised, not truly, not forever. The place where boys could run free and feel dirt and sweat and silence.

He shrugged. “Nothing, really.”

She wouldn’t understand.

Hadn’t been outside in years.

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