Every Bright Thing

THE LAST DAYS OF SUMMER always bring trouble. The glaring sky, a mean and spreading thing, light-streaky and dangerous. The white-baking heat, sticky as a loyal dog’s panting, everything smeared with flies. Ain’t nothin’ gentle out here, the sunlight fierce enough to peel the skin off your thoughts, the dry wind bitter with the stench of rotting metal. Overhead, a red-tailed hawk cries once — a sharp, lonely kinda noise that sounds exactly how I feel inside — but then falls silent.

 

Right. Focus, Daniel. You’re almost there now, fighting through the trees that grab and snatch, kicking up a stomp past the high-voltage substation, past the fleabag motel, my eyes gone narrow on the field where it happened, my brain flooding with memories. Soft flesh meeting frozen soil. The biting stink of gas. The whisper of broken wings overhead.

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The sorry patch of dirt where my mom died.    

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Sight of it freezes me solid, the memory of that night like a fist squeezing my insides til I can’t hardly breathe for the choking of it. So now I’m mad-face starin’ at the broke motel, with its gap-toothed porch and rotting shutters. The stubborn mess of ferns punching wild through the fence.

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Guess I’m tryna look at anythin’ other than the field where it happened.   

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Where my childhood ended. 

  

​But as for the silly mind pictures, this is where they started. The visions. The fantasy. As if the only way to deal with the madness of the world was to trouble it with make-believe. Worlds where my mom didn’t die. Where we went home that night and argued about what to watch on TV. Where I turned into a vaguely normal teenager and started hating on her.

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But maybe that’s how we survive what can’t ever be undone. We create what never was, hoping it somehow fills the space of what can never be again. It’s basic mathematics. Cut out the part that burns, add some wishful thinking, and hope it somehow equals somethin’ you can live with.

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Because I still think about that night.

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How quiet it got after the noise stopped. How the stars look different when you’re lying on your back in a field of broken glass. Although the teachers say it’s normal. Part of the process, they call it. As if grief is somethin’ you can finish, like homework, or washing the dishes.

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And so the years roll by, and sure, the pain dulls somewhat, but I still get a bad taste in my mouth as I pass by — ash and lead and something like paint stripper. It don’t matter that years have passed since they winched our broken car through the fence and towed it away. It don’t matter that I’ve stomped this ground a thousand times, eyes downcast like I’m huntin’ for something, ‘cause here I am again, like I’m forever bearing witness, forever hoping to learn some sorta secret truth as to why things fell apart the way they did, like knowin’ the shape of it might make this tale my own, as if through ownership, I might finally understand. 

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Behind me, the motel’s neon sign flickers in the gloom of the trees. No Vacancy. No Vacancy. No Vacancy. Even though it’s been abandoned for years.

 

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IT’S A SUNDAY TODAY, that slippery nowhere day that tastes of last-minute homework panic. But it’s also my birthday, the big fifteen. Supposedly some kinda milestone, although I’m not real sure what I’m meant to be celebrating. ‘Cause even with the warm slosh of vodka burning through my veins, this whole day has been a bust. For starters, I woke up again. That was Mistake Number One. Continuing to exist — CHECK. Because time don’t always feel like a gift, and in the last few years, time made me an empty boy, a creature made from nothin’ more than black coffee grounds and cigarette ash, my fragile heart stuffed into my chest like a dead fox in a shopping bag. And I know that sounds dramatic, but honestly, sometimes consciousness feels overrated when your main achievement for this year has been not setting fire to the house again.

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So after knocking back some coffee and the World’s Briefest Fight with Dad — he’d woken up drunk again and forgotten what day it was — I fled outside, letting the door bang spite behind me. And for a while, it was better. Because it’s always better outside. Running through the slick of morning wet. Through the giant cathedral of leaves. Vast tracks of land unrolling under a cloudless sky, calling to me, seductive, like a summons. It’s quiet out here, in the place where the grass sleeps, in the place where the sky is so blue it looks like a mirror, the kinda blue that thoughts look like before you say the words out loud. This is my land. Glacier-carved, star-gulping forest spreading clean to where the world drops off. Out here is where I can run myself empty, where the loneliness of the vast wash of light is calming, where I’ll start at one side of holler and by the time I reach the far end, I’ve somehow managed to lose the overwhelming ache of my smallness.        

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But then I go and ruin it by running past the old motel. The field where the Bad Thing happened. Because there’s still somethin’ about it that draws me in, somethin’ that whispers of hidden depths and secrets, even on a day like today, under the all-too-revealing light of the wildly aggressive sunshine. I don’t know. I think maybe I’m a little weird. Weirder than most kids. Like maybe the wrongness of this place has seeped into my bones. Because there's somethin' happens in places marked by death. Time folds back on itself. Folds so deep a boy could drown in them.

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So that’s me, drowning.

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But even I know this ain’t no proper way to birthday. Especially on a day like today, when even the grit on the road is melting. Reckon it’s time to head home again. Dad will be out at a bar, or asleep on the couch. The house will be quiet. I can make a sandwich, watch TV, do some writing. Besides, there’s a storm fixin’ to break, no two ways about it — I can feel it like an itch, a tension, stretched tight across the sky.    

        

Ducking back into the forest, I veer off towards the bird traps. Rough, triangular cages made from bunches of sticks held together with twine. Creepy as fuck. No one knows who put ‘em there, deep in the blue-dark guts of the forest. Arcane. Shimmering. Twisted somehow. Things better left alone. Or at least, that’s what folks in town say. I figure they’re trapdoors to something else, but somethin’ beautiful or somethin’ wicked, I couldn’t say. Perhaps they’re a symbol for who we were before. As a town, I mean. Before Mom’s accident, before the railroad closed and the economy tanked. Some folks say they’re haunted, but I ain’t so sure, I reckon it’s people do the haunting round here. ‘Cause all these small towns have their secrets, their tales of grief that strip the earth in two. And this town ain’t no exception. Even the roads round here are dodgy. Dead ends leading to dead hollers. Where you end up depends on who you ask.

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But this line of thinkin’ only sets me on edge, and slowly, the anxiety returns, spreading, flourishing, like a lit match on a trail of gasoline. Submerged childhood memories. High chaos inside my head. Ghosts and monsters, loud and violent, black water broken only by shark fins. Because why not add actual predators to my metaphorical anxiety ocean? So even though I’m tryna breathe normal again, the back of my neck feels hot and prickly, almost like I’m being watched. But when I scan the trees around me, there ain’t no one — only the lonely black rag of a single crow, sittin’ up high on the last of the oaks, and I briefly wonder how much of my small and anxious world he can see from all the way up there.

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I throw a rock at it. Miss. The crow doesn’t move. Just stares at me.

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“Come on Danny, pull yourself together,” I whisper. But the fear remains, deep-buried, instinctual.