The Substance of Things nicholas welch

The Substance of Things

by nicholas welch

Three men entered town on horseback, Chapped in conformed leather. The halcyon was fresh and faint veins of blue frost had appeared on the roof of the saloon. Something pulsed in that particular darkness, most alien to the incognizant being.

No one stared. No one stopped––a single boy asked his mother if he was real. A train whistle blew shrilly, like the heart-squeezing stroke of midnight. They hitched the horses, the second and last men leaving their guns in horse-slung holsters.

They embraced each other as would brothers, and then began their final journeys.

The first entered the saloon with a brazen, horse-mounted gait, and sat––One bourbon, down like burning Byzantine fire. A heavily suppressed admission of inexperience adamantly kept in his throat. His eyes drifted and suddenly settled, with intent. Modestly pale, kind, a daunting profundity: a concise connection made his heart nearly burst mid-flight, surpassing an unwritten capacitance he had, perhaps, previously perceived. Later, he spent the night in a room upstairs, wondering if he went unnoticed––if he could, by small degrees, know the feeling more definitively. ‘A hope and a future’ echoed somewhere in the numb ecstasy of his mind.

The other two men went to the washroom, to cleanse the dust, muck, and filth from their bodies. The second whistled and, when he stepped from the water, he shaved and cut long locks of matted hair. He bid the last man a kind farewell, and went just outside of town, resolutely, to collect Ophelia’s violets––later, appearing on a doorstep.

The last man smiled. He walked down by the river, watching its gentle current–– walking with it, toward home.

like mercifully dabbed pastel in the mist of snow that had quietly begun.

Dark petals melted against water which was ever impeding its own regathering.

The last man knocked twice and waited. Opening the door, he saw the familiar stead. The hearth where he felt his fire had always burned, even when it knew assurance not. The only furniture left was skeletal. Coarse burlap cream still sheltered the windows.

He built up a small pyre of kindling and felt for his matchbook. He laughed, suddenly: remembering. Striking the match, it fizzled and crackled and he nursed it under the wood with patience.

The last cowboy sat down in an old arm chair in front of the fire. In his sleep, he met her, in fields of sienna and lavender. Roses were pinned in her raven hair.