Gaylord Brewer

Gaylord Brewer

Nocturne

The storm has cooled the night, and although I read today that the month just ended was the hottest in recorded human history, I sit quietly in pleasant darkness. Summers after they vanished, a few lightning bugs have returned to chart their positions. Not the blinking skies of my childhood, but numbers sufficient to encourage.

Perhaps I focus too much on losses—those arrived, those surely coming. Not to do so is a continual challenge. For many years I called out the clutches of baby screech owls from our woods. There was a precise shade of twilight that I came to know expertly, the tangible moment to hurry from the dinner table and begin my primitive trills at the edge of the clearing. They would arrive, swift and silent, often landing only feet above me. Keen, inquisitive, defining their merciless lives. We would do this dance every evening in summer and into autumn, until it was too dark for human eyes and I ceded to them their domain of night.

For a moment the heat has relented. I listen to my breathing and let the dark settle into me. This wounded world, this immensity, to be a small part of it but belonging no less than any other. Somewhere behind, above the crickets and katydids, a tremulous, descending wail begins, a call I once attempted to learn. Ghostly hunter returned to say hello, or goodbye, or merely to gaze at what remains.

Gaylord Brewer

The Beemer and the Doe

I heard the impact from 100 yards. By the time I’d jogged to the end of Primrose Lane, the tableau of carnage was determined. Her position, 50 feet behind, on the grassy berm opposite, head lying toward the street, made no sense to me. Had she tried to run, and spun as she collapsed? The delicate legs shattered beneath her, their unnatural angles hard to witness. She looked at me, panting hard, tongue thick in her mouth. I knelt and stroked the beautiful, muscled neck, whispered what I could. My heart hammering. No way to end her pain.

The driver leaned on the fender in his pressed slacks, open shirt collar, unseasonal tan and swoop of sandy hair. Ray-Bans. Barking inconvenience into his phone, he never once looked back. I approached the BMW—a 330i sedan, Mediterranean blue, polished to a shine—and took what pleasure I could from its mangled grill, shattered headlight. This man was, of course, my enemy. I recognized him, hated him, wished him harm.

I hiked on as planned, east along Highway 96. Late afternoon. The day shimmering, palpable. It was no good. I felt dizzy. Overwhelmed with anger. I turned and walked back, past the car, past the man still animate with self-concern, back to where she lay. A pool of foam around the parted lips. The green eye a glassy marble. The chest still. The mercy of death, and no need for useless sympathy. That wild beauty gone from the earth.