Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #12

Christina’s World Ultimately, says a friend, each of us is alone. She says it standing beside me, both of us paused on the canyon’s rim, staring at what we’d trekked here to see -the mud-froth torrent churning far below, grain by grain nibbling through rock, deeper toward the Earth’s core.

She’s lost her mate recently to one of those man-eating multi-syllable synonyms for mayhem worming its way bite by bite into the brain.

Forgive me, she says, for my morbid mood, but you know what I mean. A bothersome ache one morning, a twitch, a numbness. Say goodbye to steak, goodbye martinis. Goodbye walking in the garden, goodbye walking anywhere.

Goodbye to dressing yourself. Goodbye speech, goodbye even to guessing whatever there was once to say.

She doesn’t speak all this, but we both can hear it nearby, in the river grinding its way onward.

We can hear it in our footsteps. And in the trail unwinding, descending. And in the wind under the black wings of a raven wafting by.

Lowell Jaeger