my feet. I walk towards that goat. That silver goat on the other side of the field… that goat with gilded horns and cogent words... it stands up on its two legs and stares… stares at me with its beady dead dyes… and I blink, and it’s gone. But I can feel it. I can feel it in the air. It’s beating in my ears. Like glass scraping at the inside of my skull. Like knives in my eyes. Something is wrong. I run, run as fast as possible, towards that wretched spot where the goat stood. And instead, I find a hole. A hole marked by a spade planted like a flag in the dirt. Eight feet long, three feet wide, six feet down; in that hole is the woman, the woman in the rain, and the woman is at the bottom of the hole.
What did you do? No, no, no. I turn around. For a second, it feels… only a second. Glance back at my truck. I just gotta get my head on straight. I gotta fix this. I grab my shovel and turn back… I just gotta clean this up. Clean up this mess. Except the woman is gone. The dirt is pressed, different, as if she climbed out. She was dead… she was not alive… I know she wasn’t alive. Was she ever alive? I twist my head, around and around, for some hint. She can’t have just disappeared. This is the middle of nowhere. But I can feel her. I can feel her like glass in my eyes. I stare out… out at the sunrise. The sunrise that isn’t. The sun, the sun has reversed course. It’s got stage-fright. It’s scared. It’s creeping back east. Down and down and down until it’s safe and under the horizon. The sky is falling: it’s raining, it’s drizzling, it’s drizzling, and then it’s pouring. It’s pouring down, pouring down on me. It’s a monsoon of dread. And soon I’m drenched: drenched in rain and fear.
You can’t escape.
The Wayne Literary Review: Escapism
20
