By February, Cindy had lost her sense of humor. She was twenty-five and having her first break-up with her only love. She was on the highway back to her hometown, Carlsbad--a slow and brightly-lighted town full of Mexicans and cowboys and Mexican cowboys, a town that smelled of creosote in the morning, whose lament was made of mourning doves and creaking pecan branches. A modest river, the Pecos, crept through this place.
She grew up in a blue house next to the river which brought her many offerings. Her first vision of death was a rotting carp that baked in the grass. Her second vision was a bloated goose. When she was nine, she did not see it, but the Pecos offered a dead human body near the Bataan Bridge, according to her parents’ morning conversation one day. This river offered coins and rusted cans, a tire, a shopping cart, mosquitos, slimy bottles, and once when she rode her bike into the water, it offered back a young girl and her bicycle. This was her first and only attempt at suicide. It was the first of three waves of depression Cindy would have in her life. She was eleven.
The end:
The Pecos River really put on a show this time of day. At Lower Tansill Dam, the sun was setting as she parked her car and got out. The sky was cotton candy. It was fire. It was water and the river was the sky. They reflected onto each other in a great display of rainbow sherbet colors. Cindy began to jog along the bank of the river. She was almost to the Bataan Bridge when she spotted it. Her spirit was gliding in and out of the water. It had turned almost completely into water itself and wore a necklace of old bottles, rusted coins and fishbones around its neck. Cindy stopped and watched for a moment. It saw her watching and curled its scaly fingers at her. She smiled and decided to jog back to her car. It was time to meet her friend for dinner. She wasn’t exactly sure how she would get a hold of her spirit, but Cindy knew she wouldn’t leave this town again with out it.
<3 is really all i can say.
ReplyDelete