Dry Heat

Dirt

a short story

by Ashley Horton

            There’s a driveway that you have to turn onto to get to the house. The driveway is long, winding, and exhausting, even to the vehicle you use to tackle it. White tree trunks line the dirt road, their green leaves reaching to the sky, blocking the blue from sight and filtering sunshine to the ground, dappling the tire tracks and footprints in the dust. It is obvious that many people have been down this path, simply from the criss- crossing tire imprints of trucks, cars, and motorcycles, mixed and intertwined with the footprints of people who wandered, helplessly searching for something that they knew they’d perhaps never find.

            Sunlight hours are calm summer days, when the trees blow gently in the wind and grass rustles with the scurrying of some unknown creatures, sunlight hours are light, happiness incarnate. It seems that even when you step on the tracks of those who have come before you, they don’t disappear, as if keeping record of previous travellers. You don’t wonder who they were in the sunlight hours, you just go on, and on, and on.

            Eventually there’s a break in the trees on one side, and you find a field, a creek running through, peppered with bowing willows and trembling birches, and people. You know these people, they’re your friends, and you jump the old wooden fence to join them. They’re having picnics on towels in various states of dress, some obviously just finished swimming and others obviously haven’t been in. They wave you in, sit you down. There is nothing, nothing but warm smiles, kind laughter, respect and appreciation, and wonder. One of them takes your hand, intertwining their fingers with yours, and you know then that you’re in love. You’re not scared, you just float with it, moving as a part of the creek. Everyone gets up to swim, and you’re the first in- a brave move, a stupid move, but one you laugh at making. They follow, and you start a water fight, then chicken, then marco polo, and races to the bend and back. The water is perfect, a perfect temperature and a perfect speed.

            When you’ve climbed out and you’re all lying around on the towels, some holding hands, some talking, some kissing, some even sleeping, you watch the sunset and its beautiful colors like you’ve never seen one, blood orange and red fading into a lighter orange, a pink, a yellow, purple in the farthest reaches of the light and fading up into the deep blue of the night. Tiny pinpricks, needle stabs of purity, dot the darkness, and the sky seems so big that you can see how round the world is.

            And then it’s crushing, it seems too big, a crushing weight that you carry alone. You drop the hand in yours and get up, they don’t move. You know they’re sleeping, but somehow, you don’t think they’re sleeping. Paranoid, you turn and sprint back to the wooden fence. It’s rotting now, falling apart under your touch, and as you vault over it you fall and skin your knees, your elbows. You brush off, you get up, you keep going, but those beautiful trees are crippled now, crippled and black and rotting like the fence, they’re not pretty, they’re riddled with holes from some type of personage. Your breathing is labored, and now you realize what you didn’t before, that walking along this path you are truly alone. There are no leaves now, nothing to block out the crushing sky and its overbearing moon, you feel it in your chest, that you’re going to explode, and when you can’t run anymore, you drop, you fall to your knees and clutch at your head, you take handfuls of your own hair and scream but no sound comes out, and you cry and you beat at the ground and you claw at your throat because for some reason you just can’t breathe, and you know on the inside, somewhere in your head, that you weren’t meant to live past this, that this is it for you and this is where your footprints will end.

            There are other footprints that end here. There are other tracks, from other people, that end here. You can’t see them, but they’re there, a testament to those who weren’t meant to, or just couldn’t, just past this, a breaking point, and they just stopped walking. But there are also those tracks that stopped for a while, you would be able to tell if you saw them by the depth of the depression, and then moved along and kept going. Without meaning to be, you are the latter, you are pulling yourself along with some last shred of hope that you can get to another happy place, like the last one, because you know you can’t go back, because you know without trying that whatever is behind you can’t be changed or returned to, so even though you’re lying in the dirt where a thousand others have probably fallen and struggled, you persevere and end up crawling. When you get tired, when you’re about to give up, you sit, you just sit, against those old dead trees, those crooked twisted cracked branches, and you close your eyes, and some part of you says a silent prayer to a deity you sometimes, like now, have a difficult time believing in.

            When you open your eyes, you’re leaning against a living tree, it’s once again green leaves singing in the comfortable breeze, and you no longer feel alone as the sunlight filtering through the restored branches creates patterns on your skin, and you hear whispers on the wind, too quiet to understand anything but snippets. Adventures have happened here, they whisper. Futures have started here, people have ended here, things have begun, sometimes they start and sometimes they just stop, what are you going to do?

            You get up slowly, avoiding a vertigo, and meander on. You pay more attention to other tracks now, The paths people have taken. You take in your surroundings and see the different trails, where courageous or maybe just hopelessly lost bodies have tried to hold their own. You feel now, a fear, a tightness in your chest. A worry overall, that night will come again.

            For that is the moonlight hours on the driveway, terror and panic, damage and decay, hatred and anger. Those are the less than amiable qualities, the ones you attempt to hide, the ones that create your insecurities and send you into a sort of turmoil you don’t know if you can pull yourself out of alone.

            And come again it does, you stay on the path this time to see the decay in its process, and then wish you hadn’t. The trees fade, as if the beauty were simply a glamour, and the sky darkens. You simply decide not to move, you won’t reach another breaking point, not like yesterday’s, not tonight. You’ll stand here until the sun comes up again, even if the trees stay dead and the wind still howls. Did the wind howl like that last night?

            A black shape flickers into form in front of you, unclear, a shadow. You know somehow that you have to defeat it, or it will stick with you- a fact only emphasized when you walk past it and it follows close behind. A demon? No, your demon, one of them, the many you have, and you know you’ll have to face them all or learn to control them as they walk behind you. Pick your battles. You are unwilling to fight the first, the second, the third, the fourth, and find yourself sprinting to keep their breathing off of your back during the darkest hours of the night.

            The fifth is too large, and they overwhelm you. You fall, you lie on the ground with every intention of letting them devour you, letting them take what they want and leave the rest of you behind. You simply squeeze your eyes shut, and hold up your hands instinctively to cover your face.

            A touch, lighter than a feather, almost as undefinable as air, on your arm. You open your eyes slowly, and feel love, something you haven’t had on these dark, brooding crusades.

            You’re here? You say.

            I’ve always been here. You only had to call. They say, holding their hand out.

            You stare at it. You can get up alone. You have muscle, you don’t need the offered hand. Why should they help you up when you can do it just fine all on your own? Stupid.

            Accept help.

            You take the hand, stand, and brush off your clothing. Then you tangle your fingers like on the creek, and you walk on together. The demons follow, but they’re quiet and farther away, and there is one less.

            Pride.

            You feel lighter, you feel safer, and the black world melts away like a mirage. Daylight has returned, and you now walk together, partners, sharing in the mystery. You notice that your footsteps merge in some places, though there are somehow still distinctive trails of two. Your lives have become entangled.

            They help you keep going when pitch falls again, and this time, they brush you off, too. Even as you gain  demons, you lose some. You’ve found a reason to smile even when you feel the verge of death, a gaping chasm stretching out before you in one direction while a future stretches out in the other. You see this, you look at it every night, but do not face or acknowledge it, until they leave you.

            When you hit the earth that night and stare into the open maw, you make your choice. Find them. They are everything. And this time, they are more than one. Those you love and those who love you, they’re waiting, expecting you.

            You turn and stand alone, and walk. When the shadows behind you get too close, and their breath heats the back of your neck, you turn, and you take them. One by one, the demons go down, and gradually, the sky gets lighter.

            Just before dawn, they’re gone, mostly, a remnant hangs around inside your head. You’ve reached the house you thought you’d never find, a large robin’s egg blue two-story with white trim, a dark gray roof, and matching shutters on the outside. A big porch, a white swing, swinging in the winds. The chimney is smoking. And suddenly you know-- they’re there, but you can’t see them.

            You approach the steps, and a shadow materializes, mirroring you. It is not quite you, but how you see yourself inside and out, conceited, shy, arrogant, cheating, failing, whoring, pathetic, losing, depressed, worthless, happy, sad, angry, distracted. It is everything you hate about yourself, clothing, hair, shoes, teeth, eyes, face, posture, body shape. It shows you what you look like to you, and no one else.

            Only once you have beaten this you, you know, will you be able to join your people.

            One at a time, you stare down your self-constructed faults and accept them, crying, screaming, hurting, but no one can hear you, no one can see you, and no one is there to take your hand this time. Inside, you feel that you’re burning. But you keep going. Teeth are fine, hair is fine, I’m not a failure, I’m not a whore. I’m attractive, I’m smart. I’m important. Important. Important.

            The sun sets, and rises once more. By that time, though you are profusely sweating, you have beaten yourself, and you feel strong. You feel invigorated, better.

            And the people, the people you were looking for, they’re in the windows and on the roof, on the porch and in the yard, sitting on the steps. There are more inside the house, more behind it. You never realized how many people cared for you, how much you cared for them, and needed them. You never knew how much they needed you. They smile, wave, continue on. There seems to be something cooking, and there’s a pitcher of iced tea on the window sill that everyone has a glass of. Those who were strong enough to continue, must have found their own heaven, must have found their true happiness. You gaze around, smile slowly threatening to stretch across your exhausted, beaten face, and the one, one person that you were looking for above all else, holds out their hand for you from your side.

            Where were you? You ask, taking it.

            I never left you.

            You listen to the happiness for a moment, and then let yourself smile.

            None of us did.

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