Summering
When young, only the summers counted as time. They were all that mattered. Summertime meant valuable time, where the days were long and lush, like hanging gardens where the growth is constant. Summer was when everything changed, as opposed to winter, where the trees remain as small stunts of sameness, glued over eyes in the form of the short duration of days that feel so long. To a farmer, summers matter. Often it was when Mr. Wicker would think back to a year and refer to it as one summer ago, or thirty years past as thirty summers past. For Winky and his classmates, summers were the only time they felt the glimpse of the wild world extending outward and into them and past them, past the wide woods and blue hazed mountains and infinite seascapes. But in winter, the suns always seemed to stay hidden within their shorter days, stuck beyond the strangled branches of nude, unleafed trees, and one looking to find the olden shades still left over from those larger, longer, summer days, do so just to feel whole again.
It was summer once more, and had been so now for many years. He had spent this time arriving to his transport, and waiting to be taken. He was always arriving, always leaving. Somewhere awaited his presence just as much as somewhere else held his absence. He had lived and died so many lives that, the one he held now had become no different than any of the others. Each life had a past, and each one had undergone a change to make it somehow separate, yet the same. In him, when he thought this, he thought this strange and that his thoughts were just that: thoughts and nothing more. Returning across country, exploring the uplands, wide across streams that got first acquainted with time before anything else, or anyone else even, had become a piecemeal for the tramping life that would not cease nor release him. Roaming through fun and noble cities under differing stars, and looking through one’s memory and seeing for a chance how something really is, rather than how it is thought to be, made the experience all the more grand. Here he was, happy as the stars, his new night sky, those twinkling friends after sundown, set deep within their rich atmosphere of color.
It had been several days since he’d been on the trains, and instead he’d spent the time wandering past people and trees, and headed deep into a thicket of thought till it ended up dark, as the sunlight became blocked by multicolored leaves. His ankles hurt, and he’d grown wary by then, and began searching for a stream where he could soak his feet, and the rest of himself, if possible. He still carried some of that leftover soap, but he was loath to use it since he had no fresh clothes to change into. Still wearing the fancy suit he’d stolen from the actor’s closet, his trousers were muddied and haggard and frayed at the ends, and the fabric had casually unhooked from around his ankles in several uneven rips, as if to imply that it had grown overtired too.
He’d lost some weight, so his bottoms sagged as his pant legs dragged from under, mopping up burrs and other irritating parts of earth to the point of the fabric itself being almost unrecognizable. The lapels on his jacket were now black, and carried the weight of a thousand trains. And beneath his dirty patch, held skin that had gone undisturbed by sunlight, thereby leaving that under part untanned. O what he wouldn’t have done for some food and a cool bath. He’d have traded off all his trinkets if it meant he could have just that. (Most of them he mailed off to his mother, with a telegram, as promised).
He had heard stories about boys, or men rather, his age drowning in rivers and becoming part of the very stream that killed them. ‘Such would be a noble way to die,’ he thought. To become fluid and fluent, a free-formed amoeba, free as the ever-rapid stream, as its parts and particles entered the lungs of whomever it decided to take, thereby making that person forever part of it, and forever freed. He was not considering suicide- such was not his style. But to him, and everything he’d ever heard from church, death was the penultimate juncture before life as how he imagined it, and such was what had to occur before one could truly live into the mind of another, affecting the world, and becoming ‘part or particle of God’ as Emerson wrote. To find rivers and waters and fast moving currents unheeding, that reach up and find you, grabbing and pulling from their bottomless places. The world, of course, is never bottomless, but it seemed almost as if the sea were alive and filled with active arms and hands that went on clasping for something to carry down with it. It is never bottomless, this world, but to a child’s mind, it most certainly is, altered by youth and imagined whims into something outer and without limit. Part land, part stream, part ocean, part steam, but all of it earth. Not that Winky went around quoting Emerson, for books held little interest for him. But he’d think oftentimes about similar sorts of things these great writers and thinkers from his past once did, often quoting his own theories and saying them aloud, where no one could hear. He’d say them, just perhaps not as well, and would leave the thoughts in the air to muster and roam unclaimed, as the artist does, who sketches upon a napkin only to marvel, then dismiss, in a single swipe of spilled beer.
And then something all too predictable happened. He was hungry, and had not had a bite to eat for what felt like days. Wandering through the bog amid tall grasses, he didn’t know what it was he was expecting to find there, or why he’d even turned that way at all. When one is hungry, one should always turn to the places where there are people, not this vast, uninhabited land. What reached before him were miles of marsh and trees and green-coated weeds. The grasses reached far past his knees, and some to his waist even. But he was lucky, in that what he found was a plan he could not compromise.
Tall above him, at a seeming height unattainable, was a tree where a few bees scattered. Pinching the sun from his eyes, he looked up and saw there was a hive, and what he imagined to be a ton of honey. To reach it, he’d have to climb for it, and probably get stung as result. Wishing then that he had some gunpowder and smoke, alas he did not and would have to carry the burden on his own. Bees were funny like that- always out and ready to sting, yet whirling in their secret whim inside the hive. They should be the stronger ones, he thought, and yet how they feared smoke, the thought of it must have evoked fire in their little minds, making them carry off their honey, and growing drowsy with thick sleep. Had he the smoke to distract them, none would come for him.
He reached for several rocks and aimed them at the hive, but he managed to miss every time. After a while he grew bored with this, and his stomach was not willing to wait. In his mouth, he could already taste the honey. ‘One final throw’, he said to himself, as he reached again for another stone and did just that, this time hitting the hive at its center. The act appeared to loosen it, but the hive still hung. This act upset the bees, and a few flew out, looking for something to blame. Growing more impatient, he figured the hell with it, and figured he should just climb. So, setting his sack on the ground beside, he went for the tree and used his lanky limbs to pull him upward. Upon approach, the noise or the vibration must have startled them, for a few more were flying about in an attempt to startle whatever this disruption was. Circling, several coaxed across his hands, and made him almost lose balance. He swore under his breath, and got high enough just so he could reach it, and with a single swipe of his fist, he knocked the stubborn shit out of it, and the hive and all its inhabitants came down with a wet thud, as the noise was enough to startle him as well- the bees and all their buzzing, flying about like beasts. The boy remained in the tree for an added moment, as the bees began to circle and confront their enemy, stinging his hands, his face, through his trousers what must have felt a thousand times. Letting go, he fell too, just as the hive had minutes before, and hit the swampy ground with an intensity that made his lungs feel they’d collapsed. Swarming and swimming about him, they proceeded to protect what was theirs, till he ran off into a stream and dunked his head, hollering first, and then holding his breath till the bees forgot about him and just flew off. The cool water felt smooth over the stings, but all he could think about was the honey, this reward that awaited him.
Each one of their stings evoked a little fire upon his skin. They were painful, yes, but nothing he couldn’t handle. He was older now anyway, and he’d dealt with worse. Allowing the anger of the bees to subside, he stayed put awhile and watched as an indifferent water bug surfaced across in a crawl, delicately balanced by the intimacy of legs that knew just the right amounts of pressure to place against the fluid without disturbing its stance. Winky watched the bug glide gracefully in form, controlled as an ice skater, and he wondered then if his adolescence had ever let him get as close to nature as that of a bug balanced upon a thin meniscus of moisture.
He did not let the creature crawl out from his sight, and he watched till the bug reached the small swampy parcel of land. Then it made an attempt to pull itself upward and out from the water in several small sweeps. He watched it stumble a bit till its legs graced a shape that suited it.
Sitting submerged in the slow-moving swampy stream, he did not disturb the creature with a splash as he might have done in the past, but he did not assist it either. Rather, he watched as the creature climbed out from the wetness, and danced over a rotting log till it found another side that held no sun and vanished from sight.
As his stomach continued to insist he attend to it, he rose from his spot and began slowly crawling out, dripping and sore, and reached for the honey with what strength he could manage. Most of the bees were gone, and those that were not, he figured, ‘what was a few more, then?’ Cracking open the hive with his bare hand made him feel like some badger, or a grizzly even, as he sucked the combs of all their sugar. When he was done, he walked to find a drier spot, and removed his clothes. His frame was covered in red, bumpy stings, and it hurt any way he sat. So, leaning upward against a tree, he shut his one eye, and within some fist he felt close against him, he did not fight it as sleep gathered all around and swallowed him in.
*************
“What happened ta you?” a small boy asked him when he woke. Looking around, Winky saw the similar surrounds that had grown so familiar over so many months.
“I lost my eye a while back, and it hasn’t been the same since,” he responded.
“No, I mean about these. What happened to make you get all these?” the boy asked, pointing to his stings.
“Oh, I got stung.”
“Musta been a pretty big bee then, huh?” the boy asked. He appeared only about six or seven, dirty and covered in months of soot, as though he’d spent his lifetime in this train, or easily looking the part as one who had.
“Yea, it was. It was the biggest bee I’d ever seen,” Winky said, as he examined the small face that was in return, examining him.
“Say, haven’t I seen ya before?” Winky asked the boy.
“Nah,” the boy said, uninterested.
“No really, I think I have.”
“I see lotsa people,” the boy said, before adding, “Did the bee sting yer eye too?”
“No, the train did.”
“Oh,” the boy said, as he got up and went back into his corner, crawling behind a large crate, and disappeared.
He had been somewhere else and someone else, but he was ever coming back. To wonder, he’d dream a moment, or be awake, and he’d find himself always within the world belonging to the locomotive, the noise and motion that brings one tearing and roaring past solitude and silence, demanding attention outward, outside, by force of train and steel, but not necessarily outside one’s self. To live having had railroad upon one’s hands and face, visible as black lines now human and alive as any part upon one’s already dirt-covered face; such was the changing lives of trains.
Jessica Schneider's blog can be found at http://jaschneider.blogspot.com/
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