ISSUE NO. 22: GOLDEN HOUR

My mother and I were lost. We needed to call. Although we read the name once ours on a mailbox, the house and Uncle Fritz were nowhere. He told us he would stand outside with a cigarette. His daughter Sena and six dogs waited in the house. He fed us roast, whole peeled potatoes, and gravy. The butter, the photographs, the suds in the sink– all of it felt shadowed in a familiar kind of ache. When we left, an ashtray in our hair & clothes, we drove fast for beer. Slap-happy stupid with escape, belly up to the bar, we couldn’t stop laughing about the absolutely absurd size of my father’s brother’s earlobes. Just the kind of thing my dad would have found funny, too, I knew. I was pleasantly dizzied by a pure kind of presence— something slightly psychedelic. Signs spoke in a language largely indecipherable, scattered like stars across our trip. The music on the radio in the yellow Bronco and the red graffiti suspended on an overpass praising the land of the living! felt fated. The twenty dollars dumped in the pull tab machine wasn’t wasted. Every mismatched cherry, clover, peach, and blue bell was exactly where it needed to be.

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Ellen Henning