Going for a walk
I’m walking on a two lane blacktop, the sun setting into the mountains on the horizon ahead of me. I was driving, but I ran out of gas, and the sun just stood there. The windshield channeling the heat inside like a microwave.
I tightened my hand into a fist and held up my thumb, aligning my pinkie with the blacktop, and thumb with the center of the mountain. It was noon now. The sun kissing the mountain peak as it falls into the horizon.
At first I checked every 100 steps. When I noticed the marks on my palm from when my fingers curled in to form a fist, I changed that to 200 steps.
When the soles of my shoes fell off and I stepped on a shard of glass, I checked every 400 steps. The hot iron sting of a long infected wound erupting through my leg every time I stop to assure myself of something I know will never change.
I walked off the road a few times, into the dead open field and the dark unwelcoming tree line. Above them were a dark desaturated blue(almost green) clouds. Sometimes I reach that forest, it smells like rain and wet leaves. Moths fly in my face and sit on my clothes like a coat as I walk.
When I breach that tree line, I am on the other side of the road, as if I had walked around the world and come back to the same spot. Going backwards had the same result.
Sometimes I don’t reach the trees, and just come back to the road.
I can never turn around, it only brings me back to the edge. Northwest and Southwest are awkward angles to walk into, but if looking East does what I think, I don’t think I could handle that.
I check again, my fingers resting on my palm, scabbed and now unable to curl into a fist. Ignoring my thumbnail, which is now doubled in length, nothing has changed.
My foot is numb. It hasn’t changed colors, but it leaks a viscous murky reddish ichor. It dries and protects my foot from debris, so that’s good.
Especially when I cross that shard of glass again. It’s always there, even when it’s protruding from my heel and toes and sole, it’s waiting for me to step on it again. I’ve tried not to, but I always come back to it. I can’t not. Even in the woods. Even in the fields. It will find me, and it does.
I try not to go into the woods anymore. The things that crawl in the dark are opportunistic carnivores. My foot is numb, not my leg. The caked fluid brings them to frenzy, burrowing deep past the tissue and into the bone. Nesting in the marrow to breed and reproduce.
If I let the moths rest on it; propping my foot on a stone or tree, they and their caterpillars spin silk on the wounds and eat the glass, leaving my flesh untouched. This takes time however, and I have another foot ripe for those hungry crawling things.
Ants on the asphalt are easier to avoid than what sits in the underbrush. They itch significantly more though, and burrow the deepest.
Better than the alternative I guess.
