PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE


Who talks about trying to pump gas with numb hands outside of Cheyenne?
Cheyenne has cheap gas and cold winds; you’d know it if you’ve been.
And if you know, and if I know, that’s a start.

They say fiction is the lie that tells the truth truer, but still, ultimately,
behind words are writers with scabs from 6th grade, bad kissing choices, and electric bills.
I stop thinking of acute pivotal moments, the salient detail, Aristotle’s laws, and narrative arch. What do you do with a story of a teenage brother watching the water of a lake calm
after his older brother—home from the war—has driven his car into it?
You admire clean sentences but take memory to bed. Wake up, as always, with morning breath, and go on.

You could write about your college math teacher and his car wreck. You could write about the car wreck that ruined prom. You could write a hundred times of clicking on lights,
finding cheating lovers under rustling covers. Airport goodbyes. Dogs with broken hips. Could describe cancer, how it carves a person hollow, first in the eyes.
You could talk about kisses on elbows and tampons wrapped in trash cans. You could describe frost on window panes and cloak it and call it something fancy, like a metaphor,
when the story just goes like this: Grandma, who had Alzheimer’s, got on a bus,
got off at a stop that wasn’t her stop, froze that night, thinking a next bus was coming,
or something.

Memoirs come out wrong. Who cares how many shouts we shouted up stairwells,
those nights we pitched back to back in bed, pretended to sleep. The photo you tore up and I taped back. I know the stink of bedpans. I know the sweetness of rain on sage. Somewhere is always extremes. They get piled up. I know seatbelts that never roll back all the way.
I know windowpanes that leak in strong winds. I have a few old records, but can’t play them; can’t find a record player, even at Goodwill. I have a drawer full of socks. I have changed light bulbs and attended funerals. You can pick up flowers on your way. Most grocery stores.

We walk down aisles. I will go with you, but I want to hear that Dad once bought chocolate milk as special treats on roadtrips, and yes, you did camp that one spring break with that one college friend, and yes, you once got that call in a highway motel. We get left with these pieces; they never fit, but remain. Ask the muse for one clean sentence—expect it, but nothing more than the maid service at the highway motor lodge, that knocks at noon and takes the damp towels and leaves a small wrapped square of soap.

Here’s a start, you think: old doors have brass handles and rain taps the window.
The gas in Cheyenne is cheap, but the wind always, always.