It was the way you stood on that porch with tensed shoulders and sinewy waist. Hungry eyes below leather-rimmed hat ingested fetid Appalachian foliage, yet I tasted nothing. Your mountains bowed as I passed; your range folded to its knee.
Evaluation always came first. My gaze shifted from the road, to the house buckling beneath your belt. The frame was a carcass, its rotting walls recoiling against the whine of speeding cars. Why didn’t you turn the house around to shield it from my scrutiny? Why didn’t you move it farther into the mountains?
Your reaction was to follow. The heat from your contempt, through the windows’ glass, should have branded my flesh. Your spoor was crushed by my car’s tires, your trail in the raw earth effaced--you should at least have bared your teeth.
Then it was to have revealed itself: this truth to our tale. I was to see chain links surrounding the house, you tethered to the past. You were to understand that I swim with sharks whose fins slice through arid earth, churning up suffocating waves of sand.
But you didn’t acknowledge me. So, as your house dominated my rearview mirror, I was forced to erase the scar I imagined forming as your habitat was scraped from the land.
Desert waters are choppy this morning. When I blink against their glare, I see rived leaves. Last night I dreamt I hung in a cage on your porch, while you paced below. But I must have escaped, because my steel shadow still creeps across your land. Are you cowering, yet?