heart land
a piece of fiction, from 2006.
This happened before we ever slept together.
This happened when the sun was hot and hidden, sweltering and sweaty over the baked ground of America’s heartland, over the fields of wheat and corn and strawberries, dark-skinned migrant workers hunched low and sunburnt over the harvest.
This happened when the road stretched out in front of us for miles, a thin red line connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic on page seventeen of the atlas.
This happened when both of us were otherwise involved, when we didn’t yet know we loved each other, him with his creased picture of the girl back home, his constantly-ringing telephone, and me with my head full of floating flirtations, laughing and lusty and sparkling with possibilities.
This happened before the night he touched me and a shiver ran down my spine.
Before he looked at me and I knew all the secrets that had ever been told.
This was when my arms were brown and my hair was long and my feet were dirty because I never wore shoes.
This was after Noah died, after he shot himself in the head while his parents were upstairs eating Chinese food. It was after I had showed up in black pants that were too short to the funeral that was like a horrible high school reunion. After I watched his mother sob quietly behind a lace veil while I ate curry and rice and understood that I would never get to say good-bye.
This was when every sharp word, every spilled drink, every slammed door felt like the world was splitting open and I was falling to the bottom of it.
It happened when our universe was a four-door sedan, hamburger wrappers stained with grease, gallons of water in clear plastic milk jugs, old used maps that we had scribbled over and stepped on, and the same ten songs playing over, and over, and over.
This happened after three hours of silence, driving along the seam down the middle of the country, with no view but concrete and garbage and looming billboards for gas stations in the middle of nowhere.
This happened while my legs were stretched out on the dashboard and my hands were tangled up in my hair and I wasn’t sleeping. While he was leaned back in the driver’s seat and his foot was tapping the tune of the song and his sunglasses were slipping down his nose. It happened while the hot, scratchy wind whipped through our open windows as we zoomed down the highway at eighty-five miles an hour.
This is what happened:
At a gas station. He parks the car, leaves the keys in the ignition with the ding ding ding. I keep my eyes closed and stretch my legs out the open car door. He comes back, flip flops flip flapping against the concrete. He nudges me with his toe. “Hey,” he says. I open my eyes halfway, see that he is bearing an armload of junk food. “Hey,” he says. I open my eyes a little wider. “You live really well,” he says, and tosses me a bag of chips and a carton of chocolate milk.
