An Upstate Tale

The beginning of a story that thankfully was never finished.
  January 2, 2004

Editor’s note: A snippet of the first of what was to be a cycle of stories about the lives of upstate New Yorkers.  Who knows what this could have been had the writer not died after overdosing on glue fumes.

In the golden days they all lived upstate and no one lived anywhere else.  Where else was there to live?  What other trees could sway their boughs, aflame with autumn leaves, over the heads of lovers strolling down quiet forest lanes?  What other deer could graze on evening grass in the waning glow of the sun, raising their heads in alarm at passing cars?  What other earth was there to smell of damp and dusk; what other days could flow slowly by, like honey dripping from the tip of a spoon?  Rivers and highways, bridges and lawns, burning apple logs in the fireplace and freshly cut grass—there and then, all pieces of one vast canvas beyond whose gilded frame nothing existed.

In the golden days, Mark loved Laura and Laura loved Mark, until he lost his face.  Not a pretty metaphor, that, unless you count skin torn off by medium grain road-surfacing gravel as a metaphor.  Metaphors should be subtle.  Gravel isn’t.

The events unfolded simply.  One April night, Mark rode his motorcycle from a friend’s house and misjudged the distance between the car speeding away from him and the car speeding towards him in the other lane; he swung out to pass.  A minute later, he was sailing through the air while his mind, blown back by the speed, still processed the feeling of motorcycle.  The bike was being chewed by the tires of one of the cars that very second; then Mark hit the gravel shoulder and lived, although he didn’t wear a helmet.  He rolled and slid, that slide taking off eighty percent of the skin on his face along with his nose and one ear.  Miraculously, his eyes stayed intact even when the eyelids were torn.  He lied in a ditch in shock, crying, and couldn’t blink.  His hands were tucked underneath his body, red and mangled, and he shrieked when they straightened them to put him on a stretcher.  On the long ambulance ride to the hospital, he thought he lost consciousness, although later he could never be sure because when the world blacked out, the pain remained, and ripped, and gnawed.

[…]

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