chirothecae

i've heard it called the heartland before, but i haven't felt it tremble, let alone beat, in years. slowly, as if everyone had already been hanging by a thread, they dropped, their hearts severed from the earth they used to reap and sow, turn the soil and clear cut. my aunt was the first to go. she couldn't take it anymore, her muscles frail from sixteen hours a day, everyday for decades. my dad was sure it would be years until that rot would spread. he's not been sober since.

i've been able to last, if you can call what i do anything short of incessant decaying, by always having a medical excuse. first the flu, then migraines, then bone spurs, until they knew never to rely on me for their dirty work. i had won, i thought, sitting there looking through frosted, single-pane glass, out at them desecrate a land already manufactured to be bare. the fan was at my feet. i was contented to mingle in my mind with what i came to see as a profound moral emptiness. it was something i peered into from afar. the times their machinery shook the cement under me, made me rely on bottled water and microwaved dinners, never registered.

i only remember one day clearly, the rest a wash of grey and beige smeared with cigarette ash and wooden shelves permanently stained from hundreds of glass bottles. they moved differently in the fields that evening. i noticed nothing until i saw all around me drenched orange-yellow, aglow with a shade i'd not been graced with since we had fanta on thanksgiving. locusts and pigeons blotted it damp before releasing a lavender sky, then a spotlight cutting through all i could feel.

my feet touched some ground as i groaned awake, but it did not shake me down. it enraptured me. it was a different material, one teeming with life so small as to be invisible, but was surely felt. a tide swayed the earth, this far inland, unconcerned now with feigning lack of control over her dominion.

the machinery still hummed through dusk, but a concert now drenched it all. i could feel more clearly on that day than all of my life before then.

i wasn't there much longer. forced to abandon the land, my mother went her own way. we see each other a few times a year. i read others' accounts, i plan roadtrips, i talk with anyone that can hear, i live with two others who never felt it, never saw the colors i could not come close to illustrating. but i hope they know they can experience it anew with me, if we visit the land they used to lay claim to, before it was sold back to her mother.