Dardanelle

I've been doing a lot of wondering lately. About chances and fairness, and what you do when you know what you want but you're at a loss for how to get it, because it feels like everything you try leads you nowhere. Sometimes it's even worse--you take a risk and try to step forward, maybe think you're in the spotlight for a moment, but then get the whole reality check and realize, if anything, you've moved back.

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Shoes, grey and torn, like ragged cloth left sitting out too long on the porch and it turns stale and crisp; these shoes now tread with what was left of their dying fervor on a pale grown patch of weeds.

First one, then the other.

The shoelaces had fallen loosely out of their bowties several miles down the road. Two tiny round baby blue buttons grasped onto the left side of the shoe by what was left of their thread. Jeremy’s mother had sewn two red ones to the other side back in Dardanelle, but by now they were long gone, somewhere in the sand behind him.

He turned his head as he kept walking along the highway, off the patch of faded grass onto the never-ending sandy lane at the edge of the road. This was a desert, barren and silent, with nothing but sand and cacti and low mountains every which way, and the empty road riding smoothly and swiftly off into the distance in a stubbornly straight line. Jeremy kept straining his ears for the slightest bit of low rumbling that might suggest the arrival of a rickety old car owned by some farmer who wouldn’t hesitate to pick up a stranger. But he hadn’t seen any sign of life — besides a distressed rattlesnake under a bush — since he started down this highway, not two hours ago.

He twisted his mouth in that “special way” Sally loved. She’d see him do it and her face would light up in a grin, and she’d laugh and tease him and make him do it again, only then it didn’t work the same way. He didn’t know what was so special about it. It was just a habit. But Sally liked it. That made him smile.