Season of the Sticks

Sixty-seven and thirty-three

Photo by Danila Perevoshchikov on Unsplash.

Wandering through woods, stomping over sticks, swigging whiskey, one day I’ll cut these logs into firewood. Thinking about home that doesn’t exist while sinking in mud, trying to step, but I’m stuck, and oh oh it’s so much. There’s a break in the forest canopy. A square root of birds in formation.

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I always wanted home, but home was never in my folded notes. I knew when I left Oregon there was no going back. Then mother moved away. Dad sold grandmother’s house. Now certain stretches of my life: five years here, eighteen years there are filled with silence. Another season of the sticks. Another dry cracking and the smell of birch and whiskey in my nose. Wherever the burning goes feels right. Emptiness doesn’t burn away like paper or septum.

For a long time drinking was friend and lover and dad and home. Never had a home but I came home everywhere I went. Every bar I sat alone and peeled beer wrappers and wrote on napkins. Every bar I watched people do things I could not: growing houseplants, performing pool tricks or going with love. And it never asked about my day. Never forced conversation. Just said all the right words without saying anything at all. Took the pain away.

I have always been in some sixty-seven percent region. That much accepted. The rest, well, you gotta take that somewhere else. But the sixty-seven can stay. Especially if it’s buying. And I shot the booze and wore my shoes and gave up being cool and stopped looking at women. Sometimes they still came but I sent them away because I had stopped trying and had no patience for things that made no sense. And anyway, I was no project, and anyway, I was there to drink, and anyway, I had scribbles on a napkin and would I read them?

Oh. Please leave. I don’t have a home. And they’d never listen. They’d try to make me what they imagined in their pretty heads. With the trellises and freesias and mirrors and bridal gowns. Thirty-three percent region.

All my sticks crunching underfoot. Another snap, another loss, I’m not so sad. I know too much now. See too much about how the train rides the rails to go to fantasies of love, marriage, tales of happiness. Homes are houses made of sticks. And they get cold without people to kindle them.

I know about granite skies over gravel driveways. Old pumpkins and squash air and soggy walnuts on frozen grass. I know about freezing outside and looking at a warm house. I know about leaving cozy houses. To avoid beatings. To avoid fights. To avoid police. And making long treks to the bar. I know about watching my mother through the window and being scared to go inside. Convincing myself it was not cold. I know about watching smoke curlicue from smokestacks to settle low on a flat plantation. I know houses are piles of sticks.

I carry saplings in my pockets and assemble them on the bars. The servers never suspect. They presume neatly and stay circumspect while drying pretty hands on stained towels. I laugh sometimes and knock them over. And it’s empty in here. Mostly me. Except for thirty-three. I order another. The barkeep joins in then goes into the back office and the sudden quiet falls flat.

At night there is a gust of wind through a tunnel that happens when I step through snow. I dream of old friends and what people are doing in Oregon or Georgia or North Carolina or any of the other places where I built and ruined stick houses. I keep bones in my coat pocket and hug them close. If I’m honest all this is more than half my fault. Probably at least sixty-seven.

I light up a cigarette. No longer taste them but it’s part of the process of going through the evening. There’s enough snow to keep the pretty heads away and all the napkins are mine without uncomfortable eyes wondering about the parts of me they can’t see. Bars are made of sticks too.

Drinking shows you a Zen path. How relief touches death. Booze reveals how they are shirtsleeves brushing on the way to the restroom. Spirits of the men gone before you. Lives claimed by the process. Another season of sticks.

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The sky is no longer granite, it’s concrete. I step over a log and droop my head away from an overhanging branch. There is moss. By the river. Wet rocks and sticks too wet to snap. These sticks, they bend. Thatching mats the floor. I’m wearing old boots and have my hands fixed on the polyhedron moment and I’m free to think the words and the sky is no longer granite and it’s not too much and the concrete breaks and the trees look up and I’m not stuck, oh oh, I’m not stuck, and it’s not too much.

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Roman Newell is hard at work on his debut novel — 20XX — a work in magical realism, which explores the complexities and conflicts in modern day societies amid confusing social norms, rapidly evolving technology, and impact traumas. Follow Roman’s Substack to be added to the 20XX contact list.