CZ Studio and Radio Verte presents The Wild Wind by Corey Zimmerman.
Be still, my heart. Thou has known worse than this.
Homer.
The Wild Wind by Corey Zimmerman.
Part 1. Chapter 1.
The Wild Wind by Corey Zimmerman.
When the spider in the corner dropped down not once, but three times, I knew I'd die in the same old farmhouse I was born.
I hoped they'd find me before my eyes sunk too far into the back of my skull, and that when they opened the window to let out the stench, a wild wind might whisper in their ear.
And with any luck, a crow feathers everywhere, and with a final farewell, a scratchy caw.
I no longer felt hunger, only unparalleled loneliness as I left the old house clean and orderly.
The Victorian furniture dusted and polished, everything surely in the same condition it was a century ago.
Save the broken mirrors, and the grandfather clock now facing the wall, and the floorboards sounding like an 88 key piano, notably on the second floor.
At the top of the stairs, to the left, a room in absolute contrast to the rest of the house, one hoarded with books, a tomb of tales, where an old typewriter sat under the window, overlooking the hilltop.
With good eyes, one could see the old tombstones rising helter skelter before the elms on the horizon.
A denim quilt, stitch of paws old overalls, draped on the side of my bed. On the bed stand, a photo of me when I was but a child.
I sat on the porch steps in a flower dress, chin in my palms, the soles of my shiny black shoes together in prayer, a lone crow lurking about the lawn.
I wore a rather severe look, and I can remember watching the patients in the garden, plucking the petals from the flowers one by one, as I asked myself,
what does it mean to be sane when the insanity grows like a weed all about me?
To the left of the typewriter sat two books, Homer's Iliad and Romeo and Juliet, a pressed white rose hidden away in its back cover.
To the right, a peculiar pile of words on aged paper, a somewhat dyslexic manuscript of sorts.
You see, the dusty road I'd always walked alone, scuffing my tiny feet along with only my breath to accompany me.
In time, I exhaled all I knew into those pages, and died a slow death in those sheets, offering my last words or maybe my first. I can hardly tell.
I walked in a circle, spun the chair about one leg, and crawled onto the cold mattress one last time.
I then swallowed the whole damn bottle of pills, yellow ones, round, before turning the horseshoe nail ring about my finger for some time.
As I stepped out of myself, I looked down upon the woman I once was, her lips as blue as a blackberry pie.
I have lived a long life. One many may call a blessing, others a curse.
All I know is no one ever tells you how awfully long it is to be old.
And in all those years, I stepped foot beyond the border of the state of Illinois but once, and that was to attend the St. Louis World's Fair in the autumn of 1904.
I was but four years old, and I remember nothing of it except eating ice cream in a cone, and riding a ferris wheel round and round, up into the heavens and then back down again into hell.
Back to a world where one must remember to leave a house through the same door one entered, to never enter a home with a troubled past, or wear another's clothes, or walk in one's shoe, or brush your hair too often before bed.
God forbid someone took a lock and dropped it in a stream, running the mine mad.
When the hoodoo is around, always sleep with one eye open, as it can plague you as it did me, or anyone at any time and any place, as it wraps freely upon any door, high or low.
Any minute now, someone could come along and snatch you by the tail feathers and split your tongue.
Back to a world where trains collide on dead man's curve in the dead of the night.
Sanity is but paper in a world consumed by fire.
What a strange thing that gods rounded this ball of clay in the palm of their hands, ensuring to look forward to the east was to look back to the west.
You see, in doing so, the gods made the most perilous decision, that history shall repeat itself again and again, the clouds continually turning on the western front, round and round like that ferris wheel at the St. Louis World's Fair.
It was a time of great civic awakening, a time long obscured by the growing pains of a great nation and two world wars.
The Bronson building and its mammoth limestone blocks once the epitome of timelessness, in time smothered in vines by nature's will, a straight jacket of time.
Its windows shattered like the mines that once lived within it by angst and puberty and a lost generation.
The magnificent balconies collapsed with old age and senility as they forgot how to stand.
And more often than not, the blue skies seemed an endless winter gray as cataracts stole the light in my waning years.
The garden long overgrown with weeds, the roses perished long ago, and the graveyard eroding into the ravine, tombstones washing away with the summer rains.
Bones long turned to dust, yet the elms have remained.
The wind blows beyond the crumbling monuments of the dead laid to rest upon this hilltop, overlooking a four-lane highway heading north for the city of Grandview.
Grandview expanded rapidly with the event of the steamboat and the industry that quickly followed, growing too big for its britches, inviting all sorts of unbridled activity that accompanied sudden wealth and proximity to a great river.
There was a time Grandview was dubbed the Whiskey Capital of the World, a wide open town, up for grabs by grubby businessmen and gangsters in their pinstriped suits alike.
Yet in time, the prospectors fled as the rust belt crept to the city's edge, and inevitably to its heart, where its soul quickly decayed, leaving a post-industrial wasteland in its wake.
Not much was left to feast upon, rusty smokestacks and a large stretch of merrily bone, and the crumbling bricks propping up industrial warehouses before the enormous plane of great corporate consequence, farms stretching beyond the brown layer of smog and dust and chemicals, for the foothills of the purple cumulus clouds that run from north to south as the river flows.
Feeding into the Mississippi just north of St. Louis, the muddy conveyor belt kept the heart of America barely ticking before pouring out into the delta and the Gulf of Mexico, and into the vast blue ocean and the seven seas, washing up upon the shores of Europe, Africa, Asia, and beyond, where all of man has the shadow upon his heel, leaning over his shoulder, whispering in his ear dreadful thoughts, before a backdrop of blackness and silence, an endless eternal void of reason.
I miss watching the patients playing donkey ball on the lawn, relaxing in the garden, shaking the head, shaking the hands, slapping the face, pulling the hair, sticking the tongue, shaking the finger, clapping the hands, hugging the self, singing to the self, crying, lying, and laughing, and cooling off in the shade of the Aum.
Instead, over the years, I have watched them wash namelessly into the ravine, yet the hunking geese on their great migration continue, and the current of the dear old river flows on, never revealing the reason it swallowed and washed away what or whom it did, and swooping down upon the hilltop, bending and twisting and turning and spiraling and braiding through the tombstones, before whispering forgotten voices in the leaves of the graveyard elm.
A wild wind.