Karen Solie
Franklin Hicks
The half-ton choked halfway up the boundary road and would not
turn over. He lifted the hood to shorted wire and the night adjacent.
To the south, the town on the old rail spur, a mile closer as the crow flies
than the number two highway, a slog through crown lands of chattering birch
and firs frozen as the wind had cocked them. There were streetlights,
porchlights, visible. He set forth over the crackling verge, the low wind
viperish, hissing through last year’s foxtails and brome and flicking
little tongues of grainy snow up from the crust. Hauling the scars
of 60-odd years, he felt the breach of a subtle limit. The verge of dark
was blue and short and he broached the grazing lands in the moon’s
owly light, the very air in a glittering twist as the risen wind pulled
over him its blanket of stings. No discernible rabbit or fox. He followed
fencewire and phone line to their brittle limits, cocked an eye right-angled
to the boundary road and knew he had lost the truck. That this
was his life now, feet numb in the beds of their good boots. He was
a younger man in his mind. When the branch snapped from the clattering birch
and clipped him at the neck, it lit up his nerves like a bone spur, viperish.
Still, as the crow flies, were the town lights visible. He hove up
under a fir and stuck, eyes squint and his scant fur froze, as the wind
pulled up over him his blanket of snow. He met the country
on the terms of its bitter limits. Sheltered in the underbranches until
he disappeared. As the rabbit enters the owl’s night eye, and disappears.
