Under the Sun

How came the traveler, who had traveled far from the south toward the chilled fallows of the north, starved for knowledge, angling his maps before the sun. On his journey he met a vendor outside an old house swallowed in kudzu, whose right eye suffered blind. The traveler, pale and sullen, sat on the porch, his black wooden eyes shrouded in the shallow light of the forenoon overcast. He asked the vendor if there was a place to rest, and with a withering voice he said: “There’s a small town not far west, past a little bog.”

The traveler stood. “I thank ye,” he said, and moved on.

Once he crossed the bog he could see in the far distance the town and its figureheads and traces of smog seething within that immured town. You could not see ten feet in front of you. In the center of town, in ruins of the clock tower, the dials set manacled at eight as steeple bricks crumbled and tumbled. Not that you could see it. In the shopping district rows and rows of shops and stores lay boarded up or untouched, unpopular or unpopulated by what little amount of folk who resided there.

With the indifference he held, the traveler stopped at diner called Sige’s and sat down and ordered a coffee. He looked out a window. He could see the sun dimming blood-orange beyond the clouds. Next to him was a lean man looking down into his mug. Without moving he inquired of the traveler where he’d come from. He was a dapperman and was well acquainted in the matter of language. The traveler turned and explained where he was from and why he came here.

The lean man turned to him and raised his glass with one hand and laxed his other hand to his side and said: “Nothing more of biases than of crudely drawn maps. You are at the world’s edge, man.”

The sun caught his face. He squinted and pursed his lips. Then the waitress placed his coffee on the table.

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