Handsome Family - Lake Geneva

 

You are crouched before the fire in a state park by the highway and through the heavy pine trees ten-ton trucks go groaning by. Like the screams of your Aunt Barbara who went crazy in the '70's, wrote poems to Jimmy Carter but forgot to feed her kids. But, it's the first time you're together since he got out of the hospital. Raccoons in the darkness drag off your hot dogs buns. But, you're happy just to lie there in a plastic tent from Wal-Mart like sticks and fallen dead leaves to feed the fire of the world. Because which is more important, to comfort an old woman or see visions of the heavens in the stumps of fallen trees? Albert Einstein trembled when he saw that time was water, seeping through the rafters to put out this burning world. Next morning you're at Waffle House. Toast and eggs and hash browns. Truckers chain-smoke Camels over plastic cups of juice. And you remember how he cried when they strapped him to the stretcher, convinced his arms were burning with electricity from heaven. You remember how he told you that black holes were like Jesus.
And the crucifix was a battery that filled the air with fire.