Letters, #1

Flash Fiction: Letter Series

Dear Isaac,

When you told me you envied Cain, and said you laid yourself down on those Tulsa tracks, “feeling the vibration of the Continental”, I understood you boy. When I was young I would skip school too, to see the boys work the tracks. They had a gaze I didn’t. A freedom that screamed into the void. You said you became lustful for this sound. Monastic for it. Envisioning an American Jesus with his bag of charms and sandals of meekness, clipping across that metal pedestals of this nation. But this Americana wanderlust is thin. It screams like star light and heroin. When we built this country it screamed like we were the new species as we doom rushed towards the Pacific. And I agree with you. It's beautiful. It's brave. It's lonely. It’s a suicide. Because its a drowning. That’s what this country is, my boy. The shotgun to the head, Billy the Kid, the gold rush, junk yards, the oil, our beautiful Kerouac. Nirvana, Elliot Smith, Hendrix, L.A, Chicago, New York. All of it is beautiful. It's beautiful till it gets boring. Do you see? It has no base. Its fire will die. The oil will run out. This is a massive, beautiful, island away from the old land, and the laws, away from Rome. But it too will get boring and cold. The chains that anchored itself in its ideology will one day find something else more sexy and beautiful. It will get up and walk away in the middle of the night. You someday will realize that terror. Isaac, this is a modern hell. It wants us to dip our toes in. Then our feet. Then our waist till our nose is lapping up its golden water. It wants us to worship the Sarte’s. And you, you are at your eyes with it, my child. The water is lapping. And what you will see underneath will be a current so strong, a sense so pure, so sad, you cannot unsee it or feel it. Like Lot’s wife you will become stone, paralyzed in ecstasy. So much so, you won’t help but become numb and drift away. By the very grace of God, he shut my eyes as my head went under, and I choked on the best of waters. The hand that had shoved me down, the same one that met me when I was a young boy, had an iron grasp. However, like rusted metal, it broke to pieces, it couldn’t hold, and I bloomed to the surface. I began to ascend. Isaac, this, is learning to swim until we can eventually walk on it. Quit hanging around those parts. Hang on to Donna. Don’t get bored of her and you know this. She has the light within her. Tulsa’s trains are dark. Their outhouses are full of hounds with plush beds. And I know, the literature is abundant, I know all of this and more. It tells us to free fall, and let go, and become nothing. Read them all my boy. Read them till you are nothing, but beware of the hand that guides you. It will either shove you under or have you ascend.

Write back to me my boy. God chases after you.

Fr. S