Settlers of Unassigned Lands by Charles McLeod

Author:Charles McLeod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lost Cultures of the Ancient World

He’s walking. It’s nighttime. It’s summer, late June, no thrum of cicadas, no whine from a train, just damp windless air and bright stars overhead as he descends his porch steps of wrecked brick and chipped mortar, the foundation of the house leaning south out of age and decay, the living room walls pulling apart at their corners, the house trying to grow, to uproot and leave, to abandon its form and its math and its makers, to be something past refuge, past safety or shelter, trying, he thinks, to become the impossible—a structureless structure—and the cobblestone pathway that leads to the street has been warped to bulbous by roots underneath, fans of weeds pushing through the path’s rifts and fissures, and there was the time his ex-wife fell while holding a vase, caught her foot on a bump and pitched the vase forward, the glass vessel turning as it flew through the air and then broke to shards on the porch steps below him, his wife’s elbow bruised, her knee bloodied, these acts things he’d watched from his spot in the doorway before going inside and finding the dustpan and whiskbroom—these acts over a year ago now, and while they took place here, on the porch steps he’s just passed, they seem to him part of a separate age, part of a different era.

His shoes are black canvas with rubber soles. Splotches of paint dot the toecaps, the vamps. Eyelets are missing. The ends of the laces have frayed themselves thin and the insoles, from time, have ceded all bolster. He feels every step as he reaches the sidewalk, a red brick path perhaps ten inches wide that leads south to the road that he takes up to school and north, toward her old apartment. Across the street, to the east, is a big empty lot where decades ago, long before he ever heard of this town, three houses caught fire and burned to the ground, their roofs caving in, their walls blackened from smolder, the first structure collapsing onto the next and the second house in turn igniting the third, the destruction occurring on the cusp of July and August, the students all gone, the windows all darkened, the smoke twisting and snaking before turning thick. Now, though, trimmed grass, a trio of elms that survived through the heat and the fire trucks’ hoses. The city could put in a sandbox and swings and the lot would look planned, seem empty on purpose. One society’s doom, he’s told class after class, is another’s inception.

Past the trees is a bank; its bulbs backlight the lot. A feral cat stalks through the shadows, high-stepping. He’s walking to meet her. She’s come back to town. He hasn’t seen her in over six weeks. Her texts have been vague, have been terse and half-hearted. But this morning a present: the train tracks: can we meet? She set a time and he told her he’d be there. This night is a night of hope and repair.

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