Bev

Bev didn’t know how he got to where he was. He meant that in ways large and small. A recent scan of his head presented like a smoke tree, so many vague endings more or less divorced from the stem. All he had left to situate himself was a shopping cart middle of a golf course that was evolving backwards too, into lurid, rabbity meadow. He sat by the water and wept, waiting for the ticks to find him, his shins like ivory shoehorns. His memory was more a slurry than a solid, and his self-knowledge was like a wet portrait by Gerhard Richter. Another cart had locked up with rigor mortis when he tried to liberate it from the grocery’s parking lot. They - he and it - fought like teenagers in the shade of the new arena. The police had him spend most of the night in a white-washed cell and when they released him he headed straight for these dilapidated old woods. He mistook a downed and be-mossed tree limb for a long-haired saluki he last spied in England a half-century ago, loping into the vegetable allotments near Shotover, that low hill painted richly with blackberry and stiff gorse. There were a host of simple words suspended in the ancient oak copse like a fog, like a birthday card. Donner, he called weakly. Blitzen.