the girl in the ditch by the road at night
The girl's brown hair might as well have been invisible in the night, so too her brown pants and brown shirt; they were not to be seen. The sky, too, was brown but invisible because of the night; and the invisible stars were hidden by invisible clouds. It was a dark night. And the asphalt road, because of the trees and the invisible brown banks, was a dark road. The girl was sat in the ditch by one side of the road, lain back against the bank. She rested there, like a mute, looking out at the night as if somehow some part of it was within. The night was in her eyes, and brown. Her face, her ankles, her hands, all were brown in the night, against the brown bank.
Across the blacktop road, made of a billion pebbles cemented by men and laid in a river that wound between banks where stood the trees, across it and down a ways towards one edge of night was a fence; and behind the fence, she knew (though she couldn't see them) cement stones, markers, crosses—a cemetery, though not much of one. And farther down the road, a shadow against the two small beams of a car coming, the body of someone walking. Yes it was a body walking, the two feet moving and the arms at the sides and head straight forward, walking, conscious of the car behind it, and feet slapping at the stone where the road met the dirt.
There was the tension between the body and the car, as the car flashed past, 4 feet away, like a massive bullet through the night: a miss.
The headlights shot upon him, like pulsars in the night; and instantly she could see him—the pants brown and the features of his face, and his long hair as he pushed his eyes away from the lights—as if burned by them.
“Hi there,” she spoke out.
His walking stopped and he looked up and into the ditch with his face.
And then he spoke out, “Hi, how are you?” He was stopped, and he stepped into the ditch, almost blindly, a few more steps, and sat beside her, and laid back against the bank. She did not know who he was.
They sat in silence a while.
“It's all pretty silly. All the cars and the lights and the roads and the buildings. And the clothes. And the fences, the houses we live in.” His voice was soft; brown like the night, and he looked straight forward as he spoke, not a bit to the right, not a bit to the left to her.
“It's strange that we do it.”
She was suddenly more mellow and silent than she'd been a moment before. Who was this she wondered. And yet there was nothing strange to the night, which was made of strange things.
