Sometimes, people just want to get the fuck out. They don't want to sit around and wait for things to get better. They don't want to deal with how bad things still are. They don't want to work hard and make a better person out of themselves or their lives. It's hard to say what takes more strength: staying in a place that doesn't seem like anything else other than backwards, or leaving that place behind you, nothing but a freshly emptied bank account, a few clothes, and a full gas tank in a busted ass car headed for the junkyard nearest to wherever it finally craps out.
Those are the thoughts that burn away in his mind--a hot bed of coals incinerating ideas like thin, wet sticks sizzling away until they curl like groping fingers and the last gasp of moisture puffs off into the air. They say that in older times there was someone who would take the embers of a fire and keep them for days in envelopes of lichen or moss. During the times where we were more nomadic. Apparently, you can keep a coal hot for several days when it's wrapped up. You'll need something that will smolder and keep the fire within hot without actually getting the flames up and going. He can imagine somebody who knows the secret of fire. This fire keeper is the only one in the tribe who knows how to pass the flame from place to place, and on his back there is a smoking fuse where the fire rests. The fire keeper is the leader. Only he can keep the fire going. Without him, the tribe is as good as dead.
Nowadays, we think of ourselves as fire keepers. People whose lives are so essential to the good of man that we must light our fires everywhere. Somewhere, deep inside ourselves, we know that the truth tells a different story. We are those twigs, still growing, sometimes always premature. Mankind is the fire keeper, our mind and hearts all together are the bed of coals, the lifeblood of our community. Our displeasure, angst, and impatience are the hands that throw us into the embers. Fifteen minutes of fame, two or three minutes of flame.
He examines the anathema of his existence and screams silently in his chest. The world floats on and from the flotsam vermin rise and assign worth to the beautiful and necessary. Take the pine beetle, chewing proud trees and suckimg the sap from between their rings; drying them up and suffocating them. Massive husks of wood sitting around like used toothpicks are about all that's left behind. If you look into them you can see the little trails they've made. Curvy, cuneiform carvings of hunger undying. It's no wonder that he feels sad, because it is the nature of all vermin to act under bloated impulses of need. Ironic though, that if we allowed nature to take its usual course--and forests could set themselves aflame--that the beetle problem would disappear back into the placid balance of nature. Those trees that get eaten up would instead have their moments in flame and light up the sky. They would fill it with destinies fortunate enough to realized. But even still, they do just that. As statistics and sob stories; as dreams so new their death is hardly more than infanticide.
This boy, he s sees this. He sees it and feels like running, but his legs seize up beneath him. Impotence roots his femurs into his pelvis. This road--the one in his imagination--looms before him like the spindly fingers of a poltergeist. On either side of this road he sees death or anonymity, or worse: exploitation and ultimately, failure. He gnashes his hand desperately. Grinding his teeth and breathing sharp and angry through his nose. Still, he looks ahead.
He looks ahead and takes a single step.
In the Somewhere that humans don't frequent, a sapling pierces the ashen layer of a freshly burnt forest and sprouts a single leaf.
