Hailstorm of Dynamite

by Ron Gibson, Jr.

His life was road. It entailed trade-show conventions, truck stops, late-night laughs with railroad junction men—bums grit-worn to a shine, tipping bottles to the sky, waiting for the unexplained. It was chili-stained aprons, spotty silverware, heart-attack cuisine. The road was an open vein in the wrist of America. It unrolled at his feet and beckoned him to keep moving farther and farther away from his origin. His long, dead days of flattening coins on the tracks, chucking rocks at crows by the grain silos; midnight kisses under the football bleachers; the blue-collar ceremony of the brutalities of man. His birth into the anonymity of the unerring flatness of home.

He was small and wiry, swinging his feet and legs into the patch of sky, held by rope, wood, and faith, until he let go and followed the columned curve of earth to see what was beyond the next hump, the next ridge, the next striped parking lots of psychoses. His bedroom ran alongside his feet, through towns grown cold and metal; where smiles left with the topsoil, and the Dust Bowl still prevailed. His momentary stopovers; the motel names all smeared into a mass of neon poetry. He found out No Vacancy was a myth. Everything was vacant and he kept moving away from the center, farther into that edge of town, that otherside of reality across the tracks. Work was money and money was too much work to hold onto. He pissed livelihood away in too many gutters of too many unremarkable towns, that home blurred into unmeaning. Airport strips were distant visions in motel windows; hookers testing the temperature in mini-skirts – the first to die in the tempest of one’s own frailities.

It was when the road bent and curved back in on itself that he was found, left with memories of a town that was now an urbanized mechanism slouching towards Bethlehem. Road names changed. Apartments and condos were part of the landscape, where the wilds once dominated, cultivating his friends and his imagination, carrying them to the distant lands that his feet were now calloused with. City Hall was no longer a square of brick, but a spire of glass and steel and monstrosities. He sought shelter; home. And crossed the bridge where time left behind a gate that only downhome-trained eyes could see. He crossed, into the crabgrass battleground, crunched up the gravel driveway, up the stairs, and through a door, where he met the accusatory eyes of his wife and children, broken and loving. He walked into his art; a hailstorm of dynamite. Still his art; his existence.

Ron Gibson, Jr. is a twenty-six year old writer residing in Kent, Washington. Previously appeared in The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Stirring, Mindkites, The Storyteller, upcoming in A Writer's Choice, This Hard Wind, New Works Review, & EWG, etc. Nominated for Best of the Web Anthology 2001 and accepted in anthology: "In Our Own Words . . . "
Note: Featured author in March 2001
E-mail: GibsonR@mindspring.com
Writing interests: Flash Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Experimental, Personal Essays, Familial Subject Matter
I.D. Theory articles: "Hailstorm of Dynamite", "Blackout, or Return to the Ole West"
Links: "Memento Mori" | "Pirouette" | "Agraphia . . ."