Slow MoverThe Yellow Menu
A grieving man returns to his hometown and finds shelter from a tornado—and his past—with the bus driver who once carried him home.
Micah Lyndon had imagined Lost Gap larger than this.
For twenty years it had remained within him as a country of pine shadow and red-clay driveways, of mailboxes leaning toward the roadside, of warm blacktop running away into trees, of small creeks swollen brown after rain. In his memory the woods were immense, the roads endless, the hills steep enough to rise beneath a boy like the back of some sleeping animal. Even after he had gone north, even after he had learned cities and interstate exits and apartment windows looking down over streets where no one knew his name, Lost Gap had retained the proportions of childhood.
It had stayed enormous because he had never returned long enough to measure it.
Now the roads curved too soon. The distances had collapsed. The hill that had once seemed dangerous when the school bus climbed it in winter was hardly more than a rise. A house he remembered as white stood abandoned behind brush and young pines, its porch listing toward the weeds. The convenience store where he used to buy candy and bottled drinks after school had been boarded shut, the paint on its sign faded until it resembled something remembered rather than something seen. Kudzu rolled over the back lot and sagged from telephone poles, covering the places time no longer intended to explain.
Micah drove slowly, although there was almost no traffic.
He had come expecting grief, though he had not known precisely what kind.
His marriage had ended the year before, not with betrayal or great anger, but with the long exhaustion of two people who had become considerate strangers. His work, once the ladder by which he expected to climb into meaning, had begun to feel like a room he had remained in after everyone else went home.
Then, three nights earlier, unable to sleep, he had typed Lost Gap, Mississippi into his phone.
The name itself had struck him with an almost scriptural force.
Lost Gap.
A place named for absence. A break in the ridge. An opening through something otherwise impassable. A home that sounded, even while he lived there, as though it had already vanished.
He had packed the next morning and driven south.
Read the rest of the story at Crawdad Epiphanies https://medium.com/@keith.lyndaker/the-yellow-menu-7056e723db66
https://medium.com/@keith.lyndaker/the-yellow-menu-7056e723db66
https://medium.com/@keith.lyndaker/the-yellow-menu-7056e723db66
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Alastor de Ion
Liminal Flares 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈