Trees grow close on either side of the tracks, twisted blue-black tamarack. They fall away as the grade passes a swamp. Simon looks to his right and sees the edge of the sky crusted with yet another dawn. He looks back at the tracks. It is lighter and he sees that the gravel is studded with pieces of broken iron, old spikes, nameless, igneously puddled metals, dropped like scales from the underside of passing trains. Weeds grow up to the edge and as he passes he notices that among the winter-broken thistle, goldenrod, and sage there are shoots of greenery struggling through the husks of their dead parents, larval and waxy.

He puts on more speed and everything stretches and falls away. The swamp looks dead, like a blast zone, the tracks dawn-lit bones. Underneath it all, he knows it will explode, it will grow and turn, and soon there will be colors that will make you cry. There will be the felt of new lily pads, funnels of jack-in-the-pulpit. Orioles will blast from the woods like sunlets, buntings like skylets.

But the ground on which he runs will hold no print. His passing will never be marked into the earth. You move stones with your feet but there is no impression, no remnant of your life, your action. Whatever you do is not accommodated, it is simply dropped onto the hard earth you pass. You will be forgotten. Your feet, your hands are not words and cannot speak. Everything we accumulate—our habits, gestures, muscles trained by the regimen of work, the body remembering instead of the mind—it is of no use.

His feet speed up. There are eyes, witness to the mad dash, the stretch of muscle, the shock to tendon and bone. There is no noise, just the atmospherics of the woods shaking off night travels, settling down to notice the passing. The pockets are emptied, cigarettes and lighter clank down onto the gravel, crushed from smooth rock into shards, pieces that have no character and hold nothing. The tracks play out straight and level, so flat, that looking down them you can see the earth curve, bending to the north, bending in every direction away from where you run. The level ground becomes a summit, every direction an unchecked fall.

The arms mill efficiently, the legs are finding themselves and the breathing evens out. The body is made to do this, waiting for the chance, but it doesn’t know, can’t know, whether you’re running to or from. All it wants is to get you there. There are eyes, and they watch as you run.

Also by DAVID TREUER

Also by

DAVID TREUER

Little

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