| I look down at the sidewalk and watch the weed-filled grass and thin layer of sand pass by. For a moment I am a small child walking barefoot along the dirty streets of a tiny town nestled in the rolling dunes. I look up and I'm surrounded by cement and strip malls and flashy cars and cell phones. I tilt my gaze up further and I see the thunderstorms crawling lazily across the open blue sky. Large white billows tower over the plains-scape below. The yard is overgrown. It is filled with hopping bugs and crawling locusts, indifferent to my footfalls. When I was younger my evenings were spent picking burrs out of my socks and bandaging wounds caused by the rough gravel road and dirtied from the clay and silt I knelt in as I cried. Grandma was making popcorn on her old brown gas stove, the sparks flying up to the ceiling as though they'd just been freed from their torturous suffering. The corn soon overflows and the lid falls to the floor with a dry echo. I am playing with an old deck of cards. Mom comes in from the back bedroom and tells me to turn the TV on. A light flashes from outside the house and 10 seconds pass filled with counting ("one-one thousand, two-one thousand...") before the thunder shakes the storm windows. "It's a big one," Grandma says, holding out a bowl of popcorn and sitting in Her Chair. I take a bite and immerse myself in some plastic toy I'd conned Mom into buying on the way up. I look again at my feet. A car passes. And as the thick air relaxes back into its heavy position I am home. |