Fiction

He came to the top of the rise and then collapsed again onto his haunches. The wind still buffeted him, tearing at his worn clothes and pushing on his weathered face. Before him, a great valley opened up and spread away toward the horizon, where distant mountains enclosed it. The whole undulating floor was covered in an ocean of golden orange flowers that stretched even up onto the hill where he sat, and for miles again behind him. The velvety petals fluttered in the wind. He stretched his hand toward the ground and let the flower petals whisper against his skin. They felt like butterfly wings or eyelashes or lips, and the sensation sent a pang of regret through his heart. They were poppies, although he didn’t know that anymore. He hardly remembered his own name. It was on the tip of his tongue. But in his lonely hours crossing countless miles on foot, he had thought to himself how names were only the results of society, only terms used by others to differentiate anonymous other selves from their own selves. In solitude, in the quiet times as the sun set or in the buzzing heat of broad daylight, names were meaningless, just false and arbitrary substitutes for what he could see or taste or smell or hear, and all these senses were so much truer than the misappellations of the utterances of men. So to him a poppy was not a poppy by name, not a particular species to be recognized by its habitat or number of petals or color, but a sensation, the sensation of lips flicking against his flattened palms, and they were the sensation of guilt that he quickly suppressed, for the thought of lips reminded him of his wife.

The dry brush crackled underfoot, barely audible over the wind, as he stood on shaky legs and started descending the hill. The jolting feeling in his knees, the ache in his thighs as he stepped down toward the valley floor, were like memories in his muscles. They reminded him of coming out of the cave in the snow and climbing down that hill.

Man is a solitary creature, he thought self-righteously. Lash four men to a carriage like a team of horses and they’re more likely to go to war with each other or to pull four separate ways until they tear the carriage apart than they are to pull together in one direction.

But a man once thusly chartered has some responsibility to the riders of the carriage, doesn’t he? his conscience chimed in. Aye, he does.

That night he awoke from a dream of thunder to find the world above him rumbling and flashing. He sat up from his bed in the poppies and watched as lightning rippled across the sky, and in the sudden brightness he saw the velvety heads of the millions of flowers bobbing and showing blue. They looked like the surface of a wild sea he had never seen, and he some storm-tossed refugee clinging improbably to the surface. The thunder that followed echoed through him like a cavalcade of cannon.

In that dark bed his thoughts turned to his wife and child, whose faces he seemed to discern in the illumined clouds when the lightning bolts tore across the heavens. He had left them a thousand miles and an unknown number of days ago, in a cave high in the mountains. They were stranded by snow and hungry. He pledged to return with help, but even as he walked to the mouth of the cave, he knew he would not come back. Hundreds of miles before that their carriage had tipped over while fording a stream and their fortunes were irredeemably sealed, as all their possessions cascaded away on the surface of the water. Before that his father-in-law had died of consumption, just a few days after setting out from St. Louis, the old man whose idea and inspiration the voyage had been, who encouraged his only daughter and grandson to uproot themselves and see what fortunes lay in California.

He had made it to California alone, and found only the wavering sea of living gold with perhaps not another soul in all of existence, so empty and desolate was the vista of anything but poppies.

It was night, and soon it would start to rain, but he stood and dusted himself off. He looked up to the shadow of the hill he had come down from earlier. The wind howled around its ancient and weathered features. He bent down and snapped off a single poppy at the neck and peeled apart the leaves closed against the night. Letting its velvet petals rustle against his dry and cracked lips, he took a deep breath, and set out again, to see if he could find that cave, and the riders of the carriage that he had sundered.