Waltz of Shadows

12

Cold and dark, a big piece of yellow moon, purple tree shadows flying across the hood and windshield of my truck. Me driving the back roads and talking and Arnold riding and talking and hunkering close to my old humming heater, nursing the warmth.

The years weren’t brought back, but maybe a few moments were, and when I returned Arnold to his truck and let him out, we shook hands and he clapped me on the shoulder and called me Bubba. I drove away feeling good about something, and not knowing why, way things were with Bill, but feeling good just the same, and thinking the world wasn’t such a bad place after all, and everything that had happened, crazy as it was, was going to work out. Order would soon be restored to the universe, and I would feel like the fine-tuned mainspring of the cosmic clock.

But a fella can be wrong about things.