response

Why do we fall in love? It’s not by choice and not by design. Love comes. Be open, love comes.
“Baby, do you think we have to grow up?” I thought of my circumstances, the distance ahead.
“I had such a great life planned.”
“You’ll have a different one,” I responded confidently as the chemicals of fear swamped in.
She responded in private.

I biked to the distant hills just short of the distant suburban limits. Large gulps of oxygen and blood helped. My eyes hot with sweat and vision blinded by the noon sun I settled in a grove near where I had dragged the standing box a few months back and listened. A mocking bird shifted calls, I looked but couldn’t spot it when from the supplant prairie a stag presented. The beast stood at attention, scanning the grounds, charging with mean hoof and snort. This process repeated as I fell back, as the dark clouds of summer darkened the landscape. I watched the beast, desiring contact on its terms, desiring a sea change, and with it an invading army to tear apart fortune and deliver a reckoning. I watched. The beast hoofed the soft clod ground in the clear above the ramble, and I watched leaning erect, hands on the seat and stem of my primitive machine. With a few snorts and the cullied dance the wood opened up and the herd poured out to meet him.