Blazing blacktop, flat to the horizon.
Melting, sticky under
an unapologetic sun. Flanked by soggy fields sprayed with chemicals for too
many generations, all banned now and leeched into the groundwater.
Heading West on that burning sauna of a Florida afternoon,
radio says it's 101 in the shade, although there is none of that in sight...
just more open fields of anemic cabbages raised for too many generations,
sucking on a Monsanto teat, concentrating a slow death disguised as food.
Heat snakes undulate skyward, blurring the distant stretch
of road, dancing in mirage pools that evaporate into the searing oven with my
approach.
A shape on the side of the burning asphalt, at first fuzzy,
unfocused, sharpens in flashes until I see him clearly. Disheveled, beaten by
circumstance, stooped over, dragging a piece of cheap airline luggage like an
errant child, jumping and bucking, a broken wheel resisting each step.
Offering only his back to oncoming traffic, his left thumb
turned slightly outward, barely visible.
It's an appeal destined to fail, a question already answered
by his hunched, defeated shuffle.
Heading into hopelessness. Walking hand in hand with a
hundred miles of decay, unsteady in his stumble toward a little farm town, now
as translucent and pale as the cabbages surrounding it Bled out years ago by
ancestors no one can remember. Failing structures, once called a town, as
broken and toxic as the water that runs through its veins.
Dust-devils nipping his heels, pushing him to continue a
walking dead shuffle down another road to nowhere.
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