Bob and Weave

The Word

70 The Word The night sings in my window, chuck will’s widows overlapping like echoes, cicadas sliding up the scale to find a note they hold for ages. My dogs dig in the sand and lie down again. My neighbor slams his door and drives away, twenty miles to the city, slowing down only for red lights in vacant streets, asphalt shining like the surface of water. He parks beside a building where the lights are never out, stacks bundles of paper in the back of a truck, then floors it into years of concrete, throwing a million words into empty corners of the night, stepping again and again into the clutch as deep as his leg, loving the gearshift’s grind against his palm and the long stretches of speed, leaning into corners at thirty, then forty, saluting other drivers breaking past as they deliver us from our special needs, themselves delivered from the silence by country music on the radio where all the good and bad things occur like in the news. Whatever happened to the word? The cicadas sing as if they know. ...