1999

July 1999

She’s sitting in small shack warmed by a small electric oven, lost in the aroma of cinnamon buns slowly baking. The stove is old with enamel edges that are flaking down to bare steal. She’s been there since dawn, waiting as the hours ticked by, hoping that passerbys and truck drivers would stop for gas and a snack. Sitting in a clearing on the corner of two forgotten highways, her shack is nothing more than a plywood box with a view. Moisture leaks in through the haphazardly stapled membrane covering the unfinished siding. The roof is partially shingled, but a fall wind storm has torn at its integrity. She’s listening to the steady drip of water, not rain but a mountain fog, condensing on a single pain window and running down the wall. The bare studs and loosely packed bubble gum pink insulation give the illusion of a dwelling, while the passing storm clouds and jagged peaks paint a more ominous picture out the window. 

She casts her mind back to some ravens she’d seen playing near the garbage bins in her youth. Back then, her mother and her worked the pumps together. She was supposed to be helping refill the windshield wash basins, but she’d wandered off to follow a family of ravens who were wandering off across the dirt lot. They hopped gleefully sideways and yammered incessantly in their distinctively playful clicks and caws. She followed them down to the bins bordering the forest, the large steel enclosures they used to keep the bears out of their trash. To her horror, and the ravens’ glee, someone had dumped a bag of garbage next to the bins during the night, and the murder of birds were whooping and hollering, sorting the best shiny bits and rancid meat to steal away. Their call rang in her ears. The joy and playfulness. The conversational tones and complex sounds. The skill with which they sorted and teased the trash apart. 

Her mother was livid: “Why didn’t you stop them? This is your mess to clean up!” 

Now she sits trapped in her daily routine, alone, waiting for someone to drive past or for the laminated plywood sheets to dissolve like cardboard revealed outside after a long winter.