Category: Crayon Barn Chris

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Crayon Barn Chris

V

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By Dylan Smith

And so stumbling out through that bookstore drunk I had only the vaguest idea of where I might have left my bag. The grounds of the city’s biggest cemetery rose up on a hill across the street, with its gas lamps lit and its tall stone graves and these ancient trees edged in light as the path doubled back down along the hill, and I could see all the CitiBike baskets empty in a line. No bag. The bells above the bookstore door jingled as it shut and I worked to manifest my bag’s place inside my head. To envision it shimmering there behind our empty bottles in the Square—but I was also immediately suspicious of that motherfucker Chris.

Every bender we’d ever endured together had ended in me losing something like this. Whether it be my keys or shoes or pants or my bag, it never mattered—it always drove Chris crazy. Yet there he was, so perfectly serene. Stopping in the poetry section, even. So cooly detached. I watched him through the glass door with increasing suspicion. Flipping through some tiny pink book. Taking a wallet out of his tote bag to pay. I may not have known exactly how yet, but I knew. Chris was up to something—hiding something—and that something had something to do with my bag.

My Chris Book.

My journal. My secrets.

I walked across the street.

Chris came out of the bookstore smiling. Bells. I stood beneath a streetlamp in the lowly lit night. The cemetery’s perimeter wall was behind me and Chris had his tote bag open. He placed the new pink book inside it with the wallet, then his hand came out with a small point and shoot camera with a flash.

“Stay just like that,” Chris said.

He stood there behind the parked cars. A bright flash of light with a click.

Upstate it was pianos, I thought. Chris’s constant music. Now pictures. He squeezed between two parked cars coming closer. I rolled my eyes. Chris took another picture.

Click.

The flash was blindingly bright.

Click.

“That’s great, Bill. You really look like shit. That one’s going to be great.”

Click.

That horrible high-pitched sound after each flash.

Click.

I hit the camera out of his hand and went for his bag, thinking I’d run with whatever money was still inside it with his books, but I couldn’t see much because of the flash and before I could get my hands up to protect myself Chris slapped my face hard and hit me in the chest and then I was on my back with his palm on my head against the stone. Chris got right up on top of my body and now he was on me with his knee down hard against my upper rib, the rib right above my heart. I heard the rib go pop and I lost my air to the weight of him. I spit up at him and growled and told him to Fuck off man stop it come on man stop, and I was wheezing. Chris stared down at me cold and calculated and quiet. The sidewalk felt cold too and as hard as the frozen path up to my shack in winter. A moment’s pause while Chris figured out what to do, his palm in my face. If there’d been a rock nearby I think he might’ve done it. He shushed me. I wriggled around. Then his phone rang.

Hallelujah. Haha. Church bells. I laughed into the palm of his hand.

Chris got up and spit into the roots of a sycamore tree. Took out his phone. The little bells inside there rang and rang and he took in a full breath. It hurt me to laugh, but I was laughing.

“Sarah—Wow—Hey, man. What’s up?”

Chris stepped over me. Walked up the street.

I had hit the back of my head pretty hard and so I just lay there some more trying to think. Up high in the sycamore tree I saw a blue tarp caught in the tree’s lamplit canopy of leaves. I tried to concentrate but I couldn’t. I gently elbowed myself back up against the stone wall of the cemetery and dragged my way back down toward the tree. Still wheezing. The roots of the tree had really wrecked the bluestone slabs of the sidewalk and the slabs rose and fell in the shadows like a prank. Art once told me how the city’s sidewalks had all come from bluestone quarries in the mountains around Alma’s farm. A hundred and thirty years ago. Each slab of bluestone seemed so heavy, I thought. The incredible slow strength of that sycamore tree and its roots. I wondered how many people it took to lift the slab I lay on. The blue tarp must have blown up into the tree in winter, I thought. Some poor bastard’s blue shelter. I could hear Chris speaking lowly into his phone up the street. Some poor bastard’s blue tarp house. The maple looking leaves of the sycamore tree had grown and greened all around the blue tarp but I pictured the sycamore bare of its leaves in winter. I closed my eyes. The night was hot and still and the air was wet and heavy. I could barely breathe. I imagined the tarp flapping up there in the wind in winter and the thin trembling branches. It was a cold blue wind and the tarp flapped and flapped up high and the flapping was the sound of my fate, my defeat.

Chris came back down the street nodding and listening to whatever Sarah said. He stood over me looking crazy. All wild-eyed and high. He walked over to the camera and picked it up. Looked it over. Put it back in his bag.  In the sky I saw isolated stars, distant and apart. Not a single constellation. We were down there way below the graves. I hadn’t noticed before, but Chris was wearing these fancy reddish brown leather shoes.

“Right,” Chis said. “I know—Yeah he’s right here. Right. We’re having a blast. Bill’s little birthday party. I know. Yeah. Right. Exactly.”

That’s when I finally got up. My breath had come back a bit but not fully because of the rib and I started to walk up the hill toward I didn’t even know where. The subway, maybe. The Square. Chris followed a little ways down the hill until he hung up and then I heard him running up the hill behind me in those shoes.

I stopped and turned and pointed at him.

“Get away from me you crazy piece of shit.”

“Oh come on, man. You’re who came after me. We overreacted. We were high. Let me buy you a drink.”

I kept on walking. Chris followed, but not too close. The shoes made him sound like a horse trotting up along on the stone. I wheezed a little as I laughed and walked and I was still pretty high and then a beer started to sound pretty good. The bar was a dive we’d never been to together. A place with ripped red leather booths and a jukebox and mirrors. Chris ordered two cans of cheap beer with shots and then he told me, “Put out your hand.” Four blue pills fell into it. I kept my hand out. “Fine,” he said, and then it was five pills and then six and I said, “Hand me that pink book.”

The bathroom was as dark as a cave and the walls were thick with language. I smashed two pills on the hardcover book and there were layers and layers of stickers on the wall, stickers thick as stalactites, and a big green tag above the toilet looked like this:

visual of the green tag above the toilet. Crayon Barn Chris Chapter V by Dylan Smith

Which forced me back into contact with my dilemma. Which was that Alma had made me whole. Before her I hadn’t even known I wasn’t. I’d fallen in love with her wildly, madly, and I’d lied about it all to Chris. I cut two blue lines on the tiny pink book. Love poems by like Neruda or somebody. Alma with that film guy and all my own poems gone missing. My Chris Book. My secrets. I snorted up the lines off that tiny pink book and when I came back out Chris had scribbled an address for me on a napkin. “Sarah’s,” Chris said. I could barely read it. The ink was pinkish red and his camera and wallet were there on the bar and his tote bag hung below him from a hook.

I stared at Chris’s scar.

“You’re who came after me.”

“I know, Chris. Go fuck yourself.”

“I have to be at work in the morning.”

“Okay.”

“You left it in the Square right?”

“That’s what I thought too. But by now somebody probably took it.”

“Where’s your car key?”

“My pocket.’

“What about a phone?”

“It’s been dead a long time in the duffle bag.”

“Well I’ll be asleep by the time you get back. Just ring the buzzer until I wake up. We’re meeting up with Sarah tomorrow, man. Uptown at this address when I get off from work—it’s where your Volvo’s parked. I figured you can drive it back upstate from there. Just please come back to my place tonight to shower before you meet her, Bill. I’ll have the couch made up for you. Some clean clothes set out. You need to try to get some sleep.”

“Okay.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No. Just my rib.”

“What about your head?”

“That’s fine.”

“Alright.”

“Okay.”

We took the shots without a cheers and I handed Chris the book and then he wobbled his way back past the jukebox toward the bathroom. The bar music blared yellow white red and the bar itself felt hot and wet and red. Chris had taken his tote bag with him but he left the bottle of pills on the bar with his wallet and camera like an idiot. I folded Sarah’s address and stuffed it into my pocket. I thought about the green tag in the bathroom again and about the blue tarp flapping in the wind—and then I thought about the first load of firewood I ever helped Art deliver to Alma’s farm. A big blue truck bed full of red and white oak. I helped Art unload it into a pile in the autumn grass and we covered the pile with a big blue tarp. I heard Art tell Chris we should stack it all in the woodshed, but nobody ever did. Every morning all winter long I’d wake up at dawn and walk out hungover through the frozen field toward the small stable barn where Chris once kept his chickens. Four roosters and fifty spent hens from some guy Chris found on Craigslist—I had to feed them as one of my chores. Usually I’d find only two or three eggs and on the hike back up I’d fill the blue wheelbarrow with wood from under the tarp and wheel it all up toward Alma’s farmhouse to make a fire. I’d put on a pot of coffee and sit at the kitchen table alone by the window writing poems. Alma would wake up. Come out with a cute wave and make herself some tea. We’d sit together by the fire in the bright silence and she’d be reading. One morning I watched her paint the wood pile. A small abstract kind of thing on a piece of scrap cardboard I’d ripped up for kindling. Four or five woody red wiggles and a blue line up above like a wave of water for the tarp. I loved that picture. I hung it up in the attic above my cot. But that winter one of Chris’s heat lamps got knocked into the hay because of the wind and when I walked out into the field at dawn the stable barn was burning. Hundred year old chestnut. Ancient hand hewn beams. All fifty of Chris’s chickens in it, and nothing to be done. The frost had thawed in a ring around the fire and the flames rose up with the sun like a silent red hand and I just stood there by the wood pile watching the morning burn.

At the very last second I decided I should leave. Fuck Chris. I grabbed the bottle of pills and Chris’s camera and the wallet and I ran out into the heat—I ran and ran and ran into the night and I didn’t want the bastard to catch me so I held my busted rib and I ignored my throbbing head and I was in love and I ran and ran and then I was underground, and at the far end of the platform hidden under the stairs I waited for the train in that long white yellow blinding miserable airless summer heat.

A little time passed.

A lot of shallow breaths.

The subway tile pulsed with my throbbing head and glistened. Red rust trickled between the tracks in a little creek and everywhere the trash and stink and the rats. This kid came down the stairs in a paper birthday hat tugging at a big bouquet of rainbowy balloons. I stepped out from under the stairs and yelled, “It’s my birthday too,” but I must have scared the kid’s mom because they rushed away and down to the other end of the station.

That’s when I saw this guy standing alone and staring up into the light. He looked as if he’d just seen something horrific, or maybe holy. The guy was draped in white robes which time had darkened with grime and in that underground air he held out a Dunk’n Donuts cup as if it were filling with the light. I took out Chris’s wallet. Almost a hundred bucks. I removed two twenties, balled them up as I approached, and I dropped them into the guy’s holy cup. Unmoved. I put Chris’s driver’s license in the cup and one of his credit cards in there too. The guy’s dry lips quivered. He muttered something under his breath—not a thank you, but more of like an underground prayer. A manifestation of everything dirty and divine. The fluorescent light filled him as it flickered but the man remained true. Unmoved. Then the train came and I got on it and it was like the gates of hell clanged shut behind me. The gates opened and shut and they opened again and opened and opened and opened again and it was like that all the way until the bridge—and then soaring through the air again clanging and clanging and there was the city and the dark black water and the night again, and the Statue of Liberty like some holy golden light out there in her money-colored robes and the city pulsed and sparked and each window replaced a star in the night, and then I was up in the Square and I was searching for my bag alone in the dark and broken.

It wasn’t there. Simple as that. I checked under the chiseled rock bench and kicked around at the empty bottles Chris and I had left behind—but nothing. I checked trash cans and inside tree holes. No bag. No bag anywhere. By now it was getting late and the Square had emptied except for the people who lived in there under tarps and a dozen or so drunk college kids stumbled around being idiots. Anybody could’ve taken it. I couldn’t even find the moon. I walked around the fountain looking for the guy who’d been painted to look like a statue but I didn’t see him. I sat back down on my bench to think and listened to the sound of the fountain. I had a little moonshine left, but not much. I drank it down. A drunk piano player played sloppy drunk songs in the bottom left corner of the Square but I could barely hear him over the water. A newspaper blew by like tumbleweed. Moved by some mysterious gust in the strangeness. There was the red chalk again. CURRENT. I chewed on one of Chris’s pills.

And that’s when I saw the Tarot Guy sitting there crosslegged under the Arch. He’d set up a squat foldable table at knee height. He sat there shirtless and he was staring at me in this tall gray wizard’s hat. I waved, but he didn’t move. He really freaked me out. We eyed each other. The wizard hat was the size of a traffic cone on his tiny bald super-tan head but there was a lot of calm air around him as I approached. He seemed to be looking out at me from within a deep meditation.

A hand drawn sign taped to the table read: FORTUNE TELLER. CALDER. TAROT. TEN DOLLARS.

I waved again. Nothing.

“Hey man—you know that statue guy? That guy painted silver and gold who stands over there like a statue?”

“The man you speak of has a name. It is Gary. Gary is a good friend of mine. So yes, I have seen him, but he is gone.”

“Well have you seen a duffle bag? I’m looking for my duffle bag. I left it over there under the bench.”

“Oh. Ha. Yes. It’s you. Of course. I’ve been waiting.”

Calder pulled my duffle bag out from underneath his tiny table.

Holy shit. I dropped to my knees and held my busted rib. Magic. My broken heart. I opened the bag right there on the spot and dumped its contents onto Calder’s tiny shitty table. I tried to say thank you but I could barely breath. There were the socks and the underwear and the long red birthday box Chris had given me and the card. All of it was there in a pile on the table. I dug through the bag some more and found some loose flattened papers and some trash and a dirty broken toothbrush and two pens. I pushed through the two pairs of socks and the underwear on the table, and I pushed everything off the table and onto the bluestone slab and looked through it again. I ripped opened the red box. Inside it was a telescope. A golden telescope with a leather strap like the kind a sailor would use to find land. I picked up the box and dropped it again and I opened the bag again and all its side pockets and I held it upside-down over the table and I shook it out. Saw dust fell out over everything and some small rocks and a gum wrapper and a couple bottle caps. I picked up the long red box again and I threw it off to the side at the Arch.

Calder watched closely.

“I’m fucked,” I told him.

“Yes.”

My Chris Book. My journal.

Calder nodded calmly. Knowingly.

I couldn’t figure out how exactly yet—but I knew it too.

Chris had stolen my secrets.

For money Dylan Smith plants flowers on rooftops in New York and has a website with links to other stories online. Oh and check out The Other Almanac. A piece of Dylan’s will be published in print with them this fall.

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Crayon Barn Chris

IV

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By Dylan Smith

If only on a cellular or like nuclear level I could embody my love for Alma in every moment through all of time while making love with her literally everywhere forever, I thought, maybe then in my body I might feel alright—but that’s when I came barreling out of a blackout, and I was sitting on a barstool next to Chris. Uh-oh, I thought. Haha. Holy shit. The length of the old oak bartop trembled with the energy of a newly felled tree and in my body, spirit, in my mind, I felt like a finger painting. Or like a piece of birthday cake mushed in barn dirt and glitter, with like alphabet confetti and crayons for candles burning purple pink black and red—like something smoldering, deformed, smeared. 

I’m here to get my car back, I thought. My mission, my purpose. To confess my love for Alma to Chris. 

A new beer shone in Chris’s hands, in those carefully washed immaculate hands, but I could tell from his eyes that we must have taken drugs. My glass, of course, was empty. Smudged. I had a sneaky look around. Last thing I remember I was upstate, taping Art’s taillight back together with Diane—so what happened? Art’s moonshine, maybe. Definitely. I felt Art’s flask in my paint-stained pocket. Now it felt like morning. Chris’s uppers were what woke me up. Those famous little blue ones. Thank God, I thought. I worshiped them. I found the only window in the bar, a basement window way high up with the sunlight shining through. Long, golden rays of it. The bar was dark wood. Pressed suits. It was happy hour. Golden hour. Somewhere in Manhattan—and it was evening. I felt like a hollow bone, the air-conditioned air like faint music moving through me. Humming, humming—what happened? Chris was waiting on something. The molecules around his head whirled in the mirror behind the bar. Keys to my Volvo on the bartop. My cash and credit card too. But I sensed a serious tension. The bartender came back around. A halo lit his loose silk shirt. I ordered another beer. Chris had our father’s eyes, eyes like boiling water. I looked down at the duffle bag at my feet. Hallelujah, I whispered. My notebook was in there. My Chris poems—my secrets. I felt his eyes on the side of my neck. Chris’s eyes were wild, trembling, whirlpooling, blue. 

“I’m pretty high right now,” I said. 

“No shit, man. I’m daunted too. But you were right in the middle of something.”

“Right. I was. I remember.”

“Mid-story, man. Like mid-sentence. Something about Art’s glasses.”

“Right. Sorry—I spaced out. Must have lost my trail of thought.”

At this Chris laughed. Or sort of scoffed. “We’ve got a thing called trains now, mountain man. You’ve been in the woods too long.”

I wasn’t getting it. 

“It’s train of thought, man. Not trail.”

The bartender came back with my beer. An angel lit by a loop of light. My brain throbbed loud blood, nervous fear-pumped blood. Chris’s pills had scraped at my eyes, my skull, it’s sockets. I clasped my hands in a pious way. Closed my eyes. Pictured Alma’s. 

Honey-colored moons. Depths of golden light. 

The bartender placed a candle between me and Chris. The yellow flame wiggled. Soon it would be dark, I thought. The city would come alive in the dark. Maybe I could too. Alma had completed the shape of my dreams, my future, my face. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. Oh God. I’d walked this city like a thin miracle once, I thought. Poems and paintings and people. Fearless. Alive. A part. What happened? I looked dislocated, incomplete, depleted. I had to come clean to Chris. I knew it was the right thing to do. I downed three quarters of my beer in one go, reaching for an ancient effect—but it was gone. Nothing worked. I was destined for disastrous, disgusting things. Dirty. Disconnected. I longed to go back home to my cave, my shack. To return to the beginning of time. To the center, the candle—Alma’s eyes. The cave. 

“Art’s glasses, man,” Chris said. 

“Okay, right. Sorry. I remember. It was probably just that I wore them. Wore Art’s glasses as a joke. The joke being that I’ve started to sort of absorb him. That I’m training to become the newer better, younger Art.”

“You’re not bored of it yet. You still have fun following him around.”

Chris asked questions as if they were statements. It annoyed me. 

“Definitely not bored, Chris. No.”

“What are you working on then, man. Tell me something specific.”

“Well we’re mowing lawns right now, mostly. But a lot of trees fell this spring from the rain. We handled that. Now at night we work on Alma’s doors. I mean those farmhouse doors—we took them up to the barn where the beer is. To patch the rot holes. Remember? Same red paint as the barn. Huge rot holes in the wood from the rain.”

Chris sipped his beer. The tiniest little sip.

“That’s when I started wearing Art’s glasses,” I said. “Drunk at night in the barn. But Art’s glasses are destroyed, is the point. Totally chipped up, chipped thin. Just like Alma’s doors. I bet that’s what I meant to say. Art told me it’s been a decade since he got new lenses. Ten years of carpentry work and trees, and sometimes metal shavings shoot up off the saws and chip away at his lenses. Little by little bit. Point is, it’s a miracle the old man can see.”

A long pause. Another tiny sip of his beer. Long pauses were common with Chris. Alma called them pregnant pauses. They annoyed me. If he’d only just take a bigger sip of his beer. I picked up the key to my car. Held it to the light. It reminded me of Chris’s scar—I looked for it in the mirror behind the bar. Barely noticeable in the candlelight, but it was there. The width of a key. Right in the center of his head. Chris’s mother, April, she’d left him up on the kitchen counter, playing with a ring of keys. In one of those plastic car seat things. Bottle of vodka under the sink. Chris rocked himself off the counter with the keys—and thwack. White tile. Blue face. Blood red blood. This was how our father told it. Chris was too young to remember. The key almost got to his brain, our father said. Swollen eyes. Fractured skull. That’s when my mom came into the picture. Quick divorce—quicker marriage—quickest me, etc. 

Later April died in a desert motel alone. Alcohol and pills. Chris had just turned ten. 

I wrestled a half-breath up out of my chest, and put the key to my car in my pocket. The bar had grown more crowded, and the window had started to darken. The bar felt like an airplane taking off, the way it was shaking and shaking—but now it lifted. Chris cleared his long thin throat. I felt the question come before he formed it. Here it comes, I thought. Hold on, Bill. Strap in. Here it comes. 

I felt like a little bird. 

“So have you spent any time with Alma?”

Chris’s eyes became two black circles in the mirror behind the bar. I looked away, down, and deep into the flame of that candle. A darkness opened in the center of it, and my life unfurled in there for a while. Black thoughts like a road tumbled out. My fugitive love for Alma. I had every intention of telling Chris the truth. Of coming clean. The road opened onto my future, I thought. Nothing in my way. Nothing to hide—I rode it right up onto a bright horizon. The sky inside me sparkled, it was my future. To tell the truth. And at the end of the truth was my freedom. 

“No,” I lied. “No—I mean, I see her up there in the garden a lot. You know, alone. But no. We don’t really ever spend that much time together.”

I finished the rest of my beer. Haha. My future folded right back up. 

“I saw her yesterday,” Chris said.

“Wait—what?” My reaction was not nearly calm enough. “Hold on—when? Saw her like how?”

Chris looked at me for a long time. 

Like a really, really long time. 

All Chris said was, “Yesterday, man. In Brooklyn.”

“But saw her like how?”

“Do you remember that guy she was seeing before me?”

“Not really,” I said. “The film guy?”

“Right. We went to his documentary together. The one about the old fisherman living alone on that island. Alone in that church. You remember. That film guy.”

“But what about him?”

“I saw Alma walk into a movie with him.”

“Where, though—are you sure?”

“Just a glimpse. But yeah, man. It was her.”

I felt sick. My vision shook. I thought about going to the bathroom, but I didn’t trust myself to stand up right. I was blowing it. Chris could see straight through me. Betrayal. Calamity. Death and doom and all that. I could still change my mind, I thought. There was still time, like right now—I still had time to surrender. To the moment. To confess my betrayal—no, my love—my love for Alma was pure. Just come clean, Bill. Right now. Come on, man. You have nothing to hide. Just do it. Come clean, Bill, this is your last chance—but then we were up on the street. 

Bury me, I thought. God, bury me directly underground. 

Above the bar Chris turned to face me, and I flinched. The last bit of daylight beamed off a tower, and cast him in this strange green secondary light. Chris laughed. He pulled something out of his tote bag, then the light was gone. A regular summer night. We stood there staring at each other for a while. Two stones in a stream of people. A current. The two of us totally still. 

I thought Chris would be holding a knife or gun or like some kind of crowbar or something, but it was a gift. A long box wrapped in red paper. Red bow. Red card. Chris pulled me in for a hug.

“Happy Birthday, Bill. Thank you for everything, man.”

My birthday. Haha. Holy shit. Chris was right. Somehow I’d forgotten all about it. 

“Just put this box straight into your duffle bag, man. Open it later. Let’s try and have ourselves a night.”

Chris made me buy us both CitiBikes, two of those crazy gray electric ones with the engines that go quietly vroom through the city like cars. I stuffed the red box into my duffle bag. Noticed my poems and notebook were still there, my secrets, then I nestled my bag into the bike’s plastic basket. Chris led us downtown. Second Avenue. Toward the fountain. Young rich drunk couples leapt into the street like deer and whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, Chris and I curved and swerved all around them. We stopped in front of a deli for beer. Chris said he’d watch my bike. I picked up two six packs, paid with cash, then came back out. A dark blue night in New York. Back on the bikes. Back on the street. Chris howled up at the half-moon, a liquid neon rainbow blur. I howled too—and we were laughing. 

We walked our bikes across the square, beers clinking around in my basket. There was the arch. The fountain. I hadn’t ever noticed these trees before. Chris passed out more pills. Beyond the fountain was a catalpa tree the same size and shape as Diane’s. Its leaves looked blue and fleshy and wet. We sat on a bench made of chiseled rock. Washed the pills down with beer and more beer. Chris told me about the job he’d landed at a museum uptown. An old professor of his was the director. Chris got paid to guard the art. 

“And I’m seeing somebody new,” Chris said. 

I passed him Art’s flask. Opened him another beer. 

“I’m happy to hear that, Chris. Really. You have no idea.”

“Sarah’s her name, man. She’s uptown. Near the museum. This great big building a couple blocks from the park. You just wait, man. You’ll love her.”

The half-moon hung high above the fountain. A kid in a star-spangled cape wrote CURRENT on the ground in red chalk, and I started to feel a little better. The pills, the moonshine, the beer. Sarah. Suddenly my secret felt totally manageable. Maybe Chris had already moved on. My innocent love for Alma—maybe he wouldn’t even care. Chris talked about at the museum. How he planned to work his way up to a more powerful position. To be in charge of the parties, Chris said. Fundraisers. Events. Money to acquire more art. CURRENT. What a wonderful word! The fountain unfolded like a flower. Electricity. Water. The moment. I tried hard not to think of the film guy. I pushed the film guy violently out of my mind. I was really starting to feel much better. People sat around in the fountain spray, spun circles around it laughing, singing, dancing. The square had its own rhythm. Its own pulse, like a body, I thought. Everybody growing up said Chris had Vision. Always looking up ahead. Radiating light. Making new things happen. I followed him around wherever he went. Hung back behind him, watching. My teachers said I liked to reflect. A man in a suit painted silver and gold sat on a bench beside us, smoking. No longer a sculpture of himself, I thought. He looked so loose and breezy. Chris told me about his favorite painting at the museum. This portrait of St. Francis by Bellini. “I’ll take you back uptown tomorrow to see it,” Chris said. “We can meet Sarah up there too—the Volvo’s parked out in front of her apartment.”

Chris followed my eyes. The statue guy smiled. Exhaled smoke. Chris waved. “Poor dude’s covered in bird shit,” Chris said. I touched my own bird shit stain, the one from my blue bird upstate. My blessing, I thought. My gift. I was glad hadn’t come clean to Chris. I felt wave after wave of drug-fueled relief. Moonshine. Haha. Fuck this film guy, I thought. I would win Alma back. I would stop doing drugs. Stop drinking. Whatever Alma wanted, I thought, I would do it. I had Power. Divinity. Control. I felt like a miracle again. I’ve been blessed, I thought. Alma’s grace. Our love. My secret. 

Chris and I biked over the bridge into Brooklyn. Orange blue sky. Purple black blue water. We shot through the air like shooting stars. I felt just like Evil Knievel. Our father’s favorite. I looked down at the birds flying home, the sail boats sailing on the surface of the river. Moonlight is reflected light, I thought. The city lights rippled in the water. 

We re-docked the bikes, like boats. 

A bookstore not far from Chris’s place. 

Rainbow lights. A courtyard. A tall brick wall. 

A couple poets, Chris whispered. A reading.

But I couldn’t pay attention to anything at all. I felt very very, very high. I got hooked into staring at the bones of the poets’ hands, got fixated on the fact that there were cells that made up the bones in hands and that each poet had cells deep within the center of the bones of their bodies, their hands, and I looked around. Everybody had bones. And I fixated on the fact that there was marrow or something in the bones of this one particular poet’s hands, and I concentrated on the nuclei of the cells that made up the marrow of her bones and her poem was boring and looking at the brick wall behind the poet and her reading of this boring poem, I became conscious of the density of the bricks, and of the atoms at the center of each thick brick, and I thought of a thin yellow falling maple leaf twirling up out of a tree in late autumn. Then the red of Art’s barn at dawn in winter. A shard of his busted taillight, shining. The poet finished her poem and then read another, better poem about muddy water. About all the colors of the rainbow mushed together to make a muddy wet brown, about the cold wet density of the wind above a creek in the morning, and I realized there were probably pipes full of blue water behind the bricks that made the wall behind the poet, reading. Why can we see through clear blue water, I wondered. Through glass? I remembered my reflection in the blue sloshing water of the toilet on the bus ride down. The only thing I remembered. Art says mirrors reflect back the colors we see in the light, and I thought back to the mirror behind the bar where earlier I lied to Chris. Moonlight is reflected light. And I thought about Chris’s scar.  

Chris looked drunk. Haha. He turned to look at me too. Like looking into a mirror, I thought. Everything was fine. I laughed. Chris laughed too. He patted my knee with the bones of his hand. He had no idea, I thought. No clue. I was going to turn my whole life around. Alma loved me back. I knew she did. And now I had a secret. Something to keep. That’s what I was going to do, I thought. I would do anything. My love for Alma. I would keep it. 

“Where’s your duffle bag, man?” Chris whispered. 

The rainbow lights swayed, then flickered. 

I looked down and around at my feet. 

Uh-oh, I thought. Haha. Holy shit. 

For money Dylan Smith plants flowers on rooftops in New York and has a website with links to other stories online. Oh and check out The Other Almanac. A piece of Dylan’s will be published in print with them this fall.

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Crayon Barn Chris

III

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By Dylan Smith

This day last year a blue bird blessed my desk and now every new moment opens awake within me like a poem. Today I keep the bird shit desk pushed up against my porthole window in the city. Poems scribbled everywhere. The same shit-stained pages of my manuscript, my Chris Book: Red Crayon // Blue Crayon // Green Crayon // Spring. The Statue of Liberty with its twenty-foot flame is just a pinky-sized shadow out there on the harbor—and now here comes the sun, it’s rising up out of the river. All the clouds above the city burn bright orange sea-blue pink along their bottoms at first, edges shining like the pages of a Holy book, and then it’s the tops of those close, barn-sized clouds that come alive with color again as they burn, and I see the familiar silhouettes of those horse-shaped cranes and the dark buildings beyond them that tower, and with my candle lit and the coffee brewed, I’ll just sit on the ground for a while. Close my eyes. Criss-cross my legs. Take it all in with my breath. My therapist taught me the importance of this routine, how to meditate immediately upon waking. Diane says it’s important that I right-size myself, and that I do so right away—she suggests I even say a sort of prayer as I start. Let go of my will. Try to let the light shine through me. Sometimes I do. But other times what I do is, I just close my eyes and picture Alma. Imagine her waking up behind me in bed, eyes burning golden candles—or like two struck matches as they open perfect fires in her head—and other times I picture her farmhouse on the hill, and above that her forever spring blue woods are always greening, and I pretend to hike up that path toward my candlelit shack where every new morning opens completely new in my head, like a poem, and it’s spring. 

Halfway up that path through the mountain woods to my shack was a memorial rock for Alma’s father. Everybody called it Michael’s Rock. A mossy slab of bluestone as impressive as the side of a ship. Art installed these two green benches up there, and I like to hike to them in my head. Take along my notebook and a coffee to listen to the birdsong and sit. An embedded steel engraving holds Michael’s picture. A proper monument with his name and his dates. 

Kind eyes. Sky blue shirt. Big smile dappled in the leafy darkness and light. 

Today I brought Michael an imaginary flower and was reminded of an early summer session with Diane. What I remember most from those days is the daily rainbow hanging above Art’s barn and the way the new June dew warmed and rose up from the fields all blurry-gray-blue in a thick fog thinning slowly every morning into mist, and how on the long drive to Diane’s therapy office in town, Art told me those rainbows were because of the barn’s position to the sun. 

“The sun’s got to be behind you for rainbows,” Art said. Canopies of green leaves created a kind of green tunnel as he drove, and Art threw his thumb back behind us to the east. “Water droplets bend the light. It’s a miracle if you think about it. Try to imagine the mist as trillions of tiny pyramids. They used to be the dew. You have the sunlight shining through each drop and each drop is like a tiny pyramid projecting color out onto the sky. It’s called refraction, Sunshine. Visible light. Every new rainbow is a miracle.”

The landscape widened as we turned onto the painted county road into town. I had a duffle bag at my feet. A pair of underwear, my notebook, some socks. The plan was that Art would take me into town for therapy, then drop me off at the bus station. I’d spend a night or two in the city with Chris. Come back up the next morning with my car. Now the sky opened again all blue and big and roomy, fields and farms rolling greenly into mountains, and the sudden shift in scale made me feel like I’d shrunk. Which made me think of Chris. In the side mirror my eyes looked all puffy. Swollen. Nearly shut. I couldn’t tell if it was from early summer allergies, or from all the beers I’d downed the night before, or what. 

Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

I took out my notebook. Wrote down the word Calamity.

Calamity. 

Calamity. 

I wrote and rewrote it about a hundred times.

“Speaking of rainbows, Sunshine—ever been to Niagara Falls?”

I struggled to clear my throat.  

“No. Not yet. But Alma told me she went up there once with Michael.”

“Well talk about miracles. This side of the falls is even named after rainbows. Any sunny day of the year and you will see one. Guaranteed. All that falling worter. You should make a trip of it one day, Sunshine. Especially now that you’ll have a car again. Was starting to wonder when you’d ever get the balls to talk to Chris.”

I rolled my window down. Tried to wash away Art’s laugh with the mountain air, the morning light. 

Diane lived on an old dairy farm two or three miles out of town. Her office was just a bedroom in her house. Art’s truck rocked along her long wide driveway in reverse, stopping just before this big catalpa tree flowering before the deck. Diane stood up there in the shade, waving. Art watched her in the rear view mirror. Rolled his window down. Laughed. Waved back. He picked a piece of straw out of my hair and another off my shirt, then handed me a week’s pay in cash. 

It must have been like three hundred bucks. A session with Diane cost fifty. I also had a credit card in my pocket. Art watched me stuff the money into my jeans, which were covered in red and white paint, and the knees of the jeans were caked in dried mud. 

“If cleanliness is next to Godliness you’re heading to the city with a pitchfork, Sunshine. If it were me I’d try to bribe Diane with an extra twenty or two for a shower.”

Diane’s office walls were all bookshelves full of textbooks and spiritual books and coloring books and crystals. Tall ceilings. One green couch. She kept this rocking chair in the corner for herself and I sat—well, sometimes I’d lie there with my boots off, staring out at the catalpa tree in the window. I really liked Diane. Her voice was like the silhouette of some far off mountain. 

Hillsides for eyes. Wavy gray brown hair. A seven-year-old son named Jacob. 

Diane was still getting settled into to her chair. Blue pen in hand. Yellow legal pad in her lap. At the other end of the room, this low red plastic table had a bunch of art supplies all over it. 

“Well,” she said. “Tell me. Bill. What is happening up in your world?”

I just stared at my hands for a while. Duffle bag at my feet. My hands looked filthy. 

“Alma went away for a while,” I said. 

“Went away?”

“To the city. To visit Karen.”

“Karen.”

“Her mom. I’m going down today too. To get my car back from Chris.”

“Will you see Alma down there too?”

“No. Well, I don’t know. She didn’t say. She says we need to make some distance.”

“Distance.”

“Well. Just for now she said.”

Diane scribbled something blue on her pad, nodding. 

“And what do you say?”

“What do you mean,” I said.

“What do you say? About needing to make some distance.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat there. Like my hands, my boots looked all busted up and dirty. I unlaced them, pulled them off. Swung my dirty socks up onto the leathery green. I had a good view of the window now, but I just stared at my hands some more. The ends of my nails were ten black lines and the callouses on my palms were eight brown circles. I knew it was only a matter of time with Diane, though. Just a matter of which way to enter the session together—and before I knew it we were in, and I told Diane about how I’d fallen for Alma completely the way we rolled about in my bed together with the thunder and the close dark green clouds and the rain, and how when finally that last spring storm had stopped and day by day the mountain had been greening it was June again, and Chris was gone—and how for that first week of summer, everything in my window had been rainbows. Because Alma was there. I told Diane how the moon was close at night and clean from the rain and full, and how up in my shack these fireflies twirled up in bright splashes of electric sudden neon green like stars, and Alma was there on a blanket on the floor and the radio tumbled out its song and we were dancing screaming naked love and I was sober for a while and we were laughing. Because Alma called them lightning bugs. Haha. I just loved that. I told Diane how the lightning bugs formed brief constellations above my bed, and how Alma named them these non-Latin-sounding names, names like Bird God and Horse Skull Mountain and Love Lamp, and how tattooed to her foot in the candlelight, the phases of the moon were fading. 

Then I told Diane about Alma’s shrinking dreams. How I’d never heard of anyone else having those before. 

First night after the storm. Purple blue moonlight on the mountain in my window. By now the radio’s batteries had started losing power. Its song just a whisper, faint and wobbly and low.

The shrinking dreams started after Michael died. Made death a kind of shrinking.

Diane nodded. Wrote it down. 

I can still remember the smell of coconuts in Alma’s hair. Her chin on my chest. My heart thumping raw. 

I told her I suffer from shrinking dreams too. 

Lightning bugs burst above us. Alma leapt up.

“Well in my first one I went to the bathroom upstairs in the farmhouse and heard this peeping,” Alma said. “I found these eggs and two ducklings, a brown one and a yellow one. But Michael came in and filled up the bath with water. I didn’t realize really what had happened until the eggs bobbed and shrunk in the water and the two ducks struggled to stay up on top.”

“Did they go under?”

“Of course—the current pushed them under. One at a time by the faucet. I didn’t act quick enough to grab them out and the second duck—that’s the yellow one, it went under. By the time I pulled them up they had shrunk down to bug sizes with like these terrible thin delicate wings. I placed each one on a towel as delicate as I could but they were wet. They stuck to my fingers. I lost the brown one somewhere in the blue towel and woke up screaming because I’d squished it.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But mine are always shrinking horses. Not ducks.”

“No—no it’s not always ducks. I’ve had shrinking dreams about nearly every farm animal there’s ever been. Horses yes, but also Art kept these goats in the barn when I was little, and I’ve even had a couple about Chris’s stupid chickens—,” but that’s when Diane cut me off. 

“Why don’t you tell me more about this, how did Alma phrase it, making distance.”

So I contemplated the catalpa tree in Diane’s window for a while. Leaves were as big as bibles. Clean white flowers the size of your fist. 

“Well, I guess reality kind of crept in.”

“Reality.”

“The reality of what we were doing. Like the fear of it. Love. The reality of it.”

“Tell me more.” 

“All the sudden it was, What are we doing? Oh God. Oh no. Suddenly it was, What do we do about Chris?”

“And?”

“And so we tried to kind of avoid each other. For the last few days before she left. But it’s impossible. Like some outside energy won’t let us part. I feel powerless against it. Absorbed by it. I couldn’t even get to work until she left.”

That’s when Diane’s son started jumping up and down in a nearby room. I heard his babysitter shush him. I thought about Chris. Those catalpa flowers rubbed against the window and Diane’s face might as well have melted off her head, the way I felt. My vision sort of shook. Heart thumping high up in my neck.

I closed my puffy eyes. Took in a deep breath. That morning I’d looked up the word calamity in my book. Some say it comes from the Latin word calamus, meaning straw, as in a damaged crop. But others think it’s origin is something more obscure. 

“How do you feel right now?” Diane asked. 

“Hungover,” I admitted. 

“So you picked back up.”

“As soon as Alma left.”

“And how have things been in your cabin? In your shack. How have you managed without running water?”

“I’ve been sleeping in Art’s barn again.”

“Where in the barn have you been sleeping?”

“Like down at that bottom bay again. In the bales of hay. Where Chris used to keep all his chickens.”

Diane stayed quiet for a really long time. 

Then she said, “I suggest you tell Chris the truth.” 

Man, I hated Diane. The titles of her books fell from their spines in pure colorful alphabetic arcs, their letters splashing like confetti all over the floor as I fell deeper and deeper in through her green couch like that forever. 

“When you see Chris I suggest you tell him exactly everything you’ve just told me. That you’ve fallen in love with Alma. That it happened completely organic-like, and that you meant no harm by it. Chris can’t hurt you, Bill. Not mentally. Not spiritually. Maybe he can hurt you physically a little, but you aren’t kids anymore. You’ve grown up, Bill. You are strong.” 

I looked down at my hands. Jacob screamed and screamed and I wondered what Alma might have looked like as a kid. I decided my hands looked dirtier than usual. Covered in something, like some sickly bluish film. I pictured Alma holding Michael’s hand by a waterfall. A red ribbon in her hair. A rainbow bending bands of light—and then I remembered the job I’d done the day before with Art. Alma’s basement doors had rotted through in patches at your ankles from all the years of rainwater and splashing. These two huge wooden doors painted red. Art and I took the doors to the barn and mixed this two-part epoxy. Art told me they use the same epoxy to patch up holes in boats. Entropy. You mixed the tan putty with the blue putty and like magic, the two come together making wood. 

Art called the stuff Bondo. That’s what was all over my hands. 

“Art taught me something cool yesterday,” I said. 

“Yes?”

“He taught me about nuclear fusion. Energy in one nucleus fusing with another. Art says that’s what happens inside stars—like inside the sun. He says scientists are trying to make it happen in their labs now, but that it takes an incredible amount of heat. Art told me it’s really dangerous. The most dangerous thing a human could do. But he said if scientists can make it green, the fusion could save the earth.”

A blue bird landed on a catalpa branch in the window. Diane smiled. 

“And what do you think?”

“Well, it made me think of what I like about poems.”

“Which is what?”

“The energy between the letters. The letters forming words. Art’s Bondo made me think of that. The power of the alphabet. The ABC’s. I’ve had that song stuck in my head.”

“And?”

“And I guess it makes me even more scared to talk to Chris.”

That’s when Diane invited me to close my eyes. We ended every session with the same guided meditation. Diane led me out of the office, down the stairs, then out through a field of overflowing wildflowers in my head. Set out this red blanket in the grass. Invited me to take a seat on it in my head. Together we were to absorb the day’s divine energy. Worship the healing spiritual power of the sun inside us—but instead of doing all that, I just fell asleep. 

The next thing I remember is the big kaboom-boom sound of a crash outside. I opened my eyes. Leapt up. The blue bird in Diane’s window was gone. The catalpa tree was shaking. I thought maybe something had exploded, but Diane was at her window, and she was laughing. 

Art had backed his truck right up against the catalpa trunk. 

His hat in his hands. Taillight smashed to pieces. 

Yet somehow Art seemed totally serene. A picture of perfect calm. 

Art lifted the largest shard of plastic up from out of the grass. Held it to the light. Like a big rare rock, the shard shone and sparkled as he turned it. His face cast in this wonderful, rainbowy light. Diane and I laughed. You could tell it really amazed him.

“Art is insane,” I said. 

“Yes he is,” Diane said. “But insane in the most beautiful way.”

For money Dylan Smith plants flowers on rooftops in New York and has a website with links to other stories online. Oh and check out The Other Almanac. A piece of Dylan’s will be published in print with them this fall.

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Crayon Barn Chris

II

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By Dylan Smith

Today I lit a candle in my apartment before I poured my coffee. This wavering flame takes me back, like way back up that spiraling path to my shack where there was no electricity or running water. Mountain birds lift into the mountain air in my head—hang high above Art’s barn, and shit into the blue mountain air in my head. I found this candlestick in the scrap pile at the dump. Alma loved it. A flowery brass ornamental-looking thing which lifts my daily flame up way above my desk, about midway up my window pane, and until this candle melts down and away and the sky alights again all yellow pink blue gray, my morning flame wavers like the sail of a boat by itself on the water. Everybody outside seems so alone. Above the flame I see cranes and the circles made by birds and the arches of bridges made of steel and massive yellow rock, and on top of most of those buildings across the river I see wooden towers that look like big beautiful barrels of whiskey. Or maybe beer. Art once told me the city’s water towers are all made of redwood trees and cedar—and the one thing nobody down there seems to wonder much about is what happens to all the bags of trash we drag out onto the street. I watch tug boats haul proper mountains of it north to God knows where, pushing whole landscapes of trash past my solitary flame as it wavers like a sail alone on the water. I bet Art would know where they take it. Art loved trash. Probably to some landfill out in New Jersey. 

The spiritual path I shaped for myself upstate is that of the outlaw or the sailor, the path of the hippie cowboy saint. It is the poet’s path—no, it is the sober poet’s path, by which I mean to suggest that poems are dangerous and holy and rare. This is the kind of thing my half-brother Chris would probably scoff at. Poems being holy and dangerous—pssh—Chris would roll those explosive blue eyes and spit. But Art and I did a lot of dangerous work together. A lot of wobbly wooden ladders in bad weather. A lot of icy roads, downed wires—a lot of charred black trees felled drunk after wild summer fires. 

And all of that felt safe compared to the traumatic childhood secrets I uncovered in my poems about Chris. 

This night last year Alma taught me there was once an order to the blossom of flowers in spring. I told her flowers were still sort of new to me. Chris and I grew up in the desert. I never knew they bloomed in order. 

“But not anymore,” Alma said. “Not with the warming earth. Now everything just flowers all at once.” 

Alma had hiked up the muddy path to my shack with this basket full of shack warming gifts: a bouquet of bright spring flowers, a box of homemade candles, some food—but the main thing was she brought up this battery powered radio. Said she worried I’d become some sort of weirdo hermit way up there alone in her woods. This was toward the end of May, and Alma had been hard at work all day in her garden. I remember dried mud on the knees of her jeans, a hole in her big green shirt. Chris had only been gone a few weeks. Alma didn’t seem so alone. 

I’d left my big book of etymologies open to the V’s on my desk. Had just looked up the the word veil, I remember—which comes from the Latin root vela, meaning candle in Spanish, but in Latin it means sail. 

Alma leaned over the book for a while, then shifted some poems around. 

“I wonder if revenge works,” Alma said. 

I thought to myself, Haha. Uh-oh. 

I stood beside her at my desk. Poems and drawings all over. Alma pointed to the word vengeance in the book. I could smell summer in her hair. 

“It does,” I said. “I heard revenge works great.” 

“Does it? Who told you. I’m talking about even in the long run.”

“Me too, look—my book says it means to set something free. I’ll bet you revenge works great in the long run.” 

I turned the radio on to static. 

Felt my heart beat. 

Turned the dial, found a song. 

Alma and I wrapped ourselves in blankets and went out to eat on my deck. Scooched our lawn chairs close. The food was soup kept hot in a blue thermos. This wonderful whiskey-voiced crooner croaked out a song about the wind—and after that, someone predicted another thunderstorm was coming. Days and days of rain. Alma looked out. Steam swirled up from her bowl. I felt doubtful about the storm. I told her Art’s radio had predicted it would come earlier that afternoon. We’d rushed around all day to beat it, and then it never came. 

Slowly though, the mid-spring air shifted. You could feel it. A summer-warm wind sort of swirled down through the trees and sounded like a channel of water in the branches above my shack, which is when things weirdly deepened, and a darkness rose up through the black blue green of the neighboring mountains to the east of us. 

Imagine the wind sort of wafting in through my shack, turning the pages of my book. 

Beware. Betrayal. Haha. Bible and Berth and Beauty, and Chris. 

I remember the guilt and fear I felt come alive with the changing light. Elbow to elbow with Alma on my deck. I’d recently lent Chris my Volvo—had helped him pack it full of clothes and books to be taken back down to the city. He was supposed to bring it right back up, but never did. I pictured Chris’s blue-eyed violence. Knew exactly what he’d do if he could see Alma and me, and as the trunks of all my favorite trees began to blacken, I thought about the things Art had told me at work that day, and about how all afternoon we had been in such a hurry to beat the rain. 

The Glasshouse was this empty mansion at the top of the hill above my shack. Art’s main client owned it. Some billionaire who rarely if ever came up from the city. I remember tens of thousands of little yellow flowers blooming like bright candles on the roadside, and how all along that long gravel drive we’d leveled little hills and holes in the road, holes in the road formed by ice heaves. Red shovels. Red rakes. Art found a water bottle under one of the yellow bushes, he was always finding trash, and somehow the unopened bottle was half-empty. 

“Half-full, Sunshine,” Art corrected me. 

The bottle got him going on about permeability again. About how everything has it—like even plastic bottles—and once the ice heaves had been leveled and the bed of the truck was empty of gravel again, Art and I flew back down the mountain for some beers. It was rare to see Art in such a hurry. Outside the barn I looked up the hill to where Alma worked in her garden. Art filled the cooler with beers and I lifted the generator into the bed of his truck. The generator ran on gasoline, so I lifted two red five gallon containers up into the truck bed too. A hawk hung in high, hay-colored circles up high above the barn, then the thunderclouds rolled in. 

I made a big whistle. Waved up to Alma on the hill. 

Alma turned, laughed. Made a big wave back down to me. 

Art said the plan was to replace the tractor’s rusted power steering piston. We’d abandoned the tractor below the Glasshouse all winter, in a dark hollow in the woods below the pond. A culvert had clogged but the tractor broke down mid-job. Art pulled his truck up onto the green grass growing beside the pond below the mansion. A handful of goldfinches lifted out from the flowers and reeds. A quick break in the clouds. Green water sparkled. Outside the truck Art opened one beer, then reached into the cooler for another—but I said no thanks. Surprised us both. 

“Suit yourself, Sunshine.”

West of the pond was the orchard where Art and I had just pruned a bunch of trees. A dozen red empire apples rose and reached in three rows of three. I loved pruning apple trees. The way Art taught me to prune was, you think of the branches of the apple trees as pipes. “It’s all about directing the flow,” Art told me. He added an extra syllable to the word water. “Imagine your tree is a house. You design the flow of the plumbing in the house. It’s a series of decisions about the pipes. You direct the flow. The shape of the tree. It’s about designing the flow of your worter.”

My shack had no bathroom, no toilet or pipes or sink. I got my water from a nearby spring and broke into the Glasshouse every Saturday night to wash my dirty work clothes and to shower. 

Thunder rolled above the mansion, and in a hurry I hauled the generator down the muddy hill through the woods. The tractor looked like a big green horse injured down there in the mud. I set the generator beside it. Hiked back up for the air compressor. Art had brought down the gasoline and some tools and when I got back, he’d put down some flattened cardboard boxes. He knelt there next to the rusted piston with his beer. 

And soon our working movements would merge, the tasks at hand fluid and familiar and mechanic.

I used the generator to power the air compressor, and filled up the flat tires with air while Art unwrapped the new piston—I reattached and jumped the dead battery, while Art jacked the tractor up—and together on our backs we fought to remove the rusted piston, two wrenches wrapped around the part as we took turns torquing at it, and torquing, and torquing at it—but the rust had blurred and merged the line between the tractor arm and the part. 

Thunderclouds darkened close and low, and a great big thunder clap rippled down the mountain. 

Art opened the second beer, the third beer. 

“Speaking of rust,” Art said. “I just read about this new type of battery.”

“What does battery have to do with rust?”

“To supplement with solar and wind. A rust battery. Like instead of lithium.”

“You’re saying rust, Art. Like the rust that ruined this piston. Like the rust that’s ruined your truck.”

“Right. Rust. Picture iron pellets. Now expose those pellets to oxygen. Rust could generate your energy. Your electrons. You reverse the rust back to iron pellets to eat the oxygen—and that’s what gives your battery its charge. Green energy stored by way of rust.”

“That makes very little sense to me.”

“Yeah. Well I knew this one guy who worked with lithium. A battery recycling factory in the city. You had to worry about your lead. The lead dust settled on your clothes. Settled in your hair. You take off your street clothes when you get into work. You put on your hazmat suit and you shower before lunch to get the lead dust off your skin. Off your hair. The factory gives a bonus if the lead in your blood stays at the regular levels. The goal is to keep the lead dust off your sandwich. It’s a liability. You’re in there for a test every six weeks. This guy I knew only got the bonus once. Fifteen hundred dollars. But of course you get fired eventually for having bad levels. You get lazy about it I guess. Like with anything.”

Art stood. Finished his beer. Hiked up to the truck for more. 

Nothing but bird song now, the silence leveling and sudden. 

Art hiked back down quick. Arms full. Knees wide and in a hurry. 

“Because with lithium you can store your energy for five hours—or for six hours when a storm shuts down the grid. But the point is that your generation doesn’t believe in God anymore. Or in free will either. You have no faith. No belief in your power to change the course of things. Take the old hay farmers for instance. What you probably don’t understand is that decomposition is a chemical process. You can’t rush hay. Compost generates heat. So it’s all about the moisture content of your harvest. It’s about human timing and science and faith and worter. You can’t rush these things. Fear is stupid. You have to take everything that happens as it comes.”

“We’re not hay farmers though, Art. What are you trying to tell me.”

“That if you take your bales to the barn too early you don’t give it time to dry.”

“But we don’t do hay. You said nobody’s done hay in the barn for thirty years.”

“It takes six weeks. Your moisture content’s got to get below twenty percent. You can’t rush it. Because if the moisture content is bad your bales will decompose and smolder and soon your farm is up in flames again and the barn is burning because you didn’t have faith or slow down enough to just listen. Fear is useless and stupid. You have to have faith, Sunshine. Faith in anything. It’s all about discovery and achieving the balance. Because if somebody your age could just learn to harvest green energy from something as simple as rust. Your solar energy would store for five days—for six days. You’d have green energy stored off the grid for a week.” 

And with our next effort with the wrenches, Art and I removed the rusted piston. 

The new part installed easily as Art downed the fourth beer, the fifth beer. The diesel fuel I poured into the tank was blue, and then the tractor came alive. Blue black smoke whirled out from a vertical pipe, then cleared. Art mounted the tractor as if it were a healthy horse. I followed him down the mountain, listening to the radio in his rust tortured truck, and later that night in my shack Alma said:

“First it would be the crocus and the snowdrop. Forsythia. Hyacinths. Then the tulips, and then the magnolia trees would go blooming, and the irises—and then it would be the bleeding hearts.”

Inside my shack and out of the rain, Alma built a fire. 

Last big storm of spring. Our radio predicted days and days of total rain. 

“Looks like I’m stuck with you,” Alma said. “Shipwrecked up here in your cabin.”

I lit ten thousand tiny candles and man—I couldn’t believe my luck. Thunderclouds boomed bright blue black pink and I fiddled around with the radio some more. Found the classical station. Alma’s eyes burned like perfect fires. We stood side by side before the stove, our shadows swaying against the ancient wood. We laughed. I read her some Chris poems. We danced. Alma put out a bucket to collect the rain and we drank from it all sloppy and splish-splashy, our dirty clothes drenched wet. The rain had become a column of water against the mountainside, against my life, and it would go on and on like that all night.

Embers of the lightning struck black locust tree radiated white heat. 

A kind of veil had been lifted, and I saw Alma in new crystal colors. 

We laid down before the embers. Now there was no going back. 

But I wasn’t afraid of anything. 

Not the past, not the future. Not Chris. 

I told Alma I believed in God. 

For money Dylan Smith plants flowers on rooftops in New York and has a website with links to other stories online. Oh and check out The Other Almanac. A piece of Dylan’s will be published in print with them this fall.

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Crayon Barn Chris

I

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By Dylan Smith

This day last year a bird shit on my desk. I wish somebody—well wait, I wish Alma alone had been there to see it. This beautiful blue mountain bird shit in through the window of my shack and splat all over my hand, like directly onto my desk. The bird looked all rainbowy, Alma, you would have loved it. Picture a quick translucent smear against the spring blue sky, or like a whirl of blue oil in even bluer water. I’d just started work on this new poetry book. Had been calling it my Crayon Book. It was my therapist’s idea for me to use crayons, it would become a book of poems about my half-brother Chris. I called it my Chris Book sometimes, sometimes just my Art Book, but Crayon Barn Chris became a tentative title, you’ll see why. Later at work I told Art about the shit and he said all mountain birds upstate are holy, especially the blue ones. What an omen! I wanted so badly to believe it. To believe in Art. He said bird shit brings about good luck—and so on this day last year holy shit, a bluebird blessed my poetry book. It was dawn when it happened. My windows were open to the blue green woods of Alma’s world and man, I was so in love with her, I was thrumming in awe all wide-eyed and open—I was totally alive. I wiped the blessing off my hand and onto my dirty blue work jeans, smiling. The bird had even sung its little blue song as it blessed me. I laughed and laughed and laughed. Hahaha! Good morning, Chris!

I’ve been thinking about the sky a lot. Have been wondering what the hell it is. I don’t live in the mountains anymore, I left that shack in Alma’s woods for what is probably the last cheap room in Red Hook ever. You can smell the contaminated water through the wall. My apartment’s porthole window looks out at those blue and red cranes lifting trash and red crates out from boats about the bay, where the city’s canals and rivers dump waste out into the sea and to me those cranes look mostly like strangely drawn crayon horses. Like horses a kid would scribble on a wall. I’ve been thinking about the sky because half my view out this window looks out above the city with all its rolling blue gray mystery in spring, and I’ve been wondering what is going on up there exactly, like way up beyond the cranes and towers and clouds where I’ve come to think of the sky as just the deepest, bluest type of water. 

My therapist’s name upstate was Diane. Alma found her for me. Diane specialized in art therapy for kids which meant for me she was cheap, and it was Diane’s idea for me to use my crayon drawings for my poems, or as the raw materials for my book. Draw what you feel and describe what you see, Diane said. Fucking genius. I was thirty-two at the time but Diane treated me like a kid. I loved it. For nearly two years I horsed around making poems about my kid art all monastic in this shack above Alma in the woods, but now I’m thirty-three and alone and acting like an adult again in the city. I wish I had those crayons here now and a strong good stack of that red construction paper like the stuff that bluebird shit all over. I’d draw you a diagram if I did. Or like a map of Alma’s world in the mountains upstate as I saw it in my window in her woods. First I’d draw for you a blue crayon mountain with like this chaotic red spiraling thing at its center for Art’s barn, then I’d draw you tens of thousands of greening crayon trees, and all those cleared thawing crayon fields of hay and the blue yellow crayon birds, pink red dots for new spring flowers, this golden line here will be Alma in her garden and last I’d draw for you the low yellow farmhouse Alma inherited up there on the hill.

Beyond Alma’s land was the reservoir and a little beyond that was the dump. Alma made a lot of art. Inside her blue electric car she had this tangle of translucent fishing line we found which hung from her rearview mirror and hovered there all balled up perfect like a kind of sculpture. The way it held the light. It was so Alma. Even before she caught Chris cheating and cast him out of her farmhouse forever, Alma and I would go on these dump runs together every Sunday. They became our weekly adventure. Chris was big on shrinking our carbon footprint so as a house we didn’t make a lot of waste, only what we could stuff into the trunk Alma’s electric car, but usually we came back to the farmhouse with more random dump junk than when we left.

This one Sunday at the dump Alma found a backpack full of pigments by the scrap metal pile. The baggies looked full of rainbowy drugs. Next to the pigments I opened a box full of empty metal frames. The baggies had been labeled with these wonderful names and I told Alma my favorite color was Meadow Green. Back at the farmhouse Alma glued Meadow Green into a frame and glued a magnet to the back of it and hung it on the fridge for me. No larger than a tarot card. A piece of art. 

A week later Chris asked, “What the hell is this?”

“A landscape painting,” Alma said. “Meadow Green. Look close—you have to squint.”

And Art is like Alma’s uncle. She says he’s always just kind of been around. Art’s barn is full of tools and things, a lot of spare parts, mostly trash. I loved it in there. It felt like a big red boat. Century old chestnut. Cathedral ceilings. Two of every tool—Art’s Ark. I worked for him for three good years doing handyman work out of the barn and for about half that time I lived in Alma’s farmhouse, in the renovated attic room above her and my half-brother Chris. They’d been engaged to be married for like ever. The deal was that if I helped Chris renovate Alma’s house I could sleep on a mat in their attic for free. The floorboards up there had these wide spaces between them you could almost fit your fingers through, and at night Alma’s bedside light rose up to me in soft dusty rays. It’s important you know I fell in love with her immediately. Felt like hell about that for a while. I lived up there in hell for a whole year and a half before they broke up, before I hiked up to live in my shack in Alma’s woods. The sounds of their most intimate moments rose up to me in that room and unconsciously I overheard every argument, every groan whisper secret moan, every perilous fight. Chris had this electric keyboard down there too, right below the thin metal air vent slats that opened between our rooms, and every night after dinner drunk Chris went to work on his scales with bricks for fists, or practiced like the same song over and over and over again, which for a year and a half was the Star Spangled Banner. It drove Alma fucking wild. You could tell. 

After the renovation I had to find a job, Chris said. Now I had to pay him rent on the room. So I went to work for Uncle Art. Met him before the barn every morning for three years. A lot of the time we just drank beer and drove around the reservoir together in his van. Art took me under his wing. Funny how things work out. I am half Art’s age exactly. We kind of became best friends. Best job I ever had. Hahaha. Thanks a lot, Chris. 

Alma told me the reason why morning birds sing is to let their lovers know they survived the night. This day last year it was spring and my art shack window was open to the songs of sparrows and redstarts—of gray catbirds and brown-headed cowbirds and yellow warblers and wrens, and of red-eyed vireos and yellow-bellied flycatchers and cardinals, and robins—and way down below in the trees above Alma’s garden, you could hear a whole chorus of waxwings singing. I am sober now. Have been contemplating the word serenity a lot. Sober people love to use it. Back in college Chris gave me this big book of etymologies for my 21st birthday, Word Roots, it’s open to the S’s on my desk. The book says serene comes from the Latin word serēnus, meaning calm weather, but now I’m flipping way back to the B’s. 

The word book comes from the Old English bēce meaning beech, like the tree. 

Word roots. Tree books. Hell—I even stopped drinking light beer. 

And Art’s eyes are the color of cool water. A wild man. Blue splashes. A real woodsman. Situations arose for Art with the weather, our work shifting day to day and with the seasons like in spring for instance, your favorite red maple might fall onto a car or like onto your fence. After the storm you’d call up Art and his apprentice that’s me, we’ll come help you clean it up. In winter we plowed your driveway, patched holes your drywall, replaced dead outlets and all the leaky pipes inside your house and did firewood in the fall, renovated barns and attics and basements and redid decks and in the summertime we would mow your lawn if you wanted. But now it’s spring again. Art will plant your flowers, prune your trees. He taught me everything I know about the stars and mountains, the rocks and water and wait—World is a wild word. 

Comes from werald which is Dutch, like Art’s barn. 

All broken up into parts you get wer meaning man and ald meaning age, but all alone al means to grow or to nourish. 

Like Alma. 

Alma’s world was what I pushed my windows open to, my heart and eyes and my books. But Art’s brought me closer to that red spiraling shape at the center of things. God, maybe. How the seasons turn in narrow spirals up, and it also seems that way with death. An inch worm becomes the robin’s beak that eats it, is what I mean. Grief makes this shape. I mean loss is even in the word blossom. 

Now imagine Art with an armful of flowers. Isn’t that nice. This day last year that blue bird blessed my book and about an hour later Art hiked up to my shack like that, with an armful of lilac branches. 

“Here Sunshine. Thought these might brighten up your life.” 

Chris was gone. Bluebirds sang. I felt free. 

It was Sunday, usually our one day off, but Art said thunderstorms the night before had created a bunch of emergency work. The church basement had flooded again, Art said. High winds had ruined some trees. Art arranged the lilac branches while I looked around for my boots. Found them among green bottles. Tied them up nice and tight. Thanks for the flowers, Old Man. Let’s go.

I remember an unrooted yellow birch on a nearby farm and some red work horses black with spring mud. I remember a rock oak limb in the road Art cleared, and the yellow green wisps of a willow tree drug down below the footbridge flooded high with muddy water from the creek. Then we went into town. I remember the smell of rain-soaked oak silt, my boots all full of fragrant shavings, swelling, and I remember the rhythm of our saws on fallen trees outside the church and the holy rhythmic hum of Art’s sump pump in the basement tumbling splash splash splash while above us all these saints in stained glass were shining, and how after work we drank a thousand or so beers in the parking lot together laughing at the state of Art’s rust-tortured truck. Stories about horse barns, barn fires, green bottles gleaming as they lifted toward the light. 

Late spring is the best time of year in those mountains. Warmish days, coolish nights. Cool enough to still build a fire in your shack. The last thing we did was clean up Alma’s lightning struck black locust tree. Art told me I could take some home to burn, but he wanted to save the rest of it for fence posts. He said locust doesn’t rot. Maybe a new garden gate for Alma. 

Between the barn and Alma’s farmhouse on the hill the low field sloped down and opened into pastures. Art drove us down through the fields to the tree. The bark of a black locust tree furls deeply inward and feels cold and tough to the touch like rock. I remember an evening star, probably Jupiter, silver sliver of moon in the blue. Art stared up at the tree. The locust had split way up high and splintered out where it was struck, a silhouette of wild scribbles against the settled evening blue. An elemental thing. Like something out of the tarot. 

The design of the saw sort of settles into your hands. I remember it getting dark and I remember being drunk and thinking about the root system of the tree in the earth down below me, how its roots reach as far as its canopy of branches. Art taught me that. The leafless branches of the locust tree rose in strange tangles, wiggling up and out like weird inverted roots. Art said that when the tree was struck three years ago the sap turned to steam in an instant. The expanded air exploded, Art said, wrecking a lot of the east side of the tree. What stood was dead but fifty feet tall, the trunk two feet wide. Art confirmed the tree was dead for me. The farm truck idled in the grass behind us. 

I cut the truck engine. Lowered the tailgate. Took a seat. 

“What would Art do?”

“Well Sunshine it’s pretty straightforward. You have the weight of the split to your advantage leaning west. I wouldn’t worry about going back the wrong way toward the fence or footbridge or the creek. The trunk should be full. Not hollow like the maple trees you’ve seen. I’d make my hinge regular at the waist going west. Plain angles. Like this.”

Art took a seat beside me on the tailgate. With a carpenter’s pencil he drew this diagram for me on a piece of wood. It’s supposed to show how a tree is felled. The pencil looked like a big orange crayon in his hand and I laughed. He had a beer in his lap. We always had beers in our laps. Art’s crayon was the same color as the saw: 

crayon barn chris chapter I by Dylan Smith

And after the locust tree had been felled and bucked and loaded into the bed of the truck, a light went on in Alma’s farmhouse. Art opened two more beers with the blue handle of his knife. Handed me mine. We cheersed. The absence of the locust tree had become a strange sort of presence in the pasture now. 

“Want to know what’s weird about lightning?”

“Sure, Art.”

“All it is is static. Like this static shock between the sky and the earth. Imagine you’re rubbing your socks on the carpet. That’s what’s so weird about the thunder too. The molecules from the lightning bolt come and go so quick. What you hear is molecules collapsing into the space that’s left. That’s the thunder clap.”

Alma’s silhouette appeared in a farmhouse window. The stars did like the opposite of dissolving and I felt the revolving energy of night twist, or kind of spin, and Art sat on the stump of the lightning struck black locust tree.

I said, “That’s crazy.”

“No Sunshine. No it’s not. Nothing’s all that crazy. You just have to take everything that happen as it comes. You’re not paying anything attention. That’s the thing about your generation. Nobody’s ever looking up.” 

Alma turned off her light. Went to bed. Time passed and a year later I’m sitting here all alone above Red Hook and there is shit all over my hand. Seabirds scream in circles around cranes lifting trash out of the water in my window—the word time stems from tīd, meaning tide—and the morning after I felled the lightning struck black locust tree I woke spiritually polluted. I remember it. I woke alone sick blood red without Alma, but now I’m getting better. I am. The sky opens to the sun every morning and so does my heart, so do my eyes, my poems, my books. I am building my own little world. I guess that’s all this is. All art ever wants to be. Whatever. Today I am alive. Hahaha. Tralala—today I am singing. 

Good morning, Alma. I am totally alive. God. I love you.

For money Dylan Smith plants flowers on rooftops in New York and has a website with links to other stories online. Oh and check out The Other Almanac. A piece of Dylan’s will be published in print with them this fall.