Marathon, TX 3/8/21

Outside the astrobleme.

Nine hours on the backroads and forgotten highways to reach this point. A speck on the map. Nine hours in a beat-up truck that keeps rumbling on across potholed roads. Don’t let the rusted panels and peeling clear coat fool you. The steel chassis still holds strong and’ll get you where you’re going. Through dried up towns of shuttered stores and abandoned gas stations. Across the crater of a meteorite that blots the land south of Fort Stockton.

An old couple in the adjoining room leaves their TV on through the night. A channel that airs nothing but old game show reruns. Voices of deceased hosts permeate the thin panels of wood mounted to the walls. They drift through the darkness of your room and meld with your dreams. And in the haze of bourbon-soaked sleep you commune with them, until a feeling of disquiet drives you from your bed and out into the solace of the night.

Down by the railroad tracks you clutch yourself to warm your blood. Your torso wrapped in the blanket lining of your father’s old barn coat. You wander along the tracks that stretch out into the desert. Out into a blackness that swallows the dim light cast from town. You walk a tightrope along the steel pressed beneath your boots until it starts to tremble.

A beacon of light burns out in the desert, moving smoothly through the night. A silver-eyed snake baring down on you until it tears from the darkness with the scream of metal on metal. Sparks flare the air with embers of hellish light that glisten in the eyes of men perched between the cars. Wild faces as creased and cracked as sun-baked leather from a life upon the rails. A group of spirits riding this metal procession through sleeping towns until it meets the ocean.

The locomotive blares its horn back from the mountains hidden in the darkness. Back towards you like a ghost calling through time. Back towards where you stand in this moment. Alone in the rubble and sand like the last man on earth.