Practicing again

The flames crackled in the darkness.  The sounds of the small clicks and pops flew out into the air of the forest night like so many cinders carried aloft in the rising smoke.  Doug settled his back against the stiff bark of a fallen log, still fresh and hard with recently departed life. He could feel the ground drawing the heat from his body out of his ass, leaving it just warm enough to feel uncomfortable on the protruding roots.  He shivered and drew his thin blanket tighter around his throat.

Beneath the bright tongues of flame that consumed the small twigs and branches, the vermilion coals within the growing bed of the fire danced and sighed in the light breeze of the night.  Doug look to the pile of kindling the lay just within the glowing circle of the firelight, resting atop a larger stack of coarse pine and poplar logs that he hoped would stave off the cold of the long autumn night.

Far off to the west, the faint flickers of an unseasonable thunderstorm lit the overcast sky with deep bruises of purple and gray-brown.  The storm was too distant for the thunder to reach his ears. As the hour grew on, Doug saw the storm clouds marching slowly southward, lavishly dropping their precious fall energy against the northern slopes of the tall mountain peaks.

Above his head, sharp, yellow-slate clouds leaped between heaven and Earth, greedily lapping the faint starlight from the sky like hungry dogs.  The valley between Doug and the storm flickered with the lights of the town below, where solemn towers of wood smoke dutifully supported the blue-black dome of the sky.  

Doug turned his gaze from the valley floor.    Though he couldn’t make out the details of the houses from this distance, he closed his eyes against the flickering yellow gems.  Trying to fight back the memories of the woman he had left, Doug succeeded only in conjuring the image of her face, still wet with tears, to his mind’s eye.  He felt the sharp tang of her voice, raw and rough with anger, as she shouted at his back. He could still feel the sharp clap of her words as they crashed into his ears, now ringing red with shame and pain.  Then a pregnant silence, a rich pause in the anger that waited expectantly for him to turn, for him to say something. Anything. And he did pause, for a moment, breathing heavily with a knot in his throat and a tickle in his spine.  He stopped for a second on the path – not considering really, not feeling anything at all except the racing of his heart. His cheeks glowed in the bright afternoon sunlight, and the rim of his hat itched on his sweating head.

Then for moment, he did consider.  A moment too long.

The silence fell sour and was dashed upon the rocks of a single broken sob.  Its impact knocked him to his knees, as the sound of the sobbing faded behind the soft clack of a door on its frame.  

Doug felt the color wash from his face, drawing out his life as the setting sun has drawn the heat from the air.  For a moment he lingered, savoring the pain before the inevitable numbness sank in. He wanted to remember something before he forgot everything.  He bowed his head, and with his eyes shut, felt the echo of that last shout bounce through him and around him before fading to memory in the dying afternoon light.