There's a vast green field that sits as easy as the morning sea. Calm yet treacherous, and without danger. Time has returned again and again to a fossilized space; it is evening. Each hill rises and slumps like permafrost of waves are frozen beneath the rich soil. But this place is no tundra, not even near. It's a chaparral of cool breezes. The breath of the birds among a turning deep blue sky. At this particular time of night, the clouds are off in some other state, in some other country, soaring across the sky of someone else's backyard. They're not here, they're somewhere to accompany the divorced sun; to waver as they soar belly-up to an amenable orange drench.

This mattress sheet of green ahead goes on to dip out of sight past the horizon of shrubs in the far, far distance where the eye throws in it's towel.This field, though, is not ordinary. It flourishes with a tall pure-white, rootless beam that sways with the gentle push of the wind. These magnificent and scattered windmills uproot themselves from fresh groves of nuts and bolts and stand obedient to the tender sky. Inside, deep inside these, sit generators waiting for the impulse to convert.

There are two shadows sprawled about a hill just past the roadside. Crickets speak incessantly in the echoes of periphery. This roadside stretches as endless as the hills, with cars coming and going every 10 minutes. Inside, their occupants pass by blind behind their brights. Their eyes glossed around the sockets and almost understandably so. What sits around but just a big empty space in need of immediate industrialization, or housing, or farming? A certain lust is missing. It is in need of much improvement, from roadside to fatal attraction, before anyone decides that the place they are headed to is less important than the roadside. But not so, for the two shadows on the soft, lime shoulders beneath the windmills.

The two shadows drove their big gasoline box to the edge of the gravel, pulling over and stopping their world at the foundation. The rest of the world kept on making deadlines. For the shadows, this moment was infinity. The world was speeding by, rushing, too poor to pay attention. To the windmills or the fields. Or the two shadows. Or the stars, even. The shadow boy and girl, as they are, notice the stars. They can't begin to count them or even discern constellations, so they make them up instead. It was all nonsense, but in and out, they were still kingdoms in the sky. No one could tell them otherwise. Both shadows halted their lives.

"I think we're free. For now."

"We're nowhere."

Nowhere. As we plan and tread our ripping heals and bleeding soles through paths into our lives, how often have we all stopped somewhere new and open? Like a field on the countryside between states on the edge of I-95, or beneath a tree reduced to a cool absence of sun. This place sits solitary. It sits comfortable. Pointless and invisible to the glossy eye. I'm sure it doesn't need us, this place, but I can't say the same for the other way around. Still the shadows sit beneath the windmills and wonder about their lives, even though that's what they had gone to get away from. Now instead of worrying, they simply ponder. As pondering can, it will. Almost immediately the butterflies in their stomach wither and die. They're taken somewhere beyond their will. They're homesick.

A warm box represents home down on the side of the road waits for their return should the moon's chill raise too many goosebumps or chatter too many teeth. The car is where the heart is. But I argue myself, the car is merely a vessel to the real home. It's exactly what a house isn't. The real home is that hill there where both of those ghosts are enjoying their temporary purgatory. It's the infinity of something hard to describe. Perhaps the wind across your face has combed the hairs of your ancestors. Perhaps dancing in the rain of a billion cycles. Even quitting a job. Likewise, it's a brief moment of ignorance in between everything else. The waking sleep of moments with no reaction to an action. Instead of a bottomless pit in your stomach, it's an open sky. You don't feel sick from falling, you feel free from it. The two shadows embrace hands as they lie down and enjoy their waking worry-less sleep. The world rushes, falls, and spins around them.

And such is life, as is a moment, much like a windmill. The windmill is such a simple thing yet it produces so much power. Each one of us is a generator of limitless strength all waiting for that impulse to convert. Such a moment as pulling over and laying down awhile is. Where you choose to stop and escape. You are nowhere and you are now.

The windmills spun around them.


Aspiring writer of some-kind, immersed in artistic ways and sauteed until perfection. Very hands-on and sometimes dirty.