The Coming of Autumn

The downward slope of the street suited the arch of her steps, the spine of her walk. Autumn was nowhere near them; it was summer yet, but there was something rustling in the distance. So far away, that you couldn’t see it from the upward slope, but in your nerves you could feel its tingle.

A man smoking at the side of the road reminded of carnivals in the rural towns you once knew, before they disposed of you. The angling creak of the high swings that allowed your feet to fly above earth, the carny smoking his pall malls with one hand, the other steady on the rust of the lever that ran this whole damn thing. There’s a concept of God for you. A carny, possible ex-con, inability to shave without piercing his cheek at least once, haggard in clothes that smelled of other people, standing in overgrown tall grass, with one hand smoking his cigarette and the other held onto the lever of your carnival ride. Not held tightly, mind you. Loose, like your dad driving long highways --- one hand on his lap, just a bare cradle beneath the wheel. Like he was captaining a vessel on the sea.

This guy, the carny, he didn’t watch the kids up there, he wasn’t the sort to look up little and not so little girls’ skirts, their legs filling out into their hips with each year of good nutrition and mostly conditional love…no, he was just offering us and the rest who watched, a good, long stare just beyond the mountain valley, just shy and to the left of the treetops as they fiddled the sky into late summer night a few moments earlier each time. The blues shade a slope downward with each passing turn, as each of those girls realizes that her screams can’t hurt her, and they’re a great way to tell the stars sleeping in the evening sky to stand up straight and wake up! Skirts in the air, hot muffler special air drifting southbound in the weeds not far from the blatant and suddenly set up carnival ground.

As the girls grew and screamed with more pinpointed diligence and vigil, the late summer would go and be replaced with the might chill of early fall. The smell of fresh air always got her body excited in a way that sweating and heat did not. It was a strange state of affairs, wasn’t it. That smell of faraway fires, faraway borders, snow which hadn’t even thought about hatching yet, wind just waking up from its cozy sleep, as long as it was faraway it was meaningful to her. The thought of other lives, other days, places to move towards, to keep moving, was the internal beat that she kept time alongside. And that made her wilder, the brief sun and chillier breezes marking her beneath her skin, making the warmth of human touch even more delectable and more satiating.

She was still on those swings, bellowing to anyone who would hear her and singing backup to the whistling winds that would come as fall approached. Not yet, though. The heat was still about; all stifling and stasis and immovable. But down the slope of the street, past the arches of her and her hips, was the end of summer, like the coming of a new year, a new epoch. No one in the world owes you anything and you are responsible for the sum of your life. She knew that. Always did, somehow and no one, not the God of the carnival or the lessons she found in the mountain valley taught her that. It was bred inside of her, like soft earth pouring levels of time in through her ears. Autumn was coming, and she’d ride it out until it did. You can feel yourself coming a long while before you moan, and gush and shudder with the heavens and a lover. You can feel it in the works between your legs – small hunched shoulders in quiet conversation planning a revolt against tyranny, that aching, wanting feeling in the pit of your stomach when you kiss someone just right and they pour down your throat and make their way all the way in, the mind melting in slow backwards volcanic ash, slipping away from you as you feel the crux of it coming inside, then out, with him, and then outside of him. And then it belongs to someplace else.

It is the act of letting go of summer, it is the realization that we are dying, and only we can keep the life thrashing and waltzing inside ourselves. We are the gods in charge of our seasons, and how we weave the leaves of early autumn around and through us – breathing heavy, smell of newly struck fires alighting our grounds…the only ones we strive to reach, with each passing touch, and sense of flight.

M. Lucia