I - Iosco County
Do you believe in transference? I ask my cat as he hunts for a mouse in a dark corner between the furnace and radiator. There is a light in his eyes that left mine years ago and I think and hope and pray that the light didn’t leave in vain, that maybe it went straight into him, then it’d all be worth it. He’s having a ball in this lonely musty place, galavanting across the warped hardwood, just us, on this forgotten back lot behind the marina in this tumbledown cabin my great-grandfather built before he abandoned the family he abused. He was broke when he died and all he left my grandfather was trauma, two reedy ponds, three acres of overgrown grass riddled with cattails and this decayed wood structure on a desolate Michigan till plain. My father boarded up the stairs before he died, citing a safety hazard on the collapsing second floor, but I think it holds the dark spirits of the land that shall wreak havoc if released; I don’t think it’s the bats making noise up there. Sometimes I can hear the waves crashing on the shores of Huron if it’s quiet enough and I listen closely. It’s half a mile away, but only a forest separates me and that fresh rejuvenating blue. Or maybe there is no sound at all.
II - Genesee County
Out here all the houses look the same. Out here the roads are flat and endless and when the corn stalks on the county line get high enough, the night comes sooner. Out here the boards creek when you walk upon them and I would know because one time Annie slipped through the cracks and was swept out into the lake and was never found. Out here the only good thing the restaurants serve is ranch. Out here I avoided doctors and dentists and family and friends; the county line was where my world ended. How was I supposed to know I could go further? Even when Annie told me to go to the doctor, I didn’t. I just went to the bar again to forget but all I did under those sultry swaying buzzing yellow lights was remember, remember all that weighed me down. I try to hide but there’s nowhere to hide, not from Annie, not from my parents, not from God, not even out here, in the midst of this infinite tedium, this monolith of sameness.
III - Cheboygan County
Forlorn are the windswept fields that border this town, somehow always muted and desolate against that everblue sky. When they built the cross in the woods it was supposed to save us and bring tourists but it didn’t, it just brought floods and the occasional Town and County teeming with screaming kids and the vacant eyes of parents passing through. I sit along this tepid creek they call a river, jammed between two magisterial lakes, in this cheap dive where the walls are sinking into the earth and will someday slide into the lazy rushes but for now the Labatt’s is cold and my eyes are closed and I think about it all: the day she came to me for the first time in the pale yellow sundress and the day she walked off into the western sun wearing the same. I remember the day Norman knocked my teeth out and the night Kirk had a coronary in the corner booth. I mark the passing of time with miserable moments and all that’s good in between seems accidental. But when I’m inside this room, fading out in the amber light of sunset, its warm rays beaming into the bar framed through the highway overpass outside, and I smell the tired exhale of the tobacco-stained wood-paneled walls and the Seger playing softly on the old radio, it all comes back to me, and I don’t recall these images with sadness or joy but both, some ochre-tinted acrid nostalgia, a bitter dream I lost before I knew I possessed it. But none of that matters now, because the rain still comes in sheets and the river beats a crying rhythm. And even though the lakes are poisoned now, and from my barstool I see wasted soul-searchers float by in shambolic disarray, discovering that death is the only genuine experience left, I will sit here and live my machine life and wait for her to return.
