Shadows for Breakfast

Fritos and bottlecaps: the dream less traveled

by Wes Biggs

The crescent moon, half Cheshire cat, half "Don't Panic," hangs over stovepipe rooftops like the distilled dream of a million citywide early morning R.E.M. phases, leaks a light mist to blur the harsh oranges of street lamps projecting their avenues of emptiness to no one in particular.
Out on the highway an outcast cigarette traces a shooting star trajectory across the concrete inside stopping distance. Wind-swept rubber grinds it, paper and ashes, into a tomb by default in the graveyard of bottle caps and Fritos and long-dried citrus rinds and little bits of brownish glass and plastic pull tabs and oil-liter labels. But even there, even down in the archaeology of angels, three years of metro butt dust down, the moondream lullaby softly sings in A and E minors fading into C heading west out where the freeways change their names.
You're walking, or you're driving, trying to get from point A to point B. Like the rest, you're an insomniac on a winter night (all the leaves are brown and the sky is gray). You're fiddling with the radio, trying to pick up dreams.
There's an old disturbing joke about a son who's dumb for 20 years. Then, at dinner one night, he suddenly asks if someone could please pass the butter. The family is astounded. "Why did you go so long without speaking?" they ask him.
"Because there was nothing I needed to say," he says.
You believe in believing. It's the only way to be. But you're not mean enough to justify that end. Your practiced silence is habitual, not ritual, and silence goes faster backwards.
And somewhere in there you're on a thin dotted white line between life and art, and each side seems host to a terrifying and stultifying abyss, and the off ramps glide by as roads not taken out of fear of leaving that shining path. Still, somehow, as the traffic changes, you know that this is the road less traveled by, and suddenly you're the only one on the road and the street lamps are spaced farther and farther apart.
You're starting to hear them now, in bursts of static cascading across the windshield like frost, tapping on the windows, tapping on the walls, and you ease to a stop and watch the city fill up with dreams.
And these are the dreams: cigarette butts and bottle caps and Fritos and long-dried citrus rinds and little bits of brownish glass and plastic pull tabs and oil-liter labels, but mostly the moon, in raven-and-writing-desk opulence, somnambulating through wisps of cloud that flit through the memories of hills and settle around your feet like lovers' whispers.
The night is fading into day. Headlights swing through the haze behind like yellow doves in fixed flight. After a while you turn the key again, and suddenly there's a road sign, and you glance up, knowing you've got miles to go before you sleep.
And miles to go before you sleep.