by E Townsend
My father sends me a panoramic video of an electric pink dusk settling over snowblinked Pikes Peak, the yolk of the sinking sun blown out, viewfinder shaky and fogged with cigarette ashes. I know he’s trying to hold his balance, cane gripped in his left hand, Motorola weaving like an unsteady heartline in right. “What if I had a camera like yours?” he writes, and I reply, “It’d be too heavy for you to hold.” Our eyes see the same landscape but our hands’ cadency speak otherwise. The video cuts off with a sudden shake, perhaps his fingers burnt by thin air turning sharper into altitudinal bitterness.
Naked aspens and limber pines slowly dance beneath the gloaming sky. It’s December and I don’t know how many more Decembers we’ll have. During an earlier visit my father explains to me about the rapture, how he believes he’ll be driving someday and will suddenly disappear from his car and land in heaven. “And I had this dream once, that I was there, and I looked around, and I couldn’t find you.” I shake my head knowing we believe in different things, my soul will be launched into another body, not resting on some imaginary clouds. The universe is too wide to sit still.
E Townsend‘s works have appeared in Cream City Review, Orion, Superstition Review, Prime Number Magazine, South Dakota Review, Carte Blanche and others. Managing editor at Four Palaces Publishing, she’s also the managing nonfiction editor at Chaotic Merge Magazine and reader for West Trade Review. A previous nominee for a Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, and Best of the Net, she is currently tinkering with essays and poems in the Pacific Northwest.
Hawaii Pacific Review 