The Meatfields: Chapter Nine: Vignette No. 4

I imagine that what I was feeling, or wasn't feeling, was what soldiers at war did or did not feel when things became too intense for their capacity to deal with- emotionally speaking, that is. I imagine something really bad happening to me sometimes, something unbelievable and painful, and I always imagine that it feels worse in reality than when I imagine it. I imagine the first thing I feel once it's happened is a sort of gladness that it is over.

Maybe most bad things that happen we really can see coming, and we just don't realize that we do until it's over. Most of the time. That is why hindsight is always 20/20. It's when you can see things coming and see it happen and still don't feel anything that the lack of emotion, the numbness, disturbs you.

"I should feel something- I should feel bad about this." You say to yourself. And you add bad to bad as it were, when you feel regret for not feeling properly bad about something that is already bad that has occurred.

Like when people disappear. When you wake up in the morning and they are gone and you just know that you won't ever see them again, that they are never coming back. It's as normal as knowing that they went to the grocery store to pick up something. They went away for ever, just down the street.

And then time goes by and you feel like you feel when someone has written you a letter and it's your turn to write back but you never do but always sort of feel like you should but know you never will. That's about as un- numb as you will get about it, and only when you remember it, which seems to happen less an less.

When she didn't come home that night and never showed up the next morning I sat on the porch swing and smoked a pack of cigarettes and drank a pot of coffee. I wasn't waiting for her; I don't know what I was doing.

After three months her stuff had been gone for awhile but I hadn't really looked for a new room-mate, though the thought to hold out in case she came back never crossed my mind. When the police spoke to me and her parents spoke to me I said what needed to be said like you do when you say no three times to the people selling siding on the telephone.

After six months I had been there a year and I wasn't a freshman anymore and I was used to life away from home and without a room-mate, and my life started to feel like mine and not my parent's, but in no way did I feel any urge to finalize my issues with Sarah who was probably dead, or move on.

And then at the end of my sophomore year I was there on the porch smoking a cigarette and drinking a coffee when a police man arrived. It was warm and the trees were budding and I remember thinking that the poor fellow was probably hot in his uniform. He talked and I sort of listened and he showed me a photograph of a corpse that I recognized instantly as Sarah's and then it finally hit me: I felt a little something. Something deep in me felt something move and it was warm and vaguely pleasing:

As I was looking at the photograph of Sarah's mostly decayed body in a wooded area I didn't recognize I noticed that through what was left of her naked ribcage was growing a small tree. It was about three feet in height and I thought it must've started growing last summer to be the size it was now and look at how it is reaching for the sun beams that are coming down the through the trees.

THE END.