Will-o'-the-Wisp

Abstract

Will-o'-the-Wisp George Looney (bio) Four men huddle on the shoulder of a county road in the vague glow of what might be the moon, or some town just beyond the moraines. It's difficult to see them as anything more distinct than a gathering of four men, not one any more individual than one cow in the gathering of cows you saw earlier lying together in the field, an indicator of the rain that was on its way. Those cows were, as a group, one thing, an indication of weather on its way. Just as these four men, together, indicate trouble, specifically engine trouble. Though you can't be sure they don't indicate some other sort of trouble on its way. One passes a flashlight over the engine their breath rises from as though to call down a god who'd be more than a curse on this land which can open and swallow a house. ________ You've seen one taken this way, a band of sparrows, fleeing the sudden wound, scarring the air. You remember the vast groan of the earth, swallowing, and the way dust settled for days. And you remember the whole time dust was settling a distant music was playing, every now and then interrupted for a commercial or the station's call letters or the news. You remember hearing, in one of the local news spots, the story of the house swallowed up by the earth. The reporter said that some of the spectators claimed to have heard music down there in the earth. Music and occasionally voices. You remember thinking the dust would never stop, a perpetual scar in the saddened air. ________ Evidence of scars surrounds you. You want to touch the metal and make it work, ice and rust and all, to bring that dead engine back to life with a sound that could keep you or anyone from hearing a faint, tinny music from deep in the earth. You want to be able to fix things made of metal the way your brother could, his hands covered with a grease thick as grief. A word your mother said he had brought her. He never once thought what it would mean for me, your mother said. Or for you, she said. She said grief had become a word she heard in the songs of sparrows nesting in the gutters of her house. After he killed himself, she's told you, she tried cursing the birds with his name. Nothing worked, she said. [End Page 90] His rough hands once touched your face to wake you back to a body that was yours but empty. You remember him whispering to you before the drugs they'd put you to sleep with were done with you. He was whispering about forgiveness, saying God's forgiveness, it's said, knows no bounds. The almost phantom figure of your brother at your bedside told you, in a raspy whisper, that no matter what your mother might say to not forget she really loves you and though it will take her longer than it'll take God she will forgive you. He told you he understood how things can be taken the wrong way. Like a house, he whispered, folded into the land like a definition of empty. Like every word he ever said to your mother. ________ These men could be that wrong, you think. One points to the sky, which almost makes you laugh. There aren't answers, you think, where light can lead to collapses worse than gaps that open in land and swallow a tree filled with sparrows, or a house. When you were twelve, a sparrow flew in the house and you loved how your brother kept between it and the glass it couldn't see in all the half-opened windows. How he made a game of keeping that tiny bird from smashing itself against what it believed was nothing but sky. How he tried to direct it to, and how it finally found, the door he'd left wide open for it to find and how that sparrow flew off into the sky and how...