“You’ve lost another tooth,” I tell him, though I’m sure he must know. It doesn’t surprise me when his answer takes the form of a short, dismissive nod. He nods again after a moment, a nod to himself, as though confirming some internal dialogue.

I wonder what that must sound like.

The stranger’s shadow is long and varied under the streetlights. People seem to unconsciously avoid its perimeter, mistaking it for a murky puddle in their peripheries. I prod it with the toe of my shoe when he isn’t looking and, though there is nothing underneath but pavement, the stranger turns quickly and shudders.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Waiting for you to decide which way to go.”

“How do you usually do this?”

“I just walk in and wait until something happens.”

He sighs and takes another step toward the cordoned-off street beyond which lies several blocks of happy, smiling people. Before us is a sign: “Welcome to the Springfield Night Market!”

‘Yes, the people seem to be happy and they seem to be smiling but, reader, do not believe that either is truly the case. The ‘Springfield Night Market’ is a place of debauchery, comparable only, perhaps, to the infamous ‘Uptown Festival of Greek Cuisine’ before it burned to the ground and was discontinued.’

“Was that you?” I ask the stranger, pointing to the passage.

“Of course not,” he says, his shadow wavering guiltily, “That must have happened before the book was published.”

As ever, I’m not entirely sure that’s the case.

‘To fully grasp the corruption at the heart of the ‘Springfield Night Market,’ one must step back and consider the very convention of the ‘night market’ itself. No mere place of commerce, a night market is the vampire’s teeth of American consumerism, emerging from the shadows to pierce the busy veins of a city and to drain them endlessly. Fledgling night markets gorge to bursting and fail but the ‘Springfield Night Market’ is ancient and clever.’

 “Do you also think that the author’s militant anti-capitalist rants sometimes make it difficult to figure out when a place is actually dangerous?”

“Yes,” he says, “Just skip down to the end.”

‘The simple answer, reader, is that you must be rude to leave the market. You must ignore the merchants as they debase themselves and you must walk in a determined line until the noise of the crowd dims and you find yourself alone once more. Despite threats to the contrary, nothing will follow you past the confines of the market unless you make the mistake of purchasing it.’

“What the hell is that?” the stranger asks, returning from an extended reconnoiter of the market.

“An elephant ear,” I tell him, “I thought we could share.”

“The book says not to buy anything!”

“The book says not to buy anything you don’t want following you,” I shrug, “Do you think this is a haunted elephant ear? Do you think a piece of bread can be cursed?”

“I don’t want any,” he says, which suits me well enough.

The thing cost eight dollars.

The stranger has never asked, in any direct way, where I received my copy of ‘Autumn by the Wayside’ and his not-asking has kept me quiet on the subject as well. His copy, I’ve noticed, is further along in life than mine. So broken is the binding that, sat on a table, his copy of ‘Shitholes’ forms a near-perfect circle of splayed pages, no longer able to contain itself. Pieces are missing, like the page he gave me with his number. He seems to know, without looking, which parts of the book are no longer necessary. He loses them like teeth.

We enter together.

The cramped aisles of the night market press the stranger and I close. We lose and re-find each other between hopeful artists and honey vendors. He picks at the elephant ear disapprovingly while people trip over his shadow. I get the feeling he could disappear if he wanted to, disappear like he did in the cave.

Which means he doesn’t want to, not today.

“Sir,” someone whispers, “Sir!”

The stranger has gone.

“Sir!” a man says, indicating me to his table where he puts on a louder voice, “I’ve got something you might be interested in.”

The man is selling plants, or selling intricate plant holders that seem, incidentally to be occupied by succulents. ‘Tom’s Plants,’ the sign says, ‘You can’t kill’em!’

“That’s a bold statement,” I tell him.

“Is it?” he asks.

“I mean, doesn’t that instigate people? Won’t people try to kill your plants to prove you wrong?”

“They can try,” he says, “But they can’t.”

“You’re saying that a person could not kill one of your plants, even if they tried.”

“That’s right,” he says, “It’s more than right, it’s guaranteed!”

“Guaranteed for life?”

“We don’t offer exchanges on plants that die of natural causes. Old age, for example, is not covered. Would you like a demonstration?”

“A demonstration of what?”

Tom pulls a hammer from under the table and swiftly crushes a succulent, artsy pot and all, with several deafening blows. Passerbys watch, curiously, but scatter when he’s finished, afraid that loitering might accidentally convey interest in buying. By the time Tom is finished, the succulent is a jelly and the pot is dust.

“That seems dead, to me,” I tell him.

“Not yet,” he says, “But probably soon. In this instance, given this level of damage, we would likely offer you a refund. As I said, we have a guarantee.”

“So the “can’t kill’em” is mainly a marketing gimmick?”

“Mainly,” he says with a bizarre emphasis.

I look around for the stranger, but he has not returned.

“Mainly but not entirely?” I ask.

“That’s right.”

“Is there a specific plant…”

“Our guarantee does not cover potting supplies,” he says slyly, “And it doesn’t cover the pots themselves but we do have a peculiar specimen of fern that might suit a man such as yourself. A traveler, by the looks of it…”

He seems to want something from me, then, and his eyes narrow at my hesitation.

“Do you know what this is?” he asks, smoothing the dirt and succulent powder flat. He draws, with his thumb, two small circles, one within the other.

“Circles,” I say.

“No, wait,” he says, wiping over them and starting again.

This time the outer circle is an oval, pointed at the ends.

“An… eye?” I ask.

“The all-seeing eye!” he says, expectant once again.

I nod my head appreciatively and wait for more.

“The all-seeing eye,” he says.

“Yep,” I agree.

“Do you know what this is?”

“The.. all-seeing eye?” I ask, but he gestures for extrapolation. “The eye of providence? God watching over mankind? Conspiracy? Freemasons?”

Tom’s frowning now, his own eyes narrow.

“What is this?” he asks, wiping away the eye and drawing a short squiggle. He saves me from another embarrassing assortment of answers by mimicking a walking person with his fingers.

“A path?”

“And two people, walking the same path and in the same direction and at the same speed- will they meet?”

“No.”

“But,” he says, “Upon reaching the end would they have seen the same thing?”

“Um…” I say and Tom nods encouragingly, “Mostly?”

“Mostly!” he says, “Yes, mostly! A thousand people walking a path will meet at the end with a single, blurry vision. A hundred thousand people and the vision will clarify. The path becomes easier to follow, it is worn into the ground. The vision becomes clearer, it is held aloft by those who seek it out. That is the all-seeing eye and its rays, a multitude of visions becoming one.”

“Is this how you sell plants?” I ask.

“It is how I sell a single, specific plant,” he smiles and, donning gloves, he brings a small glass jar up from under the table.

The plant inside presses desperately against the glass. A single frond has worked its way under the lid and it points at me like an accusing finger.

“A fairy fern?” I ask.

“A regional name. I grew up calling it ‘crawl grass.’ In the south it’s… ‘the devil’s such and such,’ I don’t know. Everything belongs to the devil in the south.”

“How did you know I would recognize it?”

“Because we are the two people on the same path. I have slowed and you have caught up to me. We are the two people here that share the vision.”

“Actually,” I say, pulling out my wallet to pay him, “There’s another guy you probably shouldn’t let…”

A massive plume of fire rises over the ‘Springfield Night Market.’ People scream, plastic tents shrivel and burn. Jars of honey froth over and burst. Tom stands aghast, too aghast to hand me change. I turn to leave and trip over the stranger’s shadow, tumbling into the pavement. He’s reappeared behind me and he holds out a hand from above.

I reach out to take it. “No,” he says, “Give me the stupid fern.”

“No!” I tell him, “It’s harmless.”

I wince as the rogue frond digs into my palm.

“All right, fine!” he hisses through the gaps in his mouth, “Let’s just go.”

I take his hand and he pulls me from the ground. We start to weave through the crowd, fingers intertwined, and as the stranger leads me away I hear Tom shouting. It’s difficult, at first, to make out, but what I hear is this:

“He’s running!” Tom shouts, “He’s running backwards on the path!”

-traveler

“Traveler,” the radio cracks, “Traveler.”

“What do you want?”

“What do you want?” it asks, “You don’t look so well, traveler. You look sick.”

“It took you a while to get here.”

“It doesn’t take me any time to get anywhere. You know that as well as me.”

“Well it took you some time to speak up.”

…

“Where are we, traveler? It’s dark here.”

“Shitty hotel.”

“We’ve been here for a while, in the dark.”

“That’s what I was saying.”

“If you are not traveling, then I don’t know what to call you.”

“We’ll hit the road again once I’m better. No need to think up a new name.”

“Still…”

…

“Would music help you, mmm, traveler?”

“No.”

“Would cleaning up help the smell?”

“Are you offering?”

“I am not.”

…

It’s three days before I open the window, a few days longer before I turn the bolt in the door. I am gone long enough to get ice. My legs are still weak and the day is bright and painful. The world has taken on a foreign smell, not a pleasant one. Or else that’s me relative to the new freshness.

Yes, a moment’s investigation confirms it is me.

I hurry back.

The door to my room is ajar; did I leave it that way? It is only open a crack, hardly enough for a passerby to notice. Hardly enough to let in air. It’s the space left when a closed door doesn’t quite latch, or when a trespasser doesn’t want to make a sound. Closed, but for being open.

I push inside.

The room is thick with human evaporations, with sweat and feces and, distantly, with cigarette smoke. This is a dim place, a place that resists light. The bathroom door is closed and light seeps out between the cracks. There may have been movement there as I watched but, now the subject of my focus, the room pleas vacancy.

If only there were a window.

“Is it here?” I ask into the darkness.

The radio, improperly adapted to the wall socket, buzzes and pops. The lights in the hallways flicker.

“Is what here, traveler?”

There is movement in the bathroom, I see it again.

“It might be best if you close the door, traveler,” the radio says, “It is unhealthy to linger between spaces.”

“That’s not…”

Another movement in the bathroom, the sound of a cabinet quietly closing.

“You are still not well. Is it not my duty to remind you?”

“You’re supposed to warn me when something breaks in here too.”

“There is nobody but yourself here, traveler. Even I, by most definitions, am not where you are.” The radio laughs at this, “Heh, heh, heh.”

I hear the sound of a toilet seat dropping, the rustle and tear of toilet paper.

“There is something in the bathroom, I mean. Don’t you hear that?”

The voice is quiet for a moment and I assume it’s listening. As the moment grows longer I realize it has simply chosen to end the conversation. I stand alone with the thing until, against my better judgment, I slip inside and close the door, close and latch to banish whatever liminal space may have existed. In the failing confidence of my decision I feel my heartbeat, quick with fear and anticipation.

I start the coffeepot and wonder if one evil might provide respite from another. The thing in the bathroom quiets down, some. The door there is like the last, closed but unlatched. Tenuously open.

The wayside is a place for things we’ve forgotten or failed to do and as I travel here I find it difficult to see past my own failings, or, I suppose, to discern them from the successes I carry with me. In a place littered with broken bottles and used needles, things that jab and poke and hook into your soles, it’s hard to tell if you’re being followed or if you’re just dragging something behind you.

I’ve begun to understand that mine is the latter case.

The toilet flushes and I hear the too-friendly jingle of a belt. Inside, the thing stands and pulls faded jeans up over its pale, distended belly. Its movements are lazy and vulgar, its breathing deep and steady. The hairs on my arms prick up as I hear it splash its hands about in the sink. My own body is itching and sick.

I remember the ice, now half-melted. I make a cool rag with one eye on the bathroom door. I climb into bed, between the damp sheets, and I cover my face.

“Traveler?” the radio clicks, “Traveler? Should I still warn you when something is coming? Will you believe me when I say there is nothing?”

“Yes,” I say under the rag, “Sure.”

“There is nothing now, traveler. Nothing now or before.”

-traveler

It seems, at first, to be a field like any other. That is, weedy and dry. Maybe there are flowers but they are few and far between, dispersed widely so as to be entirely incidental and meaningless. A single flower, growing eternally as the sole representative of its kind in an otherwise empty acreage, might raise an eyebrow. A few intermittent flowers in a field mean nothing, except, perhaps, to the particularly sentimental.

When the sun reaches as certain angle over the field, however, the ground begins to shine. It becomes, all at once, almost unseeable in its shining, illuminated by what seems to be a thousand tiny diodes. The field becomes impossible to approach.

No, not impossible.

Uncomfortable.

Years of sunblock adverts, skin-cancer PSAs, and embarrassing tan lines have left me distrustful of the sun and of anything that will magnify and reflect it. The ocean, for instance, and snowdrifts that remain on the clear days that follow a storm. I do not like looking at the sun and I don’t like feeling, sometimes, that the sun is looking back.

The effect of the field is a narrowing of that poisonous gaze and, backed by oncologists and screaming, dying ants around the world, I wait until the sun is differently angled before I approach. In the meantime, I read:

‘It is the pennies, not the knives, that illuminate the burial ground north of the interstate known officially as ‘Unclaimed Lot #17.’ This place has become a pilgrimage site for those wishing to inter old wrongs and, eschewing the more traditional hatchet, wrong-doers have instead co-opted the ‘knife and penny.’

A tool at heart, most cultures have recognized the knife is much more, that it has been a symbol and means of violence since before recorded history. To pass a knife between friends is historically frowned upon. To give one as a gift is in bad taste. It is fitting, perhaps, that the United States have taken this ancient superstition and adapted it to the capitalist narrative for, in stranger times, the bad luck that trailed a gifted knife could be nullified by the exchange of money, even a single penny. Such is the great sterilizing power of monetary exchange, it is the power to hide ancient meaning in the guise of an impersonal transaction.

A uniquely American power.

It is for this reason the author of this publication has decided to include ‘Unclaimed Lot #17’ and not ‘The Great Hatchet Field,’ west of the Missouri and frequented, more often, by people living there.’

It may be the pennies that light up the field but the knives are not far below. In testing the side adjacent to the highway, a strip of dirt worn low by passing cars, I see how the knives are buried vertically, blades skyward, with only a sprinkle of earth and coin between their tips and the open air. This would be an unfortunate place to fall but, because the rows are neat, it isn’t hard to walk.

My crouching has drawn the attention of a woman in the field, a silhouette, now, with the sun above and behind her. She had previously been moving between the rows but recently she has stopped and turned toward me, her posture vaguely disapproving and wary. She begins to walk my way as I finger several of the lost coins back into their places, undoing the natural ruin of the highway. Everything is in order by the time she reaches me: a young woman, younger than me, in cowboy boots and jeans. The boots are torn up the sides and her hands are bandaged. Her skin is made thick and dark by the sun.

I did not wrongly imagine her disapproval, it’s there in her face as well, hidden behind a smile.

“That’s great,” she says, smiling uncomfortably, “You didn’t polish them but I suppose you thought you were doing a good thing and that’s great.”

“I guess,” I tell her, seeing a bottle of polish peeking from her jacket.

“It’s no more work for me!” she continues, speaking as though the opposite is true, “I’ll just dig’em on up on the next round and give’em a quick polish and then put them back in the right order, no problem!”

“The right order?”

“By year,” she says, “Penny year, that is. No knowing when each was buried.”

“Is this an active field?”

“Active as in…?”

“As in, do people still come here with their knives and pennies?”

“Why, they sure do!” she says, “Only a couple a month in the winter, though. That doubles or even triples in the summer. I’ve got one fella who comes around like clockwork every new year.”

“Smoker?” I ask.

“Beats his kids,” she says, “Wow! His oldest must be heading into middle school this year!”

I resist a temptation to inquire.

“So, how do you account for new entries? Do people have to bring up-to-date pennies?”

“I sure encourage them to!” she says, jingling a bag at her belt, “But if they don’t I just make a little room somewhere and adjust! Here, while I’m wiping up these little guys you can look over our pamphlet.”

She hands me a thin brochure and crouches, pulling a rag and the polish from her side.

“The Knife and Penny Field!” the paper reads, “A few things you may not know!”

Below the title is a picture of the field, an older picture. A man and a young girl stand distantly in the center, posed solemnly. It’s dated nearly a decade ago.

The inside of the brochure is undecorated and headed with a cartoonish “DID YOU KNOW…”

The rest is typed plainly in a bulleted list.

‘DID YOU KNOW…

-rain water drains from the field and into our farmland, poisonous and red from the rusted knives and copper you bring here?

-your contribution rests among those of murderers and rapists?

-God is not blinded by the shining of the field? Your sins are as much a beacon here as they are when you carry them.

-we maintain a relationship with the sheriff in order to extract fingerprints from suspiciously buried weapons?

-tradition does not make you welcome here? It is not our job to bear your mistakes.

-we find an average of 2 bodies in our field annually? My daughter learned what suicide was when she was just eight because of what attracts you here.

-there is a tall overpass located just 15 minutes north for your convenience?

-dogs and cats run from miles around to die in this field?

The list goes on for a while in no obvious order.

The back is blank.

“Can I keep this?” I ask.

“Of course!” the woman says, though she does not make eye contact or hesitate in what she is doing.

“Why keep up the field if you feel this way?”

“Oh, my daddy wrote that,” she says, “I just haven’t gotten around to making a new one, that’s all.”

“You like the field?”

“Wouldn’t say that but the city fines me when it gets unruly down here.”

“Why not build a fence, then?”

“You’ve got something to bury?” she asks suddenly, briefly curt as she stands up to my height, “It won’t do you any good on your back!”

There is a knife in my pack, but it’s one I had imagined burying in private. The woman knows this, but seems to think saying it outright would be impolite.

“Will it do me better here?” I ask.

“Not at all, sir. Not at all.”

“Have you ever buried anything in the field?”

“My daddy,” she says, “Whole family’s out here.

I shuffle my feet in disappointment and scratch my arms under the sleeves.

“You read about the overpass…?” the woman inquires, her voice discrete.

“Nothing like that,” I tell her.

She seems relieved, then, and looks back over her shoulder.

“I’ve still got some work to do before the sun’s set,” she says, “Anything I can do for you here?”

“I don’t think so,” I say, but she lingers.

“The way things are,” she says thoughtfully, “The way things are heading here in the states… you’d think it would make more work for me.”

“You’d think it would,” I agree.

“Funny thing is,” she says, “I get more folks out in the field when things are good. Now these people aren’t ashamed of what they should be anymore. The president’s telling them it’s okay, he’s done worse things himself and never had to apologize. He’s not burying knives so nobody’s burying them.”

“These things come in cycles,” I tell her, “If not soon then in a few years when we re-elect somebody else.”

“I had a man out here last week,” she continues, “Drunkard who found his way into the field. He pulled a knife straight out of the ground and told me to go back to Mexico. I told him I ain’t ever even been over the border. Any idea how many weeks there are in a few years?”

“A lot, I guess.”

“People remember where they buried their knives,” she says, “That’s the real trouble with this place. People bury knives for show but they’re plenty happy to dig them up when someone tells’em it’s okay.”

-traveler

‘At the risk of alienating petrified wood enthusiasts, the author admits to a lack of personal excitement regarding the processes involved in its creation and, generally, in the substance itself. Consider the following interaction:

‘Do you know what this is?’ a parent might ask their child.

‘A rock,’ the reasonable child would answer.

‘No, imbecile-child, look closely and see it was once wood.’

‘How?’

‘Time and weather have replaced the decomposing wood with minerals. This is the fate of many things.’

‘So, it is a rock?’

‘Yes, child. Now you understand.’

Petrified wood does itself no favors in its found form, being mostly indistinguishable from other rocks with less interesting histories. It has little value, practically or monetarily, and it takes an amount of previous knowledge and a healthy dollop of imagination for petrified wood to inspire genuine wonder. The wonder is short lived when one considers that this is just another of the earth’s natural processes, normalcy on an extended timeline. It is a fossil, yes, but these rocks were not once the lizard-titans of our Earth’s shadowed history. They were trees, like those that remain.

Now they are rocks.

The ‘East Continental Petrified Forest’ is rife with rocks, with petrified wood. There is very little wood left un-petrified; there is very little remaining life at all. A place of jutting ruins, like dry, jagged teeth, the ‘East Continental Petrified Forest,’ composed of any other substance, might be called a wasteland. A desert.

The park rangers have posted signs asking that no rock be removed from the ‘East Continental Petrified Forest’ and warning that they patrol the boundaries of the park vigilantly and at all hours. Smaller signs, deep in the park, suggest the rangers have trained dogs to sniff out petrified wood, that visitors smuggling even the smallest amount of petrified wood will be captured and prosecuted.

Later signs admit that, due to funding cuts, the trained dogs have been laid off and ask for donations so that the program might be re-instated. The previously trained dogs have been released into the park, they say. Beware feral dogs, they say.

‘But if you’ve made it this far…’ they say.

It is the author’s theory, perhaps biased, that neither the rangers, nor the dogs exist and that all signage to the contrary has been constructed to further insinuate the imaginary value of petrified wood. There is no reason not to believe your eyes, reader. They have not failed you previous to this. If it looks like a rock and feels like a rock and bludgeons like a rock, it is a rock.’

-excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside