Page 22 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. Iv #8

Mark ABauMer
from Boots Walking in America by Boots walking in America
tractor woke me in the morning. I
In the next town, the locals seemed un- sure why a barefoot man was walking through their town.
grabbed my boots and climbed out of the tree. Before I began to walk I looked at my feet. They were no longer soft in all the spots where feet are usually soft.
Someone had left a package of meat on the side of the road, but all the meat had gotten soggy. Most of it was floating in a puddle. The outside of the package said, “ground up bruised seagull beaks.”
A few hundred feet up the road I came across four baby pheasants sleeping on an abandoned church pew. Even though my father had once told me sleeping baby pheasant meat was softer than the inside of a human mouth, I didn’t disturb the sleeping baby pheasants.
I could sense the loneliness of no longer being a part of the physical world.
At the top of a hill a cloud laughed at the part of earth where I was. It began to rain. I continued. The drips added weight to my feet. The day grew heavier on my legs.
The rain briefly turned to snow before I realized it was too warm for snow- flakes. The raindrops turned back into raindrops.
I passed a discarded town asleep in an oil drum. Five minutes later, I came across another discarded town asleep inside another old oil drum.
And the weather continued to be weather for a couple of hours.
Not much happened for a long time ex- cept raindrops.
My pace was calm and ordinary. I hardly noticed the thick patches of hair grow- ing on the dirt where I was walking. For a brief minute, when the hair seemed infi- nite, I thought of lying down and letting it eat me, but my heart got excited and then it blushed so I continued walking.
A shirtless farmer stood on top of a school bus and yelled at the clouds. There were a handful of different-colored farm animals inside the school bus.
Around midday I found a village meat store. I had been hungry almost since the first time I saw a bird. A woman behind the counter of the meat store looked at the boots hanging off my shoulder and went into the backroom. She did not re- turn. A man in a yellow vest stained with meat came out. The only thing left for sale was a bruised seagull beak. I didn’t feel like eating meat that wasn’t really meat. The butcher offered a vase of milk. I shrugged and poured the vase of milk on my feet.
At the edge of the next town, I saw a fifty- foot pole sticking out of the ground. A young man was standing on top of the pole. I tried to talk to him, but he was too far away from me and couldn’t hear any of my good voices. I shook the pole a little with one hand and held up my boots with the other hand. The young man looked down at me and laughed. He said, “I already have a boyfriend.” I began climb- ing the pole. When I was halfway up, the young man said, “There’s no pee up here.” I climbed back down the pole.
I was thankful for the milk I had poured on my feet earlier in the day.
13
The light of the day was growing less