The road is straight and coming night is miles away. At the horizon, cloud banks turn the plains into mountains.
Telephone poles grow taller here, each of them coming dead at you, one on top of the next. Straight road; no perspective. You keep seeing a fence made of telephone poles, thick and towering like some colonial fort with a thyroid issue.
But of course it’s not. The car keeps moving. Catch the poles in your peripheral vision; see the fields gaping at you through the gaps.
First fence, then poles. Fence/poles; Fence or poles? It all depends on the angle.
The school, though, is abandoned no matter how you look at it. It flashes by in red brick. Take in the name and the broken windows, some graffiti scrawled across a door that someone’s barred with steel. That padlock won’t keep the rats out, or the squirrels that are nesting, probably, in the attic of a place where children played. The carved sign above the door says 1938.
Even if they didn’t think it was forever, those school-builders standing on the brink of war, or the mothers who came after for the play on a Wednesday afternoon, bringing cookies for Miss Filbert’s class — even if they knew that all things are temporary — did they let themselves see mountains where there were only clouds? Did they imagine a thick fence around them, keeping night at a distance, always miles away?
Or did she see it? One woman (I think her name was Ruth) letting her hand linger on the doorframe for a moment, brief respite before the clamor of children’s voices. Did she see what I saw for a second on a straight road heading towards night and also home? How it is that solid things grow translucent depending on the angle. All permanence only a trick that light plays upon a hopeful eye.
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