American Vernacular Landscapes

The nanny’s boyfriend was in a car accident when I was a child. He worked in the kitchen of the country inn at the end of Springvale. Our road was at the top of a blind hill and a co-worker was dropping him off and they got rear-ended. The next day, at the bus stop, we found a single shoe, a loafer, singed at its bottom.

In the mornings now, up before Rivington is swept and bleached, the street is strewn with puke and beer bottles and the air seems dead, the void left by a party’s departed energy, and some days I’ll see a discarded shoe and feel like a child, confused by the portents, the distant, unknown conflagrations.