Leaving Kansas, Page 2

  Addicted, White-Collar, Vegetarian Atheist

  My own company is inexplicably near the wrong side of town. I've been many things: an unwilling participant in a three-legged race; the neighbor's dog (a much-befuddled guest); an origami box (fearful of its shape and waiting to be unfolded); day-old bread (unattended in a vintage toaster). I've worn with apathy and vengeance the costumes of many, a process by which I lost the peace I sought and shrugged off the one who could give it, but always the director calls for a wardrobe change. For now, I am the immigrant, with no experience and a tenuous grasp of the language, trying to hang on to a job. I cling with waning resolve to what I have left, alternating between the three phrases I am able to regurgitate. My complexities have been traded for something to chew. I am simple; condensed; an unassuming lump of hope and pain. If repetition breeds creatures of habit, then I am but a beast; ever a man of patterns; repeated in perpetuity. I stride my corner of the earth as an ant (able to bear crippling burdens, but anxious in a land of heavy walkers). Yet somehow? I am aware of that which sparkles as keenly as when I was three.

  Stalking Narcissa

  I have developed a stampede mentality, though none run with me (for lack of an actual predator). Mine is an arbitrary blend of distraction and follow-through, each perception a tardy student (insolent and full of itself). What pleases my tongue elicits a thirst that will not be slaked. No matter how I stab my shadow, it remains of itself benign. With an attitude toward clutter and variables that is nothing short of genocidal, I am summarily disqualified from the casting of stones. I count myself blessed when the entirety of my demons can be tallied on one hand. I pray the rest are truly dead and not just waiting in the bush, swapping skin with the ravens and searching for something to peck.

  The South Side of the Turret

  I could easily die in this hall, where adverbs dare not transpose. I laugh, certainly, but each time the mirth must elbow its way past throat and teeth. One pain retreats from another, as if there is only one guest chamber. Frankly, I grow weary of visitors, always shattering the spine of a hunker-down day. I have begun to restrict my comings and goings to the postern gate: the latch responds with barely a touch, and passing beneath its ivied gaze breathes into my soul the wherewithal to wield. Each day I erect observation posts and then roast in their flames by night. I wait for the nether regions to quiet so the rightful king will be free to speak. Though my besiegers will eventually break camp and lift their weapons anew, for now they are drunken by the fire, stoking a collective furnace of random ugliness, and I am emboldened by this respite as only a wounded man of faith can be.

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  About the Author

  Born in Kansas City and currently enjoying Colorado's magnificent Front Range, Brett Clay Miller is a locksmith by trade, the father of three, and a lover of words and motorcycles.