SmokeLong Quarterly

In my neighborhood, there is an asphalt walking path constricting a peaty, man-made lake like a black leather choker. Post brain-injury, my eyes prefer the world on dark mode, so I walk the circumference of that asphalt choker at night—moseying past the empty sand beach, the damp sidewalks slick with evening irrigation, and the windows of suburban houses all illuminated with gas lamp warmth.

As I walk, the sky is a rusted layer cake with veins of ore. Clouds of loamy cotton candy. Above mirrors the sedimentation below—below the lake water—as if some cosmic titan has rotated the Earth end over end, the bottom about to drop at any moment. At some point, that new orientation would be considered normal, ordinary. How strange is it that all radical change becomes commonplace with the passage of time. I sometimes wonder what deviations my brain injury has already made normal in my own flipped and suspended mind. Is there a pain in my head that I’ve simply forgotten about? I don’t know what I can’t feel anymore.

On the way back to my house, a cauldron of bats circling overhead, I hear a car creeping close behind me on the main road. My heart sinks as if it’s been cast on a line and tossed into the lake as bait.

The night before, on this very same stretch of path, a car sped past. But instead of continuing through the subdivision at the same alarming speed, it braked hard and stopped dead in the road a little ways ahead of me. The driver must have noticed me walking and felt the urge to stop, back up, get parallel to my person. A moment later, there they were, rolling the passenger side window down.

Even though it was dark, I could see the vague outline of a figure. Figures. At least two people in the car. Maybe they thought I was drunk, or high, and they felt like messing around. Maybe they thought I had just escaped some government facility, once restrained in a padded room—for either my own safe-keeping or theirs—now ambling around, scoping out a place to lay low for the night. Or maybe they thought I was just a weirdo for taking a leisurely stroll so late. In some ways, I am a weirdo. A mutant of circumstance with a titanium plate eerily bumping up to his brain, a plate tasked with making sure his head doesn’t spontaneously split open and leak said precious yet dinged up brain.

Whatever their rationale, the figure in the passenger seat made a quick motion as if he were throwing something, drawing a weapon. He screamed as he did this, loose and phlegmy. Endorphins flooded as my instincts possessed me. I hurled my arms over my head in a protective stance and crouched, getting as low to the ground as I could, waiting for a thrown object, a sharp object, a small projectile object, not unlike the one that fractured my skull bone years ago. A bang, blast, crash, something. I braced. I’ve been attacked like this on more than one occasion. A knife, a gun. This orientation of the world is commonplace to me. A sense of safety would in fact flip my life end over end.

I waited there, ready for the bottom to drop. Mind suspended. But the only thing that ever emanated from the car was the sound of laughter. I unclenched my entire body and noticed an arm positioned outside the window of the car, anticipating a high-five, left hanging by me as they, just some teenagers, drove off.

“Pussy ass fuck!” one yelled.

I don’t know what I can’t feel anymore. But on occasion, I’m reminded all too well of what I can.

Mercifully, the car tonight, the slow, creeping car, does not brake, reverse, or even roll down its window. Instead, tonight’s car just drives cautiously behind, its headlights projecting my shadow on the tree line ahead. A strobe effect occurs as the headlights shine between various impediments—bushes on the landscaped median, street signs, flickering lampposts—giving other me, shadow me, erratic movements, backwards-looking almost, but still advancing in my direction. A demonic forest cryptid on a mission. I step on a twig, by now it’s so dark, I don’t even see it, and I imagine it’s shadow me’s bones crackling in stop-motion horror as it stalks.

Each stride I make toward shadow me, shadow me reciprocates, step for step. I don’t know what he knows. What he remembers. What he can or can’t perceive. I don’t even know if he can see me. But at some point, I know we’ll converge.

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“Convergence” is the winner of the CNF competition of A SmokeLong Summer 24.