She was wearing boots, sat on a fruit crate outside a gas station, tired of watching the trucks file out like wagons rolling, tired of making metal geese shine in the sun. It was sunny though; she was 10k from your door, and without an invitation it was time to turnaround and head home. Back then, she still couldn’t see much further than the dust on the end of her boots, so she just sat there, as she would do, figuring out all the raw materials, and imagining the millions of pairs of hands that had contributed to creating the pencil she was twirling, the pencil she wanted to write it down with.
The story was contained there, but without paper, the lead was turning to mercury in the heat of the day. Waiting on a crate while an old dark vein turns liquid in the sun, was not something new - she’d been here before. This time, her hands were cups pouring liquid silver back and forth like a Slinky heading up and downstairs, and contained this way, the ground wasn’t a liquid mirror, and in moving the molten metal this way, was an old meditation.
She had waited there just a little longer, moving the liquid silver, for you to drive through all pink, back from somewhere, looking just fine; back from a meeting outside a museum, an orchestra playing the national anthem; back from picking up some shopping, on your way to the next grand opening; on the way to a venue to pick up the next bag of predictions, or one or two shocking surprises. And while she waited, a clown danced down a river of silver, a lollipop lady, a magician, a seamstress and a tailor, and a mosaic of stained glass that had tried so hard to make magic carpets as light as silk; and in this reflection they all contained what she was waiting for, of course she had thought so, and years on, the tractor driver and her, and all the women with fantastic names, would talk and sew patches while she moved the metal from one bowl of the palm to the other.
'Hey...What you doing?'
She looked up. It was the tractor driver who had picked her up in a field way back. She looked older, hot, tired. 'Hey. I'm waiting for a taxi. You want a smoke?'
'No. I'll have a shot of your whiskey though. May I?'
'Sure,' she said, giving her space on the crate; and in the silences between those sups on the flask, movies were made, words appeared everywhere, until three, or four, never heard before words, spilled over onto the tarmac in huge raindrops, and in that rain, the taxi arrived.
