Golden Meadows

Out for Publication... but here's the beginning of the story...

I drifted up from sleep unsure what woke me, but comfortable in that self-satisfied way when you wake up after dozing off in the shade of a big tree on a gently swaying hammock. You wake up forgetting who you were for a moment, a brief respite from your lack of money, your loss of elasticity, your age, and every other thing that worried you before you fell into the ephemeral coma.

Lifting my head enough to look over the edges that cradled me set the hammock to rocking. Cormac still lay curled into a ball beside my glass of lemonade. Beads of sweat had collected on the bottom half of the glass and a leaf clung to its lip by its stem while three of its five lobes dipped into the pale liquid. I squinted at it and noted the leaf as evidence.

I closed my eyes and listened to the wind making the leaves shiver on the branches of the trees. I waited for a clue…maybe a repeat noise, or vibration. Maybe a heavy sigh from Cormac. Further down the block I could hear the hum of a leaf blower, and even further than that, the low monotone of wheels on the train tracks that ran through town. Maybe the train had whistled further out. It was one of the sounds that became lost to daily life, filtered from consciousness like the buzz of bees and the twitter of birds until you let go of your worries and re-focus. But I didn’t hear anything unusual and the train was just reaching the main crossing beside the post office where it blasted its whistle in three long calls.

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