The Lonesome Cowboy’s Lost Lament

by Rudi Dornemann

His grandfather had sung this song, late at night, in his workshop, when he was too absorbed in his work to know that Thomas was there, too focused even to know he was singing. The lyrics had to do with the moon, a heart (broken or breaking), and a cowboy.

Thomas forgot the song for decades, until he heard a noisy near-punk cover version late at night on a college radio station while driving cross-country. Just half the last refrain before the music descended into squeals and static which was either the station slipping out of range or some kind of Sonic Youthy outro. Enough to hook him, put the song back in his head — or the hole of forgetting where the song would have been.

He tried hypnotism, hours in sensory deprivation tanks; nothing helped. A friend of friend with a knack for finding things shared some advice.

“In the old days,” she said, “there was a memory-art where you imagined a mansion and arranged what you wanted to remember by the rooms and the objects in them. These days, memory is collective and external — libraries, the internet… like that. Memories are still places, but they’re real and they’re out there. If you’re willing to drive far enough, you can remember anything.”

She had a car he could borrow, and he left that night, phoning in to work from a truck stop the next morning to request a leave of absence. The car, a Ford Galaxie with shot shocks, ran on words. Thomas had to pull over every so often, flip through the one-volume Oxford English Dictionary on the passenger seat to a random word, and read the tiny print aloud. The word faded from the page and the memories of everyone within 50 miles. In a couple miles, the word would be back and the needle back on E, and he’d have to do it again.

He drove: a month, two. He did find it, eventually, spotting it out the corner of his eye as he turned into yet another motel parking lot. Congealed moonlight shapes spiraled in the air over a pile of roadside gravel. Thomas could remember every verse, every quaver of his grandfather’s hum-yodeled refrains, and his heart unbroke.

He got back in the car, found the flashlight and magnifying glass, and fueled up to begin the drive home.

Finder

by Jason Fischer

Awareness came when something sharp descended, scratched out two neat slashes to serve as eyes, and opened a mouth beneath these.  He took his first look at the world, ponderous, lazy-lidded.  She hovered over him, a toothless giant backlit by weak firelight, one eye black and mean, the other a rheumy sea of cataracts.

She pinched his face and made a nub of a nose, massaged his cheeks into ears and then he could hear; the coughing of someone very sick, a pair of dogs snarling over a bone, the low talk of the man-folk.  Worried murmurings over the stink of their sputtering cook-fire.

He looked up at the hag, confused.  She gripped him in the vice of her fingers, and he blinked before the sour rot of her breath as she whispered over him.

‘Finding-Man of clay and bone,

Find the lostling,

Bring her home.’

Then a curtain of hides was drawn aside, and he took in the stars, the bright curve of the moon, the soft curve of the hills beneath these soft lights.  Then everything wheeled and span, and he realised his creator had cast him from the rude hut, flung him out into the night.

He drank the moonlight into his damp clay skin, until he found life and movement in his stubby limbs.  He brushed off the pine-needles and stones as best he could, and stood.  He walked deep into a dark wood, the black trees looming above the straggle of huts and lean-tos.  The clay man wondered at the fragility of the man-folks, wondered why the forest did not snuff out their foul little settlement.

He followed the rough paths of that benighted place, followed ways that were long forgotten and almost reclaimed by nature.  He heard the faintest of whimpers, more like a lost animal than a child, and found the tiny girl-child nestled in the twisted roots of a tree, terrified and chill to the touch.

She took his hand without a word.  He led her back through that dark place, past wild animals that would have snapped her up but stared warily at her clay chaperone.  They stole through the camps of rough men, who slumbered on as the girl stepped over their sprawled limbs and scattered refuse.  Finally, the child found herself on the threshold of her home, blinking and confused as her family descended upon her, tearful and scolding.

The clay man was gone.

When the little girl was herself an old lady, she told the story to her own little ones, of being lost in the old woods, of the perfect little boy who found her and brought her home.

‘He glowed in the moonlight,’ she said, a distant smile on her crusty old lips.  ‘And he had such beautiful eyes.’

THE END