Make_____

We passed the third intersection without street signs before Evan and I decided to stop and check the map. We were somewhere outside Oneonta, on gravel roads since the others were flooded, and the moon was yellow. He spread the map on the hood and we speared it with two-pound flashlights.

“What kind of flashlights?”

“LED,” he said. “I found them in Virginia.”

He mapped out routes. I noticed a bend in an adjacent road and explored it to get a sense of the terrain. The foliage collapsed into the road and rustled like summer locusts. In the night, everything looked sick with crepuscule or diodes, like the color had been drained out and replaced with fright.

Walking back, the moon hung over the illumined hood. It looked hot and flat and white as a cataract, quaking numbly in the stygian hum.

I told him about the bend and we looked at the lines on the paper. We negotiated roads with the map, and retraced the routes in the air with the butts of our pens, both of us. I looked at the vacuous streets but was really parsing my memory for the few ghosts I knew off the grid.

We made all kinds of turns and ended up home. Along the way we found new ways to tell old jokes and would pause to listen to the upstate radio. None of the roads looked like the whisps in my memory, but Oneonta was a nice town whose gas stations I can still recall.