a good fantasy

My lover equates me with the city so I wanted him to see my mountain town for himself. He drove me to the convenient store and the post office to get my mail. The post office doesn’t come here so we’re entitled to a free mail box at the post office off Highway 299. When we pulled up he said, “damn, this is country, girl.”

It is country, and I love my little town of drifters, where population 1,701 seems like pure myth, like some families had forgotten their dead died, because there ain’t but a handful of houses here. And there’s that weird, pretty little elongated cabin along the highway, where the young man and his dog spend their evenings and weekends gardening and burning. While across the street in front of the post office, men occasionally stand holding their thumbs up. This highway is the only way to get to the coast from Redding. Most of the men don’t bother trying to hitch a ride, they just walk the whole stretch of 250 miles, stopping to sleep by the side of the road when night falls or fatigue takes over. On this particular occasion there is a young man with long brown hair, his backpack on the asphalt and he’s holding a sign barely-readable that says, “Redwood Forest.” I wondered what was so urgent in the redwood forest that he needed to get there.

I tell my lover he’s like my genie, with him, I wish, and I get. In a drunken moment I had invited him to come to my house and he hadn’t forgotten, he came. We sat in the backyard in rocking chairs and drank. He told me about trees, I told him about birds. We talked about the fire and how no one ever comes to visit.

When we drove by the lake I said, “I wish we could spend a weekend together someday so we could hang out at the lake.” And I remembered my conversation with the Hurricane: “all I have are my fantasies” and we had laughed because that’s all there is to have in the city or in the country, and with men, that’s really all you can ever hope for, a good fantasy.