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What Grows From Power Lines
Know how you can be walking and you smell one thing—then in the next step it’s all different? Like how this lady smells moths balls when she walks by the bush that grows into the fence, but as her left foot hits the ground, she smells laundry sheets: It’s probably coming from the vent in that brick basement. I bring it up to say just between those two scents, when she looks up in that moment, there’s a pair of tennis shoes tangled in the power lines. The woman knows they’re there. She’s been walking this path every night for years. Maybe the stories are true… about hanging shoes marking places to buy drugs, or a place where a gang member was killed. Either way, each time she sees the shoes, she sees something evil. On nights she forgets to look away from the spot on the wires, she whispers “Behind me Satan.” She says the same thing when she sees a shadow move past her bedroom window, in the fragile state between wakefulness and sleep. The only other thing she sees tangled in power lines are kites. Her husband taught her how to fly her first kite. When she longs for him, she finds herself looking for colored plastic entangled in telephone wires, and kite string in trees: where she can follow the string to memories. Shoes and kites. They must grow from power lines, finding sustenance somewhere deep inside all the wires: from our phone conversations with far-off family, the constant chatting of teenage lovers, the emails we write carefully, the emails we write carelessly, our Law and Order, our MTV and local news, the power that fuels the lights and our dim love making, the power that fuels our computers and connects us to the world—detaches us from the world; all the data that moves through the power lines of our city are the roots to a living thing. From power lines grow death and life. Shoes and kites. The woman walks to the park by the middle school to clear her head each night. Usually by this time, it’s just her and the rabbits darting through the school buses. She walks the same loop each night until she remembers who she is. Sometimes she wrestles with God so intensely that she waves her hands in the air as she walks. At the end of tonight’s walk she feels a peace that gives her the strength to send an email. It had been written over and over but never sent. It’s an email of forgiveness. When she releases her finger from her mouse, the data in the email moves to the edge of her house. Then at the moment the message pulses through the wires over her street, a shoelace knot loosens. Further down the line, just a few blocks, a bit of kite ribbon grows from the power lines.
Follow this train of thought like you’re taking a walk with me.
