Fairy Tale

1 Minute Read Time

This photograph shows an empty and desolate parking lot with a yellow cart and buildings in the background. — Photo by Braden Burson on Unsplash

I took the ditch path back the empty lot
across the graveled patch of
scutch grass, musk
thistle, the fox squirrel
.22ed and rotting,
coyote scat pebbled with undigested pustules

of huckleberries. Pollen-scattered air.
Busted beer bottles, lottery scratch-
off tickets, chicken bones—
alone, I followed
my ear:
thought of you then got over it. Stripped gristle

and leftover dressings of a deer. I mooned
around the clearing beside the quick-
spilling wash. Not
everything must
have some cosmic meaning.
Cottonwoods mottled the breeze with wishing

stars, great clouded tufts. A salamander,
amphibian once thought shape-
shifting fire, slued
through the water’s
oily sluff and dander.
Far cliffsides red with iron like my blood.

Kept trying to make more of it. A fact:
the high weeds trembled
while my body, limp,
remembered sleeping
next to you. The fiction:
I could just walk off. That any ending’s simple.