*

By CD Collins

I wake before the innocent fire of dawn, the pulsing tangerine sun above the chicken coop. I take a photograph to send to California, letting her know about the grandeur of this small farm in rural Kentucky where you might assume you know what motivates the movement of the stars and the people as you sit on the front porch and count the ratio of cars to trucks. Always more trucks, some loud without mufflers and no one stopping them. Some trucks built so high up you need the running board even if you’re a grown man.

I waited to send the photograph until people were waking in California. She wrote back in response to the sunrise pleated by the tin roof: Dear God.

Mornings, I position myself with my prayer beads and the hot chocolate she’d sent the recipe for: Darkest chocolate, salt, MCT oil, full on milk and cream, cayenne, cinnamon. You can get something similar in the drive-up booth in the Dollar Tree parking lot.

This was the time when we hardly left our houses, when we checked hourly for an opening at the pharmacy for a vaccination. A time we’d been told was coming and we may have believed, but we didn’t know how to trust it. A time when I didn’t see anyone except my cousin Gordon, who showed up with a practically see-through bandana over his nose.

Gordon suspected they’d insert a tracker in his arm if he let them go through with the needle. His wife got the shot, though. People started falling all around us. We could hear the artificial breathing, the pale faces surfacing in our sleep.

We did not know how long it would last, or what transformation would arise. The Governor spoke to us each night. We adorned our porches with green lights to express honor. The wind blew from west to east.

*

Now we do not know where the wind will come from next as we watch the disassembling of all we’ve built.

Can you help us in Los Angeles? What do the Giant Flemish rabbits in cages behind the barn know as they huddle with their quivering nostrils?

We feared what would happen, but could not conceive the speed, our feet on the ground, then steadying ourselves on the running board. Our feet rising, floating, the ground beneath misty and distant.

We couldn’t conceive the speed nor the multitudinous directions.

We knew only cardinal directions, or intercardinal directions, northeast, southwest.

Now they come from every direction, coming for the goats and fowl, coming for the rings on your fingers, coming for the sunrise, coming for the day in its brightening and release.

Can you hear us Arkansas, can you hear us Belize?

Now we must say what we want, not turn away in desperate alarm.

Can you hear us Senegal, can you hear us, St. Petersburg? Can you hear us, Kyiv? Can you hear us?

We are calling.

We are listening.

*Previously published in Writer’s Hour Magazine