Bleeding Rust
Monday, July 28th, 2008
He walked to the truck – the rusting, sharp and bitter, beaten thing. It looked like it was decaying on four wheels the way a fox would fall apart lying dead against a tree stump, the way tanks hit by LAWs looked lying in the Gaza strip mid-day, torn apart, battered and forgotten; it was waiting for its page in a history book or the obituary section. He wiggled the key in the lock, twisting the dagger in its already fading frame – a euthanasia of a sort. The door crept open with creaking imprecision and a terrified, death-rattle of a cry. Its hinges were bleeding rust, and everywhere one looked it was falling apart.
The interior – muddy, stained and aging bitter from an unfulfilled life that left a slight coat of ash and cigarette burns in the seat – wafted the sour scent of the sun piercing into the buried fiber and uncovering a noxious odor from deep within its crevasse. A few decades of now unfamiliar faces and alien places were recorded in olfactory precision along the bench. Saddam’s fabled mustard gas was still seeping from its canister years after the gulf, years after anyone could still care; it was rising in undeath from the worn seats. Slow, gentle, deadly as belladonna, it seductively lurched through the air.
He walked to the truck – the rusting, sharp and bitter, beaten thing. It looked like it was decaying on four wheels the way a fox would fall apart lying dead against a tree stump, the way tanks hit by LAWs looked lying in the Gaza strip mid-day, torn apart, battered and forgotten; it was waiting for its page in a history book or the obituary section. He wiggled the key in the lock, twisting the dagger in its already fading frame – a euthanasia of a sort. The door crept open with creaking imprecision and a terrified, death-rattle of a cry. Its hinges were bleeding rust, and everywhere one looked it was falling apart.
The interior – muddy, stained and aging bitter from an unfulfilled life that left a slight coat of ash and cigarette burns in the seat – wafted the sour scent of the sun piercing into the buried fiber and uncovering a noxious odor from deep within its crevasse. A few decades of now unfamiliar faces and alien places were recorded in olfactory precision along the bench. Saddam’s fabled mustard gas was still seeping from its canister years after the gulf, years after anyone could still care; it was rising in undeath from the worn seats. Slow, gentle, deadly as belladonna, it seductively lurched through the air.
