by Patrick Mc Gann
I am driving across Palouse blacktop back roads in the middle of the night with a gut full of bitter witness and sour doubt. Out in my headlights in the middle of the road, ghost owls snatch mice up by their uncertainties. It's hard to tell if what you see is really what it is.
In the middle of the dial I find a soft voice, a woman's voice, in the middle of the rage factory of preachers and screechers and lonely psycho-soul reachers skipping off the upper air out of nowhere, all trying to find me and my aching need in the middle of this haystack.
She is in a small, middle American town. In the middle of a shift she isn't paid near enough to finish. She sounds pretty, like she has long hair and soft skin and eyes smart enough to see the truth when she hears it.
But then again, way out here, my ears hear what they want to see.
She is reading school menus in a monotonic way that reminds me of a sad old circus elephant named Ophelia back in my own small town, swaying foot to foot in the middle of Main Street tethered to a jaundiced, saggy-faced man drumming it up for the world's fattest bearded lady dwarf and the two-headed, tattooed, lizard boy, swallowing the flaming swords of their own pride every hour on the hour.
And I'm driving through the dark wasteland of voices thinking this woman works for a man just like that, selling a live pretty voice to corporate bread bakers who want it soft and white and pliable.
The radio promises to play a message from our sponsor, Polonius Bakery. But there is silence for a second, and then her voice, the kind of voice that stares out the window, says “This isn't who I am. When they told me who I am they didn't lie exactly. The lie they tell is the truth, they just tell it to the wrong people. So, the lie is in the listening. I lost myself. I lost what matters. I have to change that."
And then her voice fades to the end of a tinny jingle with bad rhymes exalting the soft, profit-rich, hardly-even-food of Polonius Bakery Bread.
Then she's back reading more Polonius Menu Reports, but you just know, you can tell she is still thinking about what we all want to know.
What matters.
I can hear paper rustle. I can hear cheap bracelets jangle. I can almost hear the roar stifled in the middle of her gut in the middle of a rotting, knotted ball of what doesn't matter.
She should just shut up and talk.
"Nutritious and delicious Polonius Bread will never steer you wrong," she says, flat as dust to dust.