Postcard prose – Issue 11 | January 2011
Long Distance
by Arlan Hess
The hillside is salted green, nothing too deep or too muted, and we wreathe the ocean at a consistent pace, not changing speed, not faster or slower but lighter than I’ve ever traveled before, alone on a highway in a rented Japanese car. I want to go home, to any home, I ache for a voice at the end of the line: Where are you now? Where are you going? — a distant accent and family out of sync — There is a time delay can you hear it, wait, what? There is a time delay can you hear it, wait, what? In the distance, a man watches me watch him and his dog. A Border Collie, maybe, I can’t tell for sure. The slow landscape folds around us, here and there symmetrical around a farmer and a car. This is his land, I think, his road. I’m trespassing. He stares until I fade around the curve of the bay, eight hundred yards closer to home, as far away as I was when he first spotted me, a chance thread holding us together, until finally he waves and I press my hand to the glass.
About the author
Arlan Hess once took a freighter from Montreal to London—an experience she recommends to all travelers. More recently, she has taken a book binding class in Siena, seen U2 in Dublin, and gone whale watching in Bermuda. You can find her work in Connotation Press, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, and Thirty-First Bird Review.
Read our current issue, Issue 11 | January 2011:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
