i took an exit by mistake in all that rain, i could hardly see three feet ahead of me and the road was a river, there were no taillights ahead of me as a ready guide, just the occasional transport truck passing fast and close. the feeling of being a small vulnerable thing when they did, the spray washing over me and impairing sight yet further. in all that water i drove towards a sky that glowed a rose colour.

i don’t mind getting off at the wrong exit, it’s not like you are going to drive clean off the map i like to laugh and say but sometimes you know i wish i could, clean off it, because i don’t like where the roads go sometimes which is to say i don’t always like where they’ve been and i don’t trust where they are going. maps as a curse worked on earth; i wonder what it was like before everywhere and everything was named, numbered and counted.

as i took the exit without realising it, looking at the glowing sky i was thinking of the fires of childhood when the whole north woods would burn and burn (that one summer when we did not see the sun for all the ash, or when sometimes we did and it was as red as a prizefighter’s bloody eye, the smell of the smoke in our hair, on our clothes) and i wondered what it was that could burn so fiercely in all that water.

the colour of the sun during the burning time, the reason for the coldness of the air that saw us wearing sweaters in august (august!) is very readily explained of course, i won’t do it here but two or three clicks and you will know it too. the glowing sky in the deluge explainable too; of course it was the lights of the many greenhouses here where all manner of things are grown or made to grow (is it different? i think it might be). rose, the mixture of the wavelengths of light which are best for photosynthesis.

but for a moment as i drove i forgot the reason for the glow and it was enough to drive towards it as though to something that was beyond explanation or comprehension. for a moment i was getting my wish to drive clean off the map.

this is a story about making a story for something that can’t be named, numbered or counted, except as it turns out it could, and so it was, and then there was something lost in the doing.

i almost tritely want to tell you what it is that was lost but i’m going to give it to you in a closed fist instead, don’t uncurl the fingers but let the roselight seep from between them.

let this one last thing seem, and not be.