Personal Narrative-Our Angel

857 Words4 Pages
Everywhere on rural roads, and not just at the crossroads where Robert Johnson once waited for the Devil, are crosses. White and stark, they stand out from the green and brown, cow pastures and barns, the yarrow, spidery Queen Anne’s lace, wild Black-Eyed Susans and trash caught in the weeds. Everywhere they mark the last place where the car rolled, the truck skidded, the deer caught literally in the headlights. Somewhere and everywhere, those crosses and sometimes plastic flowers and even teddy bears and pictures, candles and balloons, mark the last place where someone was and then was not. This is too poetic of description of what drew me out on this dusty afternoon to this highway where I may have traveled before. Way out on a road where…show more content…
Plastic flowers that were once red hang on its shoulders. But those were added more recently and still they’ve been there so long, they are faded to a dusty rust. There’s a blog elsewhere on the Internet years too late—entry after entry about the girl, the sister, the daughter, the friend, every one of them: Our Angel. A name she would never allow if she was here. That’s one story, but I stand here on the side of the road trying to find my story. Or my story of our story. There’s a little wind caught in the tall grass, and I look at the cross and wonder if this really was the place. It’s been so long that the grass has long grown back and been mowed year after year. Maybe blood soaked into the ground or maybe it washed away, but that was so many years ago, there’s no way to know. There’s no evidence, no clue, but this cross. But it’s out here, I think, in the empty pasture, the woods beyond, in this cross made of plywood and wire, faded plastic flowers. It’s out here, caught in the…show more content…
Maybe they’d think I was here to lay flowers near the cross, if they can actually see it from the road. Maybe they’d think I was looking for something—a loose hub cap. Maybe I’m some tourist from Minneapolis or Chicago who never saw a cow before, though there are no cows in the pasture right now. Or maybe they don’t see me at all. My car is just a thing to avoid. But what does one do when there is nothing but a body to bury? What sort of marker do you leave? Sometimes when I close my eyes I can see the blood, but it’s not that much. It’s just a trickle at the corner of the mouth like in some movie. It is nothing more than a little death. It’s that moment where everything was hurried and slowed at the same time. But that’s a nightmare from a different time. I wasn’t there, and still I know that a body set in motion by the front fender of a truck would have a great deal more blood than a trickle. I know a body in motion would not be movie-star pretty. But we imagine what we can bear. We use the words we know and can repeat. After so many years, the language of sorry and guilt hasn’t actually lead to forgiveness, just forgetfulness. Maybe if I can shape this story into words, I can find that something, whatever it

More about Personal Narrative-Our Angel

Open Document