Long Distance

Jamie decides today will be the day we take off to Kansas. We've both dreamt of it, driving off to flat lands where we would be swept off, cackling, on our brooms to Oz. I laugh, an unfunny laugh. Chipped and cracked, it tumbles across the phone line. She laughs too, an unfunny laugh, and I stare at the phone my eyes shaking, clutching my life force of Camel Jade cigarettes. Dreaming suddenly of the Petroleum bridge because it is so black today and how I want to walk across in my addled bare feet like I did when we were seventeen and find her at end, long hair sardonically twirled around her pinky finger in the tattered red sun stained flannel, and her purple converse tennis shoes. She remarks that we wouldn't be able to reach off the ground anyway, as old and wide as we have gotten and that menthol cigarettes wouldn't probably be popular with midgets. And I agree with her, and laugh, and cry, and wonder what silver cylindrical dreams use when they move away a slow sail down the Allegheny a broken down old U-haul or perhaps, .........brooms and twisters farther than Kansas, farther than Oz.