Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,57

together. They were crumpled and the color of dried roses. The man stood.

“I have to go. Do you have a pen?”

I found one that had slipped down into the torn lining of my coat. He squatted down in front of me and pulled my free hand toward him.

“This way, if you want, you can always claim it washed away,” he said and wrote his number across my palm.

I looked at it several times that day. Each time I washed my hands, it faded more until it was only visible to me because I knew it had been there.

I was going to the Farm and I knew it.

23 Into the Snow

Two days later I caught the bus to Breaker’s Rise with Tamara’s folded swan in my pocket. I didn’t tell her I was coming. Creeping past my hidden desire for things not to be fucked, to belong somewhere, I made up other reasons for my trip—It’s a lovely time of the year to see the coastal range; I heard they’ve got raw goat’s milk kefir. It was as if I actually believed that none of my violated hopes were real if no one else knew about them, just like how someone’s not dead until you say it on the phone.

The Blackberry Apocalypse was settling into a traffic menace and the maybe the Russian was right that not much had actually changed but I saw it differently. Over the digital streams and dammed expressways, my flag like gauze in front of the stars.

I packed like I was going to sea. I took my maps, my rock hammer, and the last Hive phone. In my PO box was the actual issue of Paleobiology featuring my name in black script on the yellow peach cover. Out of sentimentality I took that too.

Credence got the morning off and drove me up to a small town north of the city so I could catch the bus there and avoid the long security lines downtown, which was an all-around good idea. The rains started again but it was colder and I heard there was snow in the pass. We talked a lot about the candlelight march. They never even got across the bridge. The police came in from both sides and started arresting people. One girl got so scared she jumped. Broke her leg in three places. Before if I had said I was leaving town after something like that he would have called me a coward and accused me of exercising white privilege in the face of the real costs of gentrification. But when I told him I was going out to a friend’s farm he seemed relieved. Lowering expectations being the secret to my success.

Credence bought me lunch in a Mexican restaurant near the Fallon City station and waited with me until the bus came. We talked about the babies. Annette had picked a birthing center and he had negotiated his time off with the union. They were going to go in for another ultrasound the following week.

“Got any good twin names?” he asked.

“Romulus and Remus?”

He smiled, ordered an horchata, and stared out the window, the parking lot reflected in his eyes.

It was raining harder when the bus came. An older man with matching luggage got off and they switched drivers. Two women who got out to smoke were complaining about being late. I was standing in the aisle when we pulled out and Credence flickered away. Dog salmon super 8. The bus moved north then east along a river. We stopped in a few other small towns before turning onto a long stretch of road that ran parallel to an old railway line. I looked at the bedding planes of the road cut. My mind ran between riots and Rat Queens. I’d remember the Russian man, stark in the green of the Motel, and suddenly see Grace, her dark hair streaming over an aquamarine dress and tiny creeks flowing from her fingers. There were no anchor points to my thoughts at all.

I laid my head on the glass. A wave of nausea swept through my body when I thought about the bombings and what I had done. But eventually, lulled by the vibrations of the bus and the passing geology of my childhood summers, my mind cleared. Nobody was dead. I didn’t need to know what happened. And living in the center of that thought the vertigo and nauseous fear came and passed. Twice I had to stop looking out the window, fix my