After the deluge

Bus ride: 21 January, 2011

(Imagine this written in indecipherable shaky hand, on roads just reopening after the floods)

Tooth rattling ride; the blacktop roiling and bumping mercilessly at the whim of the black soil swimming underneath it.

Old wooden houses are adrift in seas of grass: paint peeling like old dead skin, windows to nothing. Dead dried muddy grass is whipped around fences and signposts at nonsensical heights; as though frozen in a moment of strong wind.

The coach’s panes don’t frame, so much as enlarge, the infinite sky. And with someone else behind the wheel, I am a child again: transfixed by the rows of crops opening up as we pass, like pages falling open from a spread-eagled book’s spine.