FROM THe DesK OF:        John Biscello

OUTLAW COUNTRY

An excerpt from None So Distant

 

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Reports of fringy lore on lost highways. Point-counterpoint in a twangy battle of wills. Stay tuned.

 

       I am not going anywhere. There is nowhere to go. Someone took a picture of me, once, whenever, just like this—A girl standing on the highway, packed suitcase, waiting, hoping, or, not waiting, not hoping … pictures lie in ten thousand different ways.

       In that scene, I will always be there, here, the side of the highway, and every person that lays eyes on me will superimpose a story, I am imagination’s text and frozen asset, I am the photo that makes you want to believe in eternity as an irregular verb.

       I am not going anywhere, yet if you are not going anywhere eternally, is that the trip? Is that the action? The motion? The odyssey? Eternity, even as an irregular verb, is subject to context. If I were to tell you—This is a story about a girl who was going nowhere, who never went anywhere, and kept on going nowhere, waiting, not waiting, hoping, not hoping … the context would be time. Or travel. If I then say—The girl came to clearly understand that the person who goes nowhere knowingly lives at the crossroads of everywhere, then the context shifts. Or rather the narrative persuasion does, as the doors open for judgement. Now the girl is regarded as artsy (if she were a movie), as heady or cerebral (if measured against certain friends, certain family), she is dubbed an outcast (based on the standards of a system designed to be dependably systematic), the girl as an outlier may be told to shut up, get out, grow up, get with the program, find herself, toe the line, the girl may hear a thousand voices assimilating into hydra, which is why the girl now carries a sword (if this were a fantasy spec), or a blowtorch (if this were a tale of revenge), or the suitcase may contain a floppy-eared stuffed rabbit ( a paean to childhood and all its sovereign wilds), or maybe a typewriter (the girl will grow up to write stories, because who wouldn’t want to rend person-sized holes into the everyverse).

       All of this takes place in a single non-specific changeless setting: the side of the highway. The prologue and the epilogue are exactly the same, the establishing shot and the climax nearly identical, the long take is a shortcut to eternity as an irregular verb.

       You see a girl standing on the side of a highway with a suitcase and you tell yourself a story. Reflexively, instinctively, we superimpose, we parrot. Layers, images, patterns. Strength, contrary to popular belief, is not rooted in numbers. It is found between what wasn’t said and what wasn’t done. By not moving from my spot, my little turf of earth, I am holding the sky on my shoulders and the stars in my mouth. I am growing up ageless. You don’t see this. You can’t see this. It is not a thing to be seen. It is a thing to be felt. To feel is to reckon with the magnitude of so many things moving everywhere all at once. Secret worlds turn over every nano-second. I am not a young girl standing on the side of a highway, waiting to go somewhere. I am nano-second improvising over eternity, time’s assassin cleaving through every possible story’s claim or shape.