My Dearest Jonah Read Free Page A

letters (another essential I was able to secure) and the thought that somewhere, something good exists in my life. For now that seems enough to get by on.
    The sun was at its fiercest when I began my trek. Sand blistered my feet and I swear that each time I’d reach a landmark I had set myself - pass a stone I’d had my eye upon, or a
winking shard of glass - the expanse would stretch once more before my eyes like a cartoon corridor. Overhead two vultures swooped in and out of one another with an ugly wisdom. Even when so weak I
could taste death on my tongue like vinegar, the beauty of the desert was not lost on me. That enormity gets inside of you. Sizes and shapes stop mattering when you have nothing to compare them to.
When it is just you and the world. The scrape of my foot against a clump of rock became deafening, yet the pain that had wrapped around me seemed to stop mattering. It was as if my feet said,
‘we’re getting out of here, with or without you.’ And so I became almost dead, led by the same strength that must enable most women to give birth. Attempting to make tangible the
hideousness of the situation - to even think it could be quantified via such lowly mediums as tears or tantrums - seemed as ridiculous as it no doubt was.
    So I walked.
    And I walked.
    My footprints disappeared behind me. The car resigned itself to volatile vaults of memory. The severed hand already on its slow return to nothingness, like the opposite of birth.
    God I was thirsty.
    It grew dark and then light and then dark again. The speed at which the cold arrived like a net cast out to sea seemed almost rude. But I didn’t stop.
    On the second morning the landscape became more varied. Mounds appeared where before there had only been flat, and with each step the terrain became increasingly rugged, like the drawings of a
heartbeat under attack. A tyre lay decomposing, buried in the sand. I touched it and it felt precious. In the distance I saw two dogs. They were either fighting or mating, though I was unable to
tell which. As I drew closer a small cluster of buildings began to take shape: a gas station, a convenience store. I heard a wind chime jangle to the sweet soul of an invisible conductor. A
makeshift bar. Two old men - toothless and gaunt - sat silently on a porch. Outlines began to rise like steam from a city grate. I heard the rhythm of my breath change and felt myself become fuller
as their shapes began to calcify.
    Just one more step.
    The following events are blurry and those that remain clear I would disregard if given the chance. Suffice to say that I do not care to see in print what I had to do in order to secure a ride
into the next functioning town (though I daresay that had I not offered it then it would have been taken nonetheless). It seemed a small price to pay at the time, though in hindsight I think the
five dollars I later found stuffed in my bra may well have been adequate. I suppose we’ll never know.
    My trailer looked interfered with even from the outside. Nothing was particularly different, though were it to be granted the luxury of expression it would have held one of
sheer indignation. As I walked towards the door, two boys wearing only their underwear played on the grass with cutlasses and swords. The smallest boy, Dylan, a redhead, eased the fervour of his
attack as he saw me and raised his eye-patch.
    “The bad men been in there, miss,” he said with a mild stutter born of genetics as opposed to fear, a fact I had deduced from his mother some time ago.
    I mostly kept myself to myself within the park. Though in the early days, before night time became such profitable currency, I would sit out on the porch during those balmy
evenings and - on the rare occasion I had forgotten to take a prop-novel to avoid such instances - talk to Deloris next door as she allowed her broiling legs to soak in a bucket of cool water.
    Her husband had invented a safety mechanism now used in every plug