Fiction

Country Road
by Yorgos Dalman

Remote country road, lewd summer day: A lost path of rough sand between the fields. A country’s dead serpentine. Nowhere to be found on any map, not even in the far corners of the mind of God.

There, beyond the horizon, lies the town. The nameless town near the northern border where everything remains the same with the passing of time. Where everybody’s hanging out the window with a bottle full of rain. Where everybody crashes down into the streets like a piece of lost, lonely confetti. A town that is constantly trembling and shaking on its foundations. No denial please, no reluctance. Just the twenty-four hour theatre of scraping, unwilling earth crusts.

All right, the camera notices in a distance: the lost country road within a hard, sweet wooden frame. A tamed total-shot. In it, about six funeral men, undertakers, overestimaters, those dressed-in-classic-black diggers-in-the-earth, are walking around, their shoulders hanging down just a bit for attitude’s sake. With half a dozen ropes they carry with them a mahogany piano. A musical casket, a sturdy collection of burial notes.

Every now and then, a tone, misguided, partly deformed, a little atonal the least, escapes from the instrument, rises up into the air and eventually dissolves and dies in the hot, trembling air above the fields. Tones, which sound like mercury and wet French kisses, with the scent of rotting mule cadavers.

The men in black are having fights together, telling each other sweet little lies, laughing out loud, denying everything around them. They point out into different directions, calling each other bluff, hesitating, chanting.

‘The Lord Jesus Christ was crucified with His face directed to the west,’ says one of them. And another immediately replies: ‘Not only hell you’ll find south from heaven.’ And a third: ‘I think ol’ Jerry Lee Lewis can beat this Mr. Jordan at any time in the game. Courtesy of being older and having more justifiedly tainted grey hair.’

Then, out of the blue, the six black morons see a trace of bread crumbs lying on the ground. ‘Follow the leader of dough,’ one yells.

And they do, leaving the stench of decay for the buttercups and clover leaves to breath.