Gale-Like | Scott Mitchel May
The wind comes off the hills and down through the valley where they sit reading to one another, simultaneously, and from different books. This was what they did — who they were. They made cacophony in the air and stormed at night. They’ve been told it isn’t healthy and they should part. She left, once. He followed. It never takes, in places like this. Her opening line hung the air and his came disjointed and a nano-second later and in the round. She hurts so much and they all tell her she knows how to fix that but she can’t leave all the noise behind. He is the problem, always has been, but he too is also part of it all, the noise she so enjoys, and he too, enjoys, and so he stays and follows and she never leaves for real.
They have friends and acquaintances and they attend parties and they eat meals with people who live and breathe and talk and have opinions on them. They are spoken of when they are not around, which is often, but also, she is spoken to when he is not around, which is less often. No one speaks to him. He will lose them all, when it happens.
The wind touches their faces and they read and nothing is decipherable between them but they both know what they mean. He stands up and shakes dust from his lap. She remains and reads and the noise she creates is singular now and fills the whole outdoors. He picks up his book and reads but the words catch and her noise is all that is there. He closes his mouth and he moves to go back where they came from, but the voices that carried her are at her back and she can’t retreat.
No one speaks to him except for her, now. She reads at night, over the phone, and only knows he’s gone when his end ceases to crackle with the small white noise of an open line.
Scott Mitchel May is a well-read skate punk living in Madison, WI. His work has appeared in Bending Genres, Maudlin Hause, Rejection Letters, Misery Tourism, and The Bear Creek Gazzette, among others. He was the winner of the 2019 UW, Madison Writers' Institute Poem or Page Competition in the category of literary fiction and he has been shortlisted for the 2022 Santa Fe Writers' Project Literary Awards. He holds a GED from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and a BS in English Literature from Edgewood College. He tweets @smitchelmay.