Fall

Driving Home Drunk, with the Devil Riding Shotgun

The Ambivalence of a Near-Death Dream

By Sean Murphy

Fall

On a dissolving horizon the sky looks good enough

to eat: orange sorbet on a black plate; overhead

birds want in on the action, circling one another

and entwined in some secret autumnal ritual.

All around me, innocent leaves are leaping

to their deaths, propelled by forces

they never asked or hoped to understand.

I stand on dead souls blown about by my brother,

the wind. I feel sorry for these leaves, obliged

to suicide themselves, only days after celebrating

the fleet summer of their fall, the full flowering

of uncontainable colors—their contribution

to the vibrancy of a landscape they’ll never

see. The wind speaks: Stay out of this, it says.

Driving Home Drunk, with the Devil Riding Shotgun

Midnight’s the cruelest hour, causing saints to sin and sinners to sing,

shrieking when—besotted with spirits and spirits spiraling, impaired

and incoherent—they realize they’re lost with no safe way home.

The bar beckons. Bars, if they’re good for nothing else, are great

for that. Watering holes for weary warriors who want what they got

and get nothing they ask for (they could pray but they know better).

Swinging down accustomed streets, a humid mist sweats beneath

the streetlights and clings to the faces of these silent, suffering souls.

You wade through the haze of colorless ties and colorful perfumes.

Familiar sights and sounds: laughter, screams, secrets, and seductions,

spilling out of mouths that come to places like this, killing themselves

slowly in order to survive. So what happens? It’s the same old story.

You don’t go looking for trouble; trouble has no qualms finding you

(it being so reliable that way). You work toward being a lover and not

a fighter, but of course it’s usually the loving that leads to the fighting.

Not working, but there’s a lot of work to do: going above and beyond

the call of duty. And the harder you work, the more you seem to spend.

You do so little and get paid so much, then work so hard and pay so much.

Someone makes the rules, and it’s not you: When you’re falling down a hill,

you pick up speed, and eventually momentum carries you. It does the work

for you, and after a while you begin to feel accountable, even a bit lazy.

So, you decide to pull your weight, take these matters into your own hands:

there’s nowhere good this can go and everybody knows that driving blind

with deafened senses is dumb. Shifting and stuttering (but smart enough)

Not to pray. The street refuses to speak; it shall not partner this perpetration

in progress. Overhead, the fully dressed oak trees on either side lean down

low, eager to eavesdrop. And here’s what they hear: Please help me…

The Ambivalence of a Near-Death Dream

According to legend you’re supposed to die

or come to upon impact.

I survived!

Upside down

car, broken bridge, shallow creek. Didn’t feel a thing.

(Too good to be true or else I’m already gone.)

All right.

Here comes the ambulance, right around the corner.

Only in a dream.

My father gets there first, older overnight.

He’s been here before: a hospital.

Dealing with the departure of someone he loved.

His father, his mother, his wife. But now: his son?

Unacceptable. You make deals after what he’s endured:

No one else goes before me or else

It’s a perversion of the natural order, an affront

to everything fair.

But who said life is fair, the doctor doesn’t say,

having seen it all and learned all the ways

they don’t prepare you for how indiscriminate death is,

indifferent with regards to who, where, when, and especially why.

Everyone disappears and I’m in a hotel lobby.

An industrious staff does everything but tend to me

because, of course, this is a dream.

After a while I’m aware:

they’re making me wait—or else I have to earn it.

Am I worthy of life? Am I worthy of death?

I begin to protest and then understand: what better time

than now for questions of this kind.

My old man, who can’t possibly lift me at his age, is

carrying me up steps and between buildings,

impatient with paramedics who never arrived or

maybe I imagined that other stuff. He’s angry;

either afraid or simply asserting control.

(the only thing more crucial than who stays or goes.)

Eventually I implore him to get assistance and he puts me down

in despair disguised as disgust: This all used to be so much easier.

Blameless bystanders stop and watch and I feel ashamed,

half-naked, baptized in blood and mud and tear-stained sweat,

what was earlier relief now an omen, or something worse—

suddenly unable to speak. My worst nightmare: maybe

I’m actually dead but I’m still me. That must mean something,

there’s somewhere else after all…

(another thing I was wrong about, as usual.)

Where is everyone?

I’m alone and that’s even worse than dying or living

through death: being aware and nothing to say or anybody

to explain myself to.

Where’s my sister?

She should be here by now, and are her kids old enough

to see me like this?

How do I look, I wonder, because I’m either one extreme

or the other: nurses can afford to ignore me since there’s nothing

to do, for better or worse.

So, I wait. Is this limbo? I feel like I need to get my story straight,

just in case.

Finally, someone walks into the lobby. It’s my father,

his return implying something about prodigal sons.

But wait!

How or why be damned he’s got my mother with him

and she’s smiling, resplendent and above all, alive,

about to tell me everything’s okay…

And then I wake up.

Sean Murphy has appeared on NPR's "All Things Considered" and been quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and AdAge. A long-time columnist for PopMatters, his work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, The Good Men Project, Memoir Magazine, and others. His chapbook, The Blackened Blues, was published by Finishing Line Press in July, 2021. This Kind of Man, his first collection of short fiction, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and served as writer-in-residence of the Noepe Center at Martha's Vineyard. He’s Founding Director of 1455, a non-profit literary organization (www.1455litarts.org). To learn more, and read his published short fiction, poetry, and criticism, please visit seanmurphy.net/ and @bullmurph.