Sorry! Zine’s April Writing Contest Third Place Winner

Prose by Madelina Rosales.

Be God. Step way back for a second. Imagine this folded earth as bed sheets dropped in heaps onto the floor. Now stick a steep winter light off to the east. Call this a landscape. Tall shadows form across the peaks and troughs. Look closer— hard mineral waters flow across rocks and roots, through duff and brambles. Watch all the forks of the rivers, sloughs, and creeks empty in the bay, and the bay into the ocean whose gray voice all things must answer to. Line the coastline with sandstone, orange clay that breaks shovel handles, gnarled shore pines. At the back of it all, thousands upon thousands of Douglas firs moan in the wind. Let the fog burn off in the morning. Add all the shadows to the trees. Let moss choke the north side of all things. Fill it with Indians, deer, and elk. Bear and salmon. Kill most of them. Call the landscape the southern Oregon coast and watch the industrialists stride forth across the earth. Come rail trestles and tunnels. Come mills and shipyards. Mine coal, fill in the marshes, dredge shipping channels, chase the steelhead upriver. Listen to the rain and sand divide and multiply in the moving parts of everything here. Reduction gears, shoulder sockets, steam donkeys. Call this The World’s Largest Lumber Port then strip the land so bare of trees that gunshots can be heard from one end of the county to the other. Watch the waterfront close down one mill at a time. Suspend the rail service. Cook some crystal. Tumble agates until they shine like salamander eyes and try selling them at the gun and gem show. Breed dogs. Sell puppies from a laundry basket near the cart return in the K-Mart parking lot. Where folks had bent to the toil of their industry, now stand patches of long, tough grass pushing through cement footprints that once shouldered buildings the size of trans-Pacific container ships. The docks sag under their own weight like a team of swayback horses on the edge of some dream the town is having about itself. The pilings bow their heads and slip into the waters like harbor seals. Water tables rise and fall through the almanacs. We get blood moons and snow moons and black moons, and everyone knows the best place to see them. Build a mile-long steel bridge over the bay. Connect the North Spit to the North Bend. Paint it green. Admire its Gothic arches rising from the bedrock beneath the water. Admire its beauty comparable to the twisting pines we capsized to build its steady arms. God doesn’t even need to look through someone’s living room window at night to fuel His particular brand of separation from the world. He doesn’t need an excuse to wander off with a shotgun and no clothes on. He shrinks and hops right into someone’s blood and swims to the spawning waters of the human heart and starts a little fire in one of the rooms there, stomps His foot and rocks in place like a mad banjo player hitting the high-lonesome.