He told me a story about when he was a child in Missouri, when farmers in his town began keeping bison.
“Do you know how high bison can jump?” he asked me. I shook my head. “Neither did they,” he answered, explaining how the ranchers had rounded the bison up, not expecting them to spill out of the open-topped trailer like a waterfall. He was still sleeping when he felt the thunder of the stampede, the plastic dinosaurs falling off the shelf above his bed.
“Wow, why didn’t they try to stop them?” I asked him.
“You can’t stop a stampede,” he told me. “You just have to let them run until they get tired.”
I imagined him haunted by this notion that nothing could be done to keep them from running. He must have thought about it when his wife left him, taking his children with her. I thought about it when we made love, his hands roaming my body with an absent-minded lust.
You have to let them run until they get tired. They will not stay with homemade chili or impromptu sex in the bar bathroom.
So this is what it feels like when they leave.
Kelly Scott
kellym.scott@yahoo.com
Normal People Don't Live Like This
Dylan Landis