The Shattered Prayer

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The DEA had visited that day. Rock showed the agents around all hundred acres of the farm. There wasn’t a marijuana plant in site. But there were cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, beans and peas, all organically grown. Rock sent the agents home with a basket full of fresh vegetables.

That night, I sat eating ox-tails off of a frisbee, listening to some hippie play the guitar. Beth stared at me with glassy eyes, “you know” she said, “when you smoke pot, your aura turns white.”

“No”, I answered, “when YOU smoke pot my aura turns white.”

The next day, Debbie and I went for a walk in the woods. We were always traipsing through some forest or other. I found a pair of sunglasses on the ground. They were enormous, and ugly, with thick zebra-striped frames.

“Maybe they’re mystical”, Debbie said.

“I think you’re right”, I put them on and the world looked different, “they allow us to see hidden magic.”

Closing time at the Krispy Creme found us out by the dumpster. The do-nuts were still reasonably fresh. And Debbie found an old Fortean Times magazine. I could see through the magical sunglasses that this was no ordinary magazine, “Its a roadmap”, I said, “to the otherworld”.

“How handy”, Debbie tucked it into her bag.

Armed with a pair of magical sunglasses, and an otherworldly roadmap, how could our summer be anything but wondrous? Three months spent in an altered state of consciousness, nothing seemed ordinary. And even the heat of the season was transformed from unbearable furnace to a sweat-lodge trance.

The roadmap took us to strange, out of the way places, and the sunglasses enabled us to see enchanted items. That summer my pockets were full of pebbles, twigs, leaves, feathers, bits of cord, beads and other trinkets that - when viewed through the sunglasses - were revealed as something special.

One day a hummingbird flew into my window and died. In the sadness, there was magic. The tail-feathers were wishes, so I kept them.

“I wish I had some money”, and before the week ended, the IRS sent me a check. I’d overpaid them several years before and they were refunding the overpayment. With interest.

Has this ever happened in the history of the IRS?

“I sure could use a bottle of tequila and a bag of weed.” A knock at my door, and there’s Wendy with a bottle of tequila. Not long after, Debbie shows up up with… you guessed it.

Then the first crisp hint of autumn sent Debbie trudging back to her teaching job. We tried, on the weekends, to revive the magic but magic never adapts to anyone’s schedule. It will be, or it won’t. Our wanderings were fewer and farther between. The wishes drifted away one by one, and a crack etched its way across the lens of the sunglasses.

One Sunday afternoon found us hiking through a deep forest in a thunderstorm. The winds were so brutal the pines were bending to impossible angles. Breaking. What we didn’t know at the time was that tornadoes were touching down all around us. By the time we’d made it back to our car, the tornadoes had given way to a torrential downpour. Unable to see three feet in front of us, we crept at a snail’s pace back toward town. I tried to salvage the roadmap, but it dissolved into pulp.

“We don’t need the roadmap anymore” Debbie said, and pulled the car over to the side of the road.

“Why not?”

“Because we’re already here.”

And we stepped out of the car, and stood in the relentless rain.

Buy me a beer!

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