He came from the mud, formed of substances soft and hard, cold and warm, moldable and impenetrable. From within a hollow in the dirt came the bleating of labored breathing and a face hidden by earth and blood. With eyes whose color and intensity were a visage of his home, he looked up, away from the carrion and chemicals that dragged on towards nothing. Untouched hands searched for pale roots of trees in the dark and followed them up from the bottom of existence. Emerging into a sanitized room of steel and whiteness, he could see no sunlight, only the light from fluorescent tubing, flaring intensely and shimmering like broken glass across linoleum flooring. A voice blared out high and pained, testing the permits of a cage, as eyes searched the walls vainly for green and blue and other colors of the earth and sky. He found none, and no warming face or blanket could ease his screaming.

And dirt was bathed from his skin and he was told than he was more than mud. But, it was in tiny, plastic-infected forests off the freeway and in the valleys of eroded mountains where his body and mind were built. As a child, in a world of metal and disillusionment and at the sacrifice of all other endeavors, he sought to make mud, the former and taker of all things, his alter and his god.
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The highway was rough and gray and it rounded off into the green of the mountains. He felt cold northern air and the sun’s warmth on his cheeks. In endless linear paths above and below him lay rambling and darkened sky, and asphalt, made uneven and spiked by the trompings of metal caravans carrying extracting equipment into the hills. But, slow, sweet sounds from his stereo escaped out the windows and drifted over the landscape. It drifted through damp earth, housing flowing fields of yellow grasses, and through young forests thick with underbrush. It snuck underneath slick branches that hung over either side of the road to rub together gently and release water droplets in small spurts onto his truck. It drifted through his body, too, and turned his mind to fantasies unusually optimistic and romantic. He believed that the wind was a hard gust away from carrying him goosebumped and freezing for miles, deep into a new town full of fresh faces and haunts.

Ahead, the mechanical noise of traffic violated the short moment of serenity. A truck carrying piping for a natural gas company’s new lines had flipped and torn through the guardrail and into the woods. Trees were cut down at their knees and ground was overturned and covered in scraps of metal. Hulks of beige cylinders struck out of the ground in strange symmetry to each other. In their peculiar arraignment, they resembled a terrifying piece of modern art by some twisted sculptor. The scene, ripe with an ancient sort of jagged and meaningless chaos, inexplicably encapsulated the now so vividly that the sculptor might as well have been God and the mess of concrete and mud, all other things. A couple of faceless young policemen had the road shut off and were directing traffic, while gas workers clad in hard hats worked on their machines. The mud that covered the pipes and burst forth with the movement of machinery looked like blood flowing from the earth. He shut the music off.

He decided to turn around and travel into the city. At the Sheetz near the river he would buy cigarettes and Red Bull to smoke and sip as he drove through degraded streets lined with clusters of sunbaked and musty homes. Near the park he would stop to loiter like any other young asshole and fancy himself some sort of northern, Faulknerian outcast or a wannabe, sordid, rural hipster.

Time passed and driving slipped into a soulless chore. Eventually, he came upon the central bridge over the river, separating sprawled rural mess from its close urban cousin.
The bridge had been washed away before, and after constant reconstruction it had finally been brought to a point of mild functionality. Now, several lanes wide and hundred yards long, it sloped up high and confidently, even as its castings rusted away below. Not much more could be said for the river. Other than a particularly wide girth and gritty consistency there was nothing about it that stood out among the countless other sleepy eastern waterways that, swelled and brown, wind their way through rundown farms and factories, accumulating contaminants and washing away earth.

The water was high from recent rains and it traveled fast alongside the truck. Staring at it with eyes that matched the water, he lost himself in the familiar eddies and holes and strange, but, assured movements of water. He felt that the river was tied so closely to his soul that its flow might as well enter his through his mouth and twist around his heart like an artery before continuing on its course. In muddled water he saw a coherent map of both himself and the world distinctly reflected. He saw its incessant rising to greatness and falling to the mundane, like bursts of emotion and thought. He saw it, with the changing of the seasons, grow ferocious in an attempt to dramatically unchain itself from the long established path that the random crashing of the world had stuck it in, and he saw it always failing, returning to a stagnant trickle. He saw that the river was only the product of millions of pounds of pressure unknowingly pushing, down, down, down, and it was a pressure so consuming that nothing could fight against its current or change its path. The river flowed on thoughtlessly, its only purpose, lifeless continuation and marking the passage of identical centuries with layers of sediment on its bank.

He was in the right lane and was thinking this and it made him feel claustrophobic and nervous and the sun was glaring through his windshield as the semi truck beside him swerved into his lane. He turned and saw in giant, joyful lettering the logo of some soda company and somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind he thought “oh s***,” and he leaned on the horn let it blare out. The rig rammed into his side and his truck collapsed from all directions and the squealing of automobile against guardrail was blaring in his left ear and then the sound stopped and he was locked against the seat and weightless.

His head was jarred. As his eyes unfogged he noticed the redness of blood against his cracked window. The truck was moving slightly down river and sinking slowly and his feet were browned and wet from the water and the top of his head was bloodied from the crash. He tried to reach his left hand up to touch his wound, but it felt spongy and faraway, so he grabbed his left arm with his right and stuck it on the top of his head. It slipped stiffly from its perch. He didn’t feel like moving anymore.

“Well. I didn’t see that coming,” he said, and then he stopped talking. He looked back down at his ravaged arm and his failed body and then turned his gaze to his coffin. It was dark and sleek and smelled of air fresheners and smoke. The smell made him nauseous and he spit warm blood on the passenger seat. Originally he had found an old truck, rusted and redder than blood. Its wheels stood high and it smelled of dirt and wood and wet seat upholstery. He loved it and the way it bounced when it turned or sped up. He tried looking at the world differently and he pictured himself ridding the highway in the dark, with the night and music and a beautiful combination of youthful sadness and hopefulness that he was trying to see in himself. Then he came into some illdeserved money, something he wasn’t used to having and he sure as hell didn’t want to use, and was pushed into a more expensive and sensible purchase. If he had a choice, he would have died in the other car, or, more preferably, not at all. But, there was no choice, only a downward surge of alternating intensities.

Water at his knees and somewhere he could hear geese, returning north. Their blares mixed with the neverending roar of freeway traffic. Still he didn’t move, but sat back, dazed, and thought. He could see the report on the evening news: “Teen killed in collision with tractor trailer on Highway 81. And now in sports…” In the morning, when folks opened up their daily papers, they said "what a shame," and asked their children "did you know him" and they mostly responded "I think so." Outside of some dank parlor his entire class lined up, fidgeting with their phones, and waiting to glance with a grimace at an unfamiliar figure contorted into a more peaceful and contented position than he ever took in life. He knew that this was how it would be. It would be just like last winter, when a poor bastard from his grade skidded on black ice on his way home from work and crashed into a tree. He recalled the delicate way everyone avoided the inconsolable family at the funeral, and he knew the scene would be equally horrible at his. The thought of people he cared about filled him with dread, and he tried to avoid any more thought of them, telling himself that it’s easier to die cold, another bleeding fish in the river, rather than sad and broken and human. At the same time he came to the realization that this fear of pain and resulting avoidance of connection had haunted him his whole life and turned him into a coward, controlled by loss. Now he was about to be another corpse and sad story, another fifteen minute school assembly in the fall and moment of silence. Now he was about to disappear, leaving only mostly empty footprints in the mud.

And then in his stilted fear his mind turned to an earlier encounter at the filling station, down the crumbling road from his house. He had awoken alone and late, having missed the sunset and with unobstructed light burning in through his window blinds. A headache and buzzing florescent lights drove him outside, where he stood in the drying grass, feeling nauseous. It rained the previous night and would again later in the day, so, the fresh and damp scent of dirt mixed with the humidity. When he was young he loved the smell of wet earth, deeply, and when he dreamt, and his dreams weren’t nightmares, he dreamt of swimming in it and lying deep within its cooling wells. Bored and aimless, he jumped into his truck and soon stopped to get gas at a dinky station, dwarfed by tall pines and cascading mountains. The station and the plastic-looking canopy that covered its two pumps were painted a fading red. At the pump opposite of him a blue sedan pulled up and a girl he remembered from elementary school stepped out. Clouds were just coming in and it was windy and the wind blew her hair into a tangled mess. When they saw each other, there was a recollection on both sides of a moment, long ago, when they were children overwhelmed with feelings of desperation and fear and empathy, feelings that they still struggled to comprehend.

One morning, a decade past, a longsuffered illness stole her mother’s last breath and everyone in his little school knew before they were let out in the afternoon. When the girl; returned, people avoided her and her unspoken grief like a contagion. The two had never talked; in those days, she talked to noone and he, anxiety ridden and restless, felt that no time should be wasted on those not in constant motion. But, the awfulness of her situation welled up inside him till in felt like lead in his gut and he resolved to talk to her. Realizing his limitations on the understanding of such intense grief, he did not plan on talking to her about anything serious; he only wanted her to know that she was not being ignored. Uncomfortable, he walked up to her to talk, but, found himself unable to speak. From the pained look in his eyes, though, she saw that he wanted to. Now, her face looked older and more lived in, each expression wholly felt. She said “hi” and leaned against her car and talked. She asked him about what he’d been doing and planned on doing and he responded in “no’s” and “not much’s.” She asked him if he knew what he wanted to do when he got out of school and he said, “No. But, I hope it’ll be something” and he gave an awkward part smile, part grimace, returned the nozzle, and nodded and said “see ya.”

And the water was up to his waist and rising and his breathing turned fast and erratic as his chest was cut up by his seat belt and his blood dripped from his body into the river and mixed with tainted muddy water. He didn’t want to sink back into the mud, crushed inside his pickup, quietly and lifelessly, his arms too tired to pull upward. His eyes looked to the sky and he held his left hand in his right and smacked them both against his windshield, yelling out. His knuckles broke and bleed and smeared on the windshield and fell and blinded his eyes. A hole scattered through and he felt for a moment the wind against his cheeks. Sunlight reflecting off the broken glass glared in his eyes. And then the muddy water was at his chin and it poured in from the hole and he breathed in mud like a drowning man might oxygen, in great gulps, and then he was swallowed up into a vastness that pulled him back down.

And the paramedics and fireman arrived quickly, and the divers dragged his body back up from the water and laid it in the muddy river bed for the sun to dry. In a hushed, someone asked, “do you hear him breathing,” and a solemn speaker returned, “No.” And in the summer, the river water cleared and the grass grew and burned over his grave and the graves of the other fresh-faced, unfortunate youths.