by GARY DUEHR

You look down. There’s a small spot of blood, unmistakable, a crimson stain the size of a quarter on the front of your shirt. It’s sinking into the weave of the black-and-white plaid.

You have no idea where it came from. The stain is fresh, still damp. You touch a finger to it and bring it to your lips. The taste is metallic, like rusty iron. You examine your forearms, their hairy expanse, feel around the bumpy geography of your face. Nothing, no scrapes, no oozing indentations.

Instinctively, you look up. You’re on a train. Overhead, your carry-on appears intact, no suspicious drips. The nozzle in the ceiling sprays chilly air.

Outside the outskirts of some town in Ohio rushes past, self-storage and superstores and used car lots. A parade of mundanity.

You wonder if some hurt squirrel or possum has stowed itself on board and clambered up onto the luggage rack to bleed down onto you. You listen for the clatter of claws, a plaintive squeal. Nothing.

You remember watching “Man Vs. Beast” on Animal Planet. How bison weigh up to two-thousand pounds and can run thirty-five miles per hour, faster than an Olympian sprinter. How there are wild pigs in New Mexico that have fatally bitten hikers. You worry how dangerous the world is, how easy it is to slip into a canal in Florida and have an alligator’s jaw clamp onto your thigh. On the six o’clock news, the alligator victim in a hospital bed said simply, “So that’s how that feels.”

What if you have dozed off on the train, and, while it’s stopped at a station, a bird of prey, a vulture or raven, flew in through the open door and delivered a surgical puncture? Or what if another passenger pierced you with a sharpened umbrella like the KGB assassination on a London street?

You survey the train car. A bald guy asleep with his soft hands curled up on his tray. A lady smoothing back her thick black hair while she checks her texts. Two college girls chattering away head-to-head. No obvious candidates.

The train jolts around a bend.

The blood stain has begun to spread. It’s ragged on the right side like the state of Missouri. You slide your fingers between the buttons and feel around the bristly flesh. If there’s an incision, it has somehow sealed itself up.

You’re on the train back home to Chicago to bury your mother’s remains. Your sister Pam has shipped the ashes north from Texas, where your mother passed ten days ago while watching Jeopardy, leaning on Pam’s shoulder. She made it to ninety-three and managed to avoid a nursing home. But nothing could save her, eventually, as she lost her short-term memory and lived smilingly in the present, with Pam reminding her when to get up, have a bowl of Grape-Nuts, swallow her handful of pills, take her turn in Scrabble, go to bed. Her heart muscle just stopped; it had had enough.

You couldn’t save her. You can’t save yourself. You’re an orphan now. The world is a frightening place, and buffalo can outrun the fastest human.

Ω

Based in Boston, Gary Duehr has an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. In 2001, he received an NEA Fellowship, and he has also received grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the LEF Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. His books include Point Blank (In Case of Emergency), Winter Light (Four Way Books), and Where Everyone Is Going To (St. Andrews College Press).

Reporter, visual artist, and photographer Guilherme Bergamini is Brazilian and graduated with a degree in Journalism. For more than two decades, he has developed projects with photography and the various narrative possibilities that art offers. The works of the artist dialogue between memory and social political criticism. He believes in photography as the aesthetic potential and transforming agent of society. Awarded in national and international competitions, he has participated in collective exhibitions in fifty-three countries.