‘HELL IS REAL’
H. Lee Messina is an east coast native, self-taught artist, and owner of The Dutch Spork. The bulk of her creative work includes mixed media collage and digital paintings utilizing magazine clippings and a simple drawing table. You can view more of her work here: dutchspork.com
HELL IS REAL
It is a twilit afternoon on the treadmill of Interstate 71 South in Ohio. ‘HELL IS REAL’ the farmer’s home-made billboard admonishes. I scoff, habitually, but soon I realize that neither the place I left nor my destination are places I really want to be, although precise locations (my parents’ house? My own home? An offsite work location?) resist focus. There may be some small truth to the sign. Traffic around me jockeys for position, perpetually attempting to be in the lane that makes the fields and copses flow past faster. I develop fleeting intense relationships with vehicles- profound gratitude, world-burning rage, weary solidarity. Occasionally we slow abruptly, the ghost of an accident several hours gone lingering to inflict its ire on drivers for a little longer before the heavy traffic evaporates and our pace resets.
Short eons after passing the billboard, we stop completely. Corn resolves into stalks. A hawk on a fencepost glances blandly at me then away, disappointed that I am not a mouse. There is a disturbance ahead, but what it is I cannot initially see, hemmed in on this berm of concrete in the flat plain. I look to drivers around me for clues, but they either stare at phones or look right through me. Shortly a figure approaches tumbling through the parked traffic. He is a giant of a man, wearing a tawny cloak with a large furry hood, pausing at each vehicle to peer into the windows, so tall he barely has to stretch to see into the cabs of the semis. He’s carrying a club over one shoulder, occasionally thumping it on hoods or roofs with enough force to leave a dent. He careens off an SUV in front of me, my eyes telling me the vehicle slid as he hit it, but my brain refusing to accept it. The man trips on his sandal and catches himself on the top of my window frame with one hand. I can see now that he is wearing a lion pelt as a cloak, his head protruding from between its jaws like a carnival act gone wrong. He bends down to look in at me. I roll my window down, certain that he could break it with just a little more pressure.
“Alcestis?”
His breath is like chugging a liter of wine, oily and plum. I shake my head.
“Alcestis?” he asks again, craning around me to peer into the back seat.
“Where the hell is she?” he asks, the words so slurred I can barely make them out. He pauses, his rugged face screwed into a quizzical expression within his lion-headed cloak that reads “confused prey’s final thoughts” more than “alcohol-blunted realization.”
“Hah. Hah. Ahahaha!” He stutters into a long peal of laughter and smacks the top of my car. I hear the shocks protest. The car bobs until he leans on the frame again to address me.
“Hell- get it? Gods! That is some good wine Admetus serves! He deserves her back just for that.” He belches, and I realize that my understanding has lagged his speech by a fraction of a second, the language not (just) slurred but lilting and vowel-rich, incomprehensible but somehow assembling itself into English in my mind.
Not waiting for my reaction, he levers himself upright with his club, his head disappearing again over the roof of my car, and he staggers away, swiping the car next to me with his club. The driver startles and looks around, questioning. I blink once, emphatically, but she doesn’t acknowledge me.
In my mirrors I watch the giant continue his drunken search, the billboard occasionally flickering into view as my eyes saccade. I wonder if Alcestis is back there. I wonder if he’ll find her. I hope he doesn’t. Lights wink ahead of me as the lion’s head diminishes into the perspective point between the lanes of traffic. We roll forward slowly, jerkily, then abruptly we are accelerating to the blurred everlasting statis of the highway.
Patrick M. Hare’s works have appeared in Gordon Square Review, Bookends Review, The Metaworker, Vestal Review, and Photochemistry and Photobiology. They are mostly good words and only a few are made up. He lives near Cincinnati, OH, USA but can be found online at pmhare.wordpress.com.
