fun in the sun by matt knutson
after Annie Proulx
Mr. Eddy Lee driving alone from the miseries of Wisconsin, sheltering from hailstones in the plains’ electric air and crossing a single-lane tract of wooden planks laid across sand dunes tall as ocean waves in the California desert; with him comes adventure novels, paintings in-progress, a collection of handspun mugs adorned with sunwheels, a single modest bathing suit; his wheeze subsiding in the bright day, each rasp banishing a darkness to skitter among the ancient granite, and him remembering those moss-fringed turnpike billboards: come to life again amid the deep, glad feeling of home. Mr. Lee standing mute in his kitchen in the shadow of the city of San Diego, the coffee he’s holding long gone cold, one ankle wrapped in a women's boot and the other naked, his wrist edging into the shaft of winter sun issuing from a single window.
One night he watches the lights from Tijuana fifteen miles distant arcing across the ocean but he cannot sense what happens there; the couples have cleared out since the sun’s setting and Mr. Lee takes tenuous steps along the cliff while waves shuffle below, the constellations aswim with another coughing spell. Across the water it could be a city on the moon and him alone somewhere in space, but he has not painted in months and cannot imagine the scene being right: somewhere beyond the horizon his country extends further still to the tiniest atolls of a Pacific vastness, which is no desert he can cross; in Wisconsin that stern house in the woods held nothing he could have or want but here there is nothing at all except the sun’s empty glare and come its rise the following day they find him wrapped around a rib of sandstone at the cliff’s base stoically and silently greeting the day, cold hand bobbing with the tide.
Go west you dreamers and find your fortune.
Matt Knutson is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop. He's been a resident at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and his work has appeared in Cola Literary Review, Expat Press, Bat City Review and elsewhere. His manuscript "Quiet Homes in the Hills" was a semi-finalist for Iron Horse Literary Review's Chapbook Contest, and his story "Stormin’ Norman’s Ferry" won Midsummer Dream House’s Fall Fiction Contest. Originally from San Diego, he now lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and cat. Find him at mattknutson.net and @mattknuts.
