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Appending The Past

by Sebastian Michaels
Chapter 1
Tonight, dear traveler of the late hour,
we begin with a whisper under carnival lights.
A whisper that should have stayed buried,
but has a habit of clawing upward.

They said the object rested beneath the fairgrounds,
wrapped in wax paper that stuck like old skin,
bound with chain that rusted on the air.
A ledger of sorts,
smelling of gasoline,
rain,
and something older than both.

When the first shovel struck dirt,
the ground gave a cough of radio static,
as if some forgotten station
had been waiting for a listener.
A hymn crawled upward,
not sung in any language
you or I could name.

Our witness described a figure in the floodlight,
a worker with hands darkened by axle grease,
leaning close to each stained page
as if the ink itself were speaking.
Voices rose from the smears,
voices without eyes or shape,
yet they knew every name
the worker had ever tried to forget.

Highway dust drifted through the open ledger,
twisting the words like tumbleweeds
rolling through heat haze,
sentences spinning away
before the mind could claim them.

And above all this,
the neon sky thickened like storm water,
swaying like a river drunk on light,
washing color from motel signs
that had never gone dark before.

By the time the last page turned,
something else had begun to speak.
A wire split with age,
a voice salted and dry,
like jerky in a glovebox left too long.
It spoke in fragments,
half instruction,
half curse,
wholly determined
to be heard.

So sit back, listener,
if you dare.
For tonight’s tale begins
where the lights flicker slow,
and the fairgrounds breathe,
and the ground remembers
what we try to forget.