TRAUERSPIEL (MOURNING PLAY)
Fallout snow clouds smothered the city and blacked out
whichever light was supposed to be out at that hour.
My watch stopped working some three sleeps ago and the
days before that left unanswered questions to shock my
body into a walking supernova of anxiety. My eyes
darted around continuously, looking for any movement
and my body wouldn’t let me sit, so I kept moving and
searching.
The cavities of once tall corporations littered the
city like large cigarette burns and left miles of
nothing as horizon. Roads had been erased and parks
made imperceptible as landmarks. Days (or weeks) in, I
found where the earth started sloping down in rocky,
uneven terraces. I walked the edge for hours, counting
steps and doing the math of feet to miles. I paced my
steps and counted seconds in order to recreate time
and to occupy myself.
I had seen no one yet. If anyone made it, I imagined
how we would react to each other. How much shock and
tension can the body take before acting of its own
accord? At step 3,280 (just over 16 football field
lengths in approximately 53 minutes and 36 seconds), I
paused. I looked to the left of the outer ring towards
the epicenter and then to the right where I assumed
safety to be.
I about-faced and walked, feeling the ground crunch
beneath my feet and stopped counting steps so I could
pretend the cottony gray tufts were simply the product
of an unusually warm winter. I caught myself several
times trying to catch them on my tongue and nearly
retched. I could feel my thirst and shirt disintegrate
as I ran down the sloping earth. I pushed my body
harder as I felt flakes, and then chunks, of skin peel
away until I was simply the bone structure of a ghost
haunting an old home.
Adam “Bucho” Rodenberger has been writing for 14
years and has dj-ed across the Midwest for half of that
time. A double-major in English (Creative Writing) and
Philosophy at the University of Missouri – Kansas
City, he will be graduating in May and heading off to
graduate school in the Summer of ’08 to pursue his
M.F.A. in Creative Writing.
Taking the cue to ‘make it new,’ he is always trying
to flip common words and phrasing into something more
interesting and lyrical to read while dabbling in the
abstract and colorful. As of October of 2007, he has
been published in Number One Magazine (a UMKC
student-run literary magazine which he is now the
Editor-In-Chief of during the 2007-2008 school year)
and has won the Monthly Writer’s Choice Award for
Poetry (October) on www.editred.com, along with being
published in the first issue of Alors, Et Tois?, Agua
Magazine, and The Red Pulp Underground.
