All my friends were dead.

As we watched the rain through the windows of that old truck, driving the rocky gravel lanes, passing the bottle, stolen, and swiping drags from the snuffed out butt's in the tray, we often didn't speak to one another.

Old country: Cash, Jennings, Nelson, cried from the rusty speakers of that old Chevy and neither dared to change the station. We didn't really like the sound of the music that was playing, but we both understood what those old boys were preachin',

A twisting cloud of death would eventually destroy an old corn bin and toss tractors, trailers, children into neighboring counties. And for some reason, we still drove to our spot of silence.

That old lot, surrounded by the Elm and the Oak was gated off by the slow mumbling of the Aux Able Creek, where the dead of our community rested for years, decades, centuries, was our spot of comfort.

We'd sit, under the storm, with the dead, trying to depict their short stories that were engraved in the cement slabs at their heads and pretend that we actually knew how it really went down.

Hours atop hours, they'd stack like empty wooden crates on the docks, with the two of us talking with the dead, but never each other, sharing the pint and trying to find a way, the way, to not end up in a spot like the one that we sat at.

With lightning crashing into the tree's and thunder echoing screams between
John C. Jones/Christopher R. Kelly/Suzanne L. Bolze, we were soothed.

The old black cat, with only one eye, the left, would scamper out from behind the tomb house that held more of the dead just to see where the voices were coming from.

Headlights from Interstate 80 and Route 6 found their way in from time to time, bending around fence posts and through the trees. Nobody ever found us there. And they never will.

Perhaps that is why we went there anyway. So that we can both be alone with our minds, the forgotten dreams of the dead and the lost memories of love.

We did this every time it stormed. We did it to cleanse ourselves. And our minds.
But most importantly...

to leave it all behind with the dead that we called our friends...

where it belonged.