NON-COMPOS MENTIS

It's crazy to live like this.

We agreed.

And angry, still we are here.

The tears are acidic and evident through the diminishing skin. Leakage is unceasing for no reason other than I have never cried for us in honest and genteel ways. That's as close as I can get to the truth. It could be that it's been buried too deep, this cistern of salt and reminiscences—that could be it. I am rummaging through old bones, the dark, thick fossilized remains of a million days.

Find oil, old man. Find it. Release your accumulated crude. Is that the mission? To strike at the heart of it.

I become a wildcatter broiling under a neck-scorching sun, brow running wet, my hat bleached white, the perspiration a puddle at my feet. I sink a hole and come up dry. I sink another. Dry, too. Another and another and another. I've pock-marked myself end to end, and then, a brown slurry belches through the fractured soil, then a bit more, rumbling, and the lizards scamper, and then I blow, spew, and splatter. I am a raging storm of black rain on a dim day—the clouds are gauze, an endless backdrop, catching this blood bath. And then, just like that, a geyser is reduced to a trickle, and I am closed up, receding deeper than before, and the lizards scrape their bellies across the scarred, hostile, and arid ground.

Dry again, I am.

So, I will sharpen my bit and drill anew. Another day.

Agitated because I thought we had this all worked out.

We agreed no one would be left alone.