A place called lonesome. - A story about Connie Converse by Ryan Cameron

3:30 in the afternoon on the first day of February. A pale sun clings lazily to icicles hanging from storefronts. Downtown Concord is quiet, businesses closed, people home with visible heat and smoke vibrating from chimneys. Connie walks in a brisk, consistent tempo. 

It was going to be dark soon but that did not bother Connie. She would walk for as long as she pleased, the bitter cold be damned. She turns and walks to one of the off-shoot streets from the downtown drag. Connie felt safe enough to indulge in a cigarette, the hot tobacco smoke and frigid air in her lungs were exhilarating. 

The engine in her mind roared to life. Her heart pushes play on the recent pleasures, lit by the light orange gauze of each street light she passed. When she finds a bench on the edge of the downtown area, she sits and thinks once again about her friend Flint. 

Frannie Flint is Connie’s closest friend and it was in Flint that Connie felt the full promise of actual living that the secular world may offer. When Flint talked, Connie felt the sweat swathed psalms of her father and their congregation wash away. Felt the false barrier of guilt breakdown with a terrific relief as Connie became enthralled with talk of literature, art, political theory. Connie felt all of the limitations expected of her dilute away in the flask of bourbon they shared between them. 

Flint says she can read Connie’s mind. Says she can feel her deepest impulses beneath her surface. Connie, often steadfast and reserved, allows herself the luxury of feeling brittle around Flint. They discuss the limits of liberalism and the constraints of conservatism. They talk about the world outside of Concord, New Hampshire. A world of lovers and skyscrapers, of bars, boutiques, and bibles with the words heaven and hell scratched out. 

They talk about injustice, of money, of hiding certain books shared between them in covers fashioned out of paper bags. Flint writes poetry to Connie on the inside of these paper bags. Connie returns the favor. Flint likes to write to Connie about the virtue of disappearing. Speculates the difference between here and somewhere else. Someplace unreachable,where you enter like you exit, naked and new. 

In a few years Flint will disappear and then reappear. When they find her she will be a corpse, naked and new. They will ponder words like murder, they will ponder words like suicide. Connie will resign to the faith that Flint just simply disappeared, and in dreams will come to Connie, naked and new. 

Connie looks up from her cold iron bench to see the stars spread out like grains scattered now across the indigo evening. Connie’s breath exhumed steam that clouded around her head. With her eyes closed, she could picture herself as a mountain, shouldering up along White Mountain ranges. In her valleys she could tend to a place called lonesome. The clover saloons filled with pink salmon patrons. Sad and lonely men of the sky would float down, riding on horses past Connie on their hunt for potential darlings. Cold hands conduct clouds, the clouds striped with the faint lines of cigarette paper, they are staff notes and red inked edits.

Connie lets herself go, she is floating above Concord. Bubbling past the golden dome of the capitol building. She can see interstate 93 shriveled tight like an aged artery. Connie sees the woods ahead. She sees Flint, gunshot and turning the color of ice. Around her body ash groves where the strangest of vines grow fruitless. In the soil she can see the lilies start to bloom. Swirling around are lilies, how wonderful, Connie thinks. She is starting to be led home, stricken with the sadness of constraint. 

How sad, how lovely this world has become as its troubles continue to turn it upside down. Connie will write and scrutinize these troubles, though writing is a solitary act. It takes time and the kindness of strangers to commune with words. Connie considers the lilies, how they toil and never bloom. She thinks of singing in the church this morning. Maybe if she could sing through the troubles, another soul could listen.