Hyser Road Junkyard

Matt Hohner

Carroll County, MD

Sprawling for a quarter mile near Big Pipe Creek, taken back by the woods at the intersection where Hope ends at History, these cars died when a gallon of gas was less than a dollar, bread and coffee each cost a nickel and seatbelts were decorations. Six teenagers could fit in a trunk entering a drive-in. In these empty metal spaces dissolving into time, young men and women learned each other’s bodies to the FM radio late at night, the way desire cloaks itself in love, the exact moment condensation runs down glass on a winter night. Bodies lived inside these bodies, flesh encased in steel and chrome, riding on rubber down macadam streets in town, across fields to tend fences, down gravel side roads, sneaking home. In these rusting hulks, whispers broke open at dawn like pupae spawning promises that vanished in the rearview, like ballads through gapped windows. The future was a thing they could make, a bendy world no match for the muscled arms, grit, and sweat-soaked great-grandsons and granddaughters of homesteaders’ grandchildren. They milked cows, cured pork, cut hillsides undulating with wheat, corn, rye. Families went to church in these husks, argued, wrapped themselves around telephone poles on icy, foggy, or drunken nights.

If only they could have foreseen the corrosion and stagnation, the decay of effort and aspiration in these hollow carcasses, dented fenders and hoods, cracked engine blocks and frames bent like beer cans, memories and half-buried secrets releasing their molecules to hungry roots spreading underneath dry-rotted chassis where fat oaks jut through windshields into the cold daylight. Black shadows circle and turn overhead silent scavengers, searching for roadkill.