Forgotten Ground Regained

Automobile Fences

The mist remade all the motley lightsof the night cruisers in their ninety carsto so many shattered disco stars.Pile ups don’t happen overnight,but they did then. The dark fogrendering every little rider —from fender bender to fractured soulto mangled mother and mutilated trucker —to a true disaster: ain’t no starsfixed anymore. So he foolishly lefthis car to seek shelter. Might have been clipped.
He jogged through the magic of apparated junkyarddodging the still oncoming “drivers”until he came to the guardrail’s coldfolded steel, feeling its curveswith bloody knees. Normally folksfind themselves crushed between fencerowand hood ornament, harrowed by grill.
He saw the fog and started to climbbut providence — or proffer the termyou use for the transcendent — yearned him other:he waited, still. The fog witheredand on the other side of the guard openedthe maw of the abyss. He pocked his mouth,koi out of the graveyard’s old koi pond.
A man once said, “If you stumble on a fence and want to move it, walk awayand think for a while. If you can wonder and tellme why it was made, what it was for,I will consent to you sundering its trusses,barbed wire and welded studs.”
We Americans love moving guardrailsin the fog and pileups of our freezing night.
In Forgotten Ground Regained, Issue 9, Winter 2026 Psalms and Meditations
Copyright © Lancelot Schaubert, 2025
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