Leyla Guirand

21 Terry Drive

Mastic, NY 11950

l.a.guirand@gmail.com

Toll Booth

Leyla Guirand

I cross the bridge at the point where the river runs rusty. Brume cloaks the village-houses.

A school of viscid, serpent-like fish swim near the surface.

The fog conceals the extent of the terminus; branches focalize in a barbed crown upon me. Ambulating more into obscurity, sideshows carry on in the kermis sky.

I have been wayward on this bridge prior, relying on the likely chance of capturing divinity in the underwood. His counsel amid the chaos was that, while the act of submission is sure to curry favor,

what it requires is everything needed to distinguish.

There is a phantom man in a boundless toll booth—vacant, hoary—

whom is omnipresent. With all that said, he is far past approach. As I draw nearer, he inexorably recedes.

The decaying planks look as if they disintegrate beneath my feet; the ligneous posts may be concurring.

Ere long, it shall come slumping earthward; the bridge cannot abundantly afford me, but oddly I am immune from the precariousness.

Despite the pandemonium, the aspiration to overtake the lambent toll booth preoccupies. I want to forewarn the phantom heartily that I am durable, that I will hereafter make gains unto my toward destination.

Never has uncertainty strayed me, only the dissonance of falsely believing. I spiritedly accept the possibilities

of where the wooded path leads.

  A peculiar cluster of roots grow at the base of a small mountain on the riverbank. The forest becomes still more somber, the toll booth ever more remote.

I begin to wonder if the phantom man might accept my tokens, offer any provisions to salve these uniform specters. Only now it’s apparent through the ascending miasma that perdition

was a bleary memento hitherto, an estranged fetal cognizance in which—

They march in symphony, dressed in the same manner as myself, their summation greater,

consumed, confined by mutant hearts, esurient and roaming, knotted roadways labored on for centuries,