This Is How It Really Sounds by Stuart Archer Cohen

through the litter and the wet bushes to check it out.
    The barn was open at the sides, and there were big yellow leaves hanging all around from the rafters, which he realized, to his amazement, was tobacco. Bales of hay formed a little fortress in one corner; some had been broken down into a big soft pile that smelled so sweet and grassy that it went to his head, the best thing he’d ever smelled. He saw a pitchfork, a tractor attachment of some sort. There was a faint odor of diesel and lubricants. He was startled when something moved. Then he heard the snuffling and dense breathing of a horse. He felt uneasy all of a sudden, and he stepped out again, into the field.
    The house sat some two hundred yards away from him, and he could see that a light was on in one corner of the ground floor, probably the kitchen. Someone was making breakfast; he was sure of that. Supermarket coffee percolating on the stove in an aluminum pot. There’d be oatmeal. Bacon. Three fried eggs, like the “truckers’ breakfast” in the truck stop, except this was the “home” of all the promised “home cooking” at every highway restaurant he’d ever been to. Who lived there, at home? He dreamed a middle-aged couple, maybe with a few kids. The mother was the first one up, with an apron on, presiding over the salty smell of morning. Maybe they had a daughter, a beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter, the most beautiful girl in western Pennsylvania, fairy-tale beautiful. He’d knock on their door, and they’d open it and look him over. He’d say, Hi, I’m Pete Harrington and my bus broke down on the highway out there. They’d invite him in and offer him something to eat, not knowing who he was, and the beautiful daughter would come downstairs to stare at him and he’d stay around for a few days in the guest room, doing some chores around the place, helping in the fields, chopping wood, and before he knew it, it would be home, and she’d be his, and they’d be living this gorgeous green life of hot black coffee and waking up on autumn mornings in a world that was antique and crisp and uncluttered and luminous. That whole life transpired in a moment as he stood there, from lying naked with his new wife to walking with his grandchildren, just a feeling, but so strong and possible that he felt he could make it real, just by reaching out and touching it.
    He made a few steps toward the house. The field was filled with stubble, and he could feel the cold dew soaking through his velvet tennis shoes. The earth was soft and rich. The rectangle of light on the other side of the mist seemed to pulse almost imperceptibly.
    Pete! Where the hell are you going? Get your stoned ass up here!
    Bobby’s voice. He turned around and his manager was up at the top of the slope, at the edge of the gas station parking lot. Duffy and Cody were standing next to him and they probably thought he was still spaced from the mushrooms. Maybe he was. He turned and looked at the farmhouse again, the window with light in it, the dark ones where people were still sleeping. His other home. Cody: Come back up here before you get shot, man! We can’t find another lead singer! The others yelled, too. He stopped and let their voices wash over his shoulders. The farmhouse was vibrating there, across the field.
    He’d never reach it. His life had caught up with him, with its newspapers and its clothes all his size. He’d never reach it and he’d never be able to explain it and he tried writing a song about it afterward that never came out right, no matter how many words he added and subtracted. The song was about the house near Wilksbury, and the girl he never saw, but if it was the story of that girl, how could it not be the story of that gas station and the barn and the night before and the mushrooms they’d eaten? The rain in that place that had just turned to mist, but not the rain of the other place