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The tracks across the margins of the lawn, hardly held in check by the squat, limestone guardians, mark the madness of man. On rainy winter days they are long, grey canals sliced through a squishy green marsh, bleeding brown blood, slick, raw, and ugly. What things have this? Delivery vans? Postal trucks? Those small, innocent-seeming electric golf carts? Who knows? But it wasn’t alone. There had to someone driving. Maybe many someones. Someone has been cutting corners. Who has been dashing down these lanes, lacerating the landscaping? Someone in the residences? Someone at the construction sites? Someone in administration, perhaps? The scores scratch deep into campus, where common cars can’t go. A detective could compare tracks with tires; find the culprit so callous of delicate grass, so heedless, or in a hurry, he can’t be bothered with marked margins; the culprit who pays plants no particular heed, who won’t stop to smell the flowers; the culprit who runs over whatever is in his way, feeling himself over all, but who will someday be beneath this same green grass he crushes now in his unseemly haste. A detective could do it, if he had the time, cause, and the inclination, and weren’t in such a hurry. But the lawn lies unnoticed, accumulating scars, its criss-cross clues unread, prey to the tyrant tires of those mindless drivers diligently dashing towards their doom; the corner cutters. |
Cutting Corners
Originally published in
SUL News Notes,
Vol. 5, no. 7,
Feb. 23, 1996.
1st web edition posted
7/29/2008.
This page last updated
11/26/2013.
Published by Fleabonnet Press.
©
1996-2013 by Brian Kunde.