Broken Cross on a Hillside (or Health Risk Assessment)

By Luke Rolfes / Issue 12

According to my university health-risk-assessment, I have low cholesterol. The bad way to be low—as in, my good cholesterol isn’t good enough. It’s probably because I don’t eat fish or nuts or olives. But my other cholesterol is fine, so my ratio says that my risk isn’t yet worrying.

Imagine me driving home on a Missouri highway, passing a cemetery on a hill at 58 miles an hour. Some of the grave markers sticking out of the grass are crosses, and a few of them have broken in half. A right or a left angle remains of what used to be a lowercase T. Some passersby will see these broken crosses as metaphors, but, really, it’s just an old cemetery dying like the rest of us.

Here’s an actual metaphor: I saw a man once in the median of that same highway straddling a dead buck with a knife. He took the antlers in his left hand and used the knife to remove the trophy from the deer’s head.

As the cemetery fades into the rearview, beer battered fish sticks and olives rain from the heavens. They bounce on my windshield and fall into the ditch—more carcasses of run over creatures that we may or may not consider food.

LUKE ROLFES is the author of Flyover Country, winner of the Georgetown Review Book Prize. He teaches creative writing at Northwest Missouri State University and co-edits The Laurel Review. He mentors in the AWP Writer to Writer program.