In defense of lying down

You could lie here forever, giving your life over, not back there for the country, but for the land; it feels right, to return to saguaro and sand.

Before I dive into this latest In Defense Of, I have some thrilling news to share. In the past few weeks, two extraordinary reviews have landed from the publishing gatekeepers. First, Publisher’s Weekly named Unfixed an Editor’s Pick. And just as I was catching my breath, Kirkus—affectionately (and sometimes fearfully) dubbed Snarkus for their sharp takes—delivered an unabashedly glowing review. Someone pinch me. Am I dreaming?

“Both accessible and poignant, this is a powerful reflection on identity, memory, and family. A gripping, often literary memoir that ruminates on life’s unfixable complications. Genre-defying.” —Kirkus

“Evocative, deeply immersive…Warner’s poetic prose and intimate descriptions of her inscape plunge readers directly into her reality.”— Publishers Weekly, Editor’s Pick

And now, a little something for you. This is the third story in my “In Defense Of” series to take the shape of second-person fiction. The first, In Defense of Uneventful, circled around a birthday ballad my biological father, Charles Brauer, once wrote. The second, In Defense of Never Arriving, was inspired by a rare 1981 recording of Charles reading his poetry aloud on A Prairie Home Companion. This one—In Defense of Lying Down—was born after spending time with one of his poems, Before My Last Darkness, a dreamlike meditation on surrender, passage, and becoming something beyond the bounds of form.

Just four years after that radio appearance, Charlie sailed into eighteen-foot swells on a stormy Lake Michigan. He was thirty-five, and his body was never found.

I never got to meet him, but he lives at the center of my memoir (just named Publisher’s Weekly Editor’s Pick!!!) Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery, and the Currents That Carry You Home (Empress Editions, October 2025). Writing these fictional pieces has become a way of reaching toward him—and living imaginatively alongside his creations. To listen through metaphor. To touch what fact can’t hold.

The scene in this story is imagined—a solitary walk through the desert after Charlie’s real medical release from Navy service in 1969. I don’t know if he hitchhiked home through the desert, but I know he jumped trains, thumbed rides, and carried both a reverence for nature and a restlessness in his bones. This brief release on a long, desert road may not have happened. Or maybe it did. Sometimes, fiction gives us permission to meet the people we’ve lost in the places they might have paused, and to hold their quiet transformations.

This one is for those who’ve lain down—not in defeat, but in something more transformative: a personal disarmament, a letting go of expectation, an act of devotion. For those who’ve dared to stop, to surrender, to dissolve just enough to be remade. For those who know that lying down can be its own kind of becoming.

from the archives: Palm Springs, 2014

Before My Last Darkness
- Charles Brauer

My face, my chin
touch the cold hard centerline
the double yellow line
  No passing for anyone on earth plane
    but
the secret of infinite others
flash on convolutions 
then
slowly at first
with the sure inevitable grind
 of a ten-ton pyramid stone
hauled into place by
one thousand loin cloths and 
two thousand whip-stung shoulders
I
My Total
I
  move forward
    with painful slowness
and watch 
as black petroleum tar
with innocent crow-eye stones
forever suspended
pass from view
beneath my drooping brown T-shirt
and healed umbilical
  now momentum
  plunks
  into a rain barrel
as anxious grey clouds
squirm over the northwest ridge
and the plunks
  the inevitable plunks
   quicken
     increase
       until it’s unsafe to look aside
with neck cranked
arms outstretched
I hear the black crow-eye stones
  blink
but can’t look 
but dare not
      earflaps burn with thick air
      rushing like it’s supposed to
(i was a falcon before my last darkness)
         rushing
           rushing
             the black-blue clouds boil
               overhead
                 rhythm gives way
                   melts into one constant
                   one single
                   unified
                   consciousness
                     louder it growls
                       Louder it roars
                         LOUDER
till tympanic refuse response
                           and i
                             my total 
                               i
                                 gush upward 
                                   into 
                                     torrential silence
                                     and
                                     white tranquility 
while the black crow-eye
winks

You’ve been walking for hours now, maybe days. No one stops. No one even passes. The desert eats the world whole—life hidden beneath the cool undersides of sandstone, tucked under the shade of a lone piñon pine. Even the ants know how to vanish here. The yellow line ribbons and rises and you blink, blink, blink to paint it back in place. But sweat insists on blur. Your shoulders slouch deeper under the weight of the pack, your thighs throb with the slow betrayal of distance. A sky stares down like it remembers something about you you’ve forgotten.

You’ve stopped asking why, this is no place for meaning. Only the plodding request of one foot in front of the other, even while some other part of you has already stopped asking. A bleached billboard in the distance thinks it knows the answer, only the words "REPENT" still legible.

You pat the release note in your breast pocket, typed in clinical block letters, that classifies you as 4-F. Spinal fusion. Unfit for service. You should feel luckier than a man in uniform still marching east, but if your father were here, you know what he’d say. He’d squint like he does when something doesn’t measure up and call out what it was: an out. Maybe he’d remind you you were lucky to have survived that toboggan toss at all—a fractured spine now competing with your fractured spirit.

You’re glad no one has picked you up, no one to witness this vacancy, no one to see what shame looks like when it walks with cracked lips under a hard blue sky. You let it rise around you—this scape and sky and silence, rubbing it in like salt in a raw place.

A small accumulation of life but to what end? A few poems, a garage album never pressed, a few girlfriends who never kept you warm. You hold their names and shapes up to the sun like old Polaroids, but they’ve all faded from fullness. Just hubcaps in a ditch—freed but useless. Rusting without rotation. You think of your peers, boys not so fortunate, whose boots have already hit the festering canopies of the Land of the Ascending Dragon. You wonder which one of them will be first to vanquish in its mouth of fire. Which mother will be first to open the door to silence.

So you lie down.

The asphalt is hot but it feels deserved like a good slap in the face. Your skin sizzles against it. It hurts, which means you must still care. Like the day you told your father he could keep his disappointment. It was no match for the heat of your own indignation.

You walked away that day and haven’t stopped walking, maybe not until now. Chin pressed to crow-eye pebbles and a yellow line refusing trespass. You close your eyes and let gravity have its way. God it’s good to lay it all down, the hopes, the regrets, the posturing that only ever wanted to be horizontal, belonging to not just yourself but everything.

Below you, the ghosts of travelers whisper—hooved to wooden to rubbered—pressing their once-dreams, their never-plans into the roadbed like fossilized song. Your body thins into porous membrane, and you begin to remember what came before the name: the soaring, the shadow-hunting, the wind-thrill of falcon wings before your last darkness.

The sky above has been dry for days. A hard, powdery blue that refused softness. Even the clouds were ashamed. But now, lying here, something shifts. At first, it’s just a dimming, a bruise blooming at the western edge. Your hand slides into your pocket and pulls out the stone. Smooth, grey, worried and worn. You plucked it from Lake Michigan the morning you left for the San Diego base. Right after carving June 1969: I never wanted to go, into the bottom of your mother’s cedar chest. You told yourself it would be a talisman, for homesickness, for fear, for the unknown. But now? Now it’s too soft, too round and easy, too much like home.

The light tilts, a wind stirs, one that smells of minerals and static and forgiveness.

You don’t cry but the sky does. First a lick, then a heaving. As sure as your own dissolution, the parched riverbed opens and water rushes in—or is it the other way around? You don’t flinch, just let it come, becoming water, hydrogen bonds unbinding, reforming, boundaries softening, edges silking. You let go completely—you, your total you, gush upward into torrential silence and white tranquility. You could lie here forever, giving your life over, not back there for the country, but for the land; it feels right, to return to saguaro and sand. You worry the stone between wet fingers, released at last from worrying.

But just when you think daisies might push from your skin, you hear it—the growl of adventure barreling toward you. Eighteen wheels spinning to somewhere, somewhere else, and the stone that once begged to stay now begs to keep going.

So you get up. You brush the crow-eyes from your knees, wink back, and stick out your thumb.