This is Part 4 of 5. One more to go… Part 1 is here, if you wish to start at the beginning. * * * * * He must have gone for help, the little junco, because when I awoke there were two of them. One on my side of the window, inspecting the sill– making those erratic steps that come in packs of four or five– and the other one outside, moving only its […]
Well, I couldn’t squish this into a single post… I promise it won’t be too many. Welcome to my short foray into serial fiction… * * * * * It was just a small apartment. I don’t know what I had really expected, but not something so patently vacant. It would end here? There was a dinged up coffee table, a faded olive sofa that didn’t match the carpet, a landslide of unsorted mail on […]
For Christmas this year I received a copy of George Saunders’ collection of short stories entitled Tenth of December. I had never heard of Saunders before, and didn’t know what to expect, but the giver of this gift– an inspiring young man securing his MFA in film directing with whom I’ve been known to occasionally watch Celtics games, make an Indian food run, or share a conversation in support of a draft screenplay in which […]
Snow is carefully disguised propaganda dropped by spring a few moons in advance of Her campaign, a dusting of crystalline apples and bergamots, acorns and pomegranates, perfect white kernels of new life. Snow is a fresh coat of time-delayed beauty sprinkled onto the land that muffles every footstep and rounds off every corner, dissolving every edge into a pure continuum, while augmenting the whack whack whack of unimpressed woodpeckers. Pay attention they say. whack whack whack […]
What we are… is invisible, alive, dancing— an incandescence of possibilities whirling through the dark, flickering— always one step ahead of the pin— from one instant to the next, traversing chasms between worlds, discarding moments that flutter softly to the ground like feathers pinched in the closing doors of our fractured timelines. What we are… is immobile but forever growing, forever reaching out, fruit-bearing and branched, a tree whose upper-and-lower, inner-and-outer limbs snake through the […]
A film lies over the world, a distortive coating– a difficulty that has been sprinkled throughout the realm. Somehow we let the powder escape from the bag: the dust that causes permanence to fracture and dissemble into half-lives, the dust that causes recognition to thicken and cloud into obscurity. The wind blew it in all directions. Now everything is a strange, skewed cinema of what it once was. Now fading has become natural, and youth […]
I am ever grateful to you who have given of your valuable time this year to lend the gift of your presence, and to share a moment or two with me here by the fire. As a token of my heartfelt appreciation I have posted two new stories on the Fiction page today. They are intended as gifts to you, and I hope if time and desire present themselves in equal measure, that you enjoy them. I further […]
There’s a poverty I sometimes settle into, a clawing for connection. It’s a painful question that picks me out of the world’s line-up of chiefs and princetains, captains and raconteurs, the divas and the daring, and squares me up for examination. Him. He’s hiding something for sure– a limp of some sort, a wound that hasn’t healed, one eye that betrays him with its flickering tic, a slow, creeping failing he strives to ignore. Protectiveness […]
There’s a kindness that isn’t about doing the right thing, or being good. It’s not about holding the door open for a stranger to be polite, or even nice. There’s a kindness that’s about upping the ante and challenging the status quo, about asking the kind of question that provokes a crisp rebuke from your inner skeptic, that elicits a little wait and see because here comes another sweet dose of I told you so– […]
Once, when he was still learning his craft of ushering the anxious and doubtful from the shadows of falsehood to the river of poetry at the center of their own being, and in a well-intentioned effort to raise the general morale, Hafiz gave away two court-side seats to the Explosion of the Sun. Because, as we all know, sometimes having something to look forward to can make all the difference. In this particular case, the […]
Embracing Forever 