at the fair

No, I saw it. It was right there. I even touched it. Really and truly. I don't know why you don't believe me. It's not like I go around telling inflated stories that aren't even a little bit true. And I've never lied to you. I tell it like it is. You know that. So why are you being so weird about this? No, I don't think you're gullible, some country bumpkin fresh off the apple cart. I have nothing but respect for you. This isn't a con, it's the real deal, and I'm telling you, I saw the thing.

I walked right up to it and that was that. God, the stench, you wouldn't believe how much that thing smelled. It was like going inside a garbage dumpster on a hot summer day when the trash truck was due three days ago but there's a strike. That gross. That strong. But, like, I was right there. You have no idea. It's nothing like in the pictures. The pictures make it look glossy and ferocious and huge, but it wasn't like that at all. If it weren't for the smell I might not have even noticed the thing. And none of the descriptions mention the smell, so it's not like that's how I knew what it was. It wasn't sleek or glossy at all, more like, like a sheep with dreadlocks. That's how its fur was. Thick and matted and it smelled something awful, so I wondered if it was diseased or a reject or something.

But I'm telling you, it was the real deal. I looked it up and found out that it smells that way because it has to ferment its food before it can finish digesting it, but like how a cow has all those stomachs, it only has one, so it basically sweats like a drunk. Which is totally weird and totally gross and totally true. Apparently that's why it has all those dreadlocks, too, its fur is just a reflection of what it eats, the same way flamingoes are pink because of what they eat, they aren't born pink or anything. So this thing gets all matted if it eats a lot of seaweed or fish. It's some weird chemical reaction to iodine that comes out in its fur.

And you know how the pictures make it look absolutely huge? Like elephant-rhinoceros-hippo-huge? Apparently that's just National Geographic and their obsession with the telephoto lens. It wasn't huge at all. And it wasn't just a baby, either. Nah, it was full grown and about the size of a dog. Just a normal dog. The type every kid has. Not a Great Dane or anything, more like a beagle or a cocker spaniel. You know, just dog-sized. So on top of all this, that thing didn't even growl. Didn't bare its teeth.

It was just hanging out, lounging by a tree. There were squirrels running around that it didn't even seem to notice at all, there was even a little kid that kept staring at it, and, I'm telling you, if a little kid stared at me that way, I'd hit him for insubordination. Teach him some manners. But the thing there didn't bat an eye. I wondered maybe if it was old, blind or deaf maybe, but that didn't seem to be the case. When I snapped my fingers, it looked over, it noticed, but it didn't really care. No, it wasn't catatonic, or drugged, although, yeah, I thought about that. Like maybe it got into the Xanax or something. But there was a breeze and the wind was blowing leaves around, and it seemed to be paying attention. It was more like one of those Zen monks on top of a mountain, it had transcended everything.

So since it didn't seem vicious or anything, yeah, I touched it. I mean, I held my breath when I touched it, because it stank like a drunk hobo on a train, but it didn't mind me touching it. It wasn't really a side show, and it didn't seem to be anyone's pet. I couldn't figure out what it was doing there. These aren't even native to this area, and so I wondered if it was some wacko's escaped exotic pet, like those rock stars that have monkeys or those crazy New Yorkers with bobcats or those kids in Florida with Burmese pythons or that guy in, what?, Indiana? Ohio? You know who I mean. That guy with a private zoo who let all his animals out then killed himself. Land of the free, so if you want a piece of the wild in your subdivision, help yourself.

I thought maybe that's why it's so tame, maybe it was just used to being around people, and it was the right size to be a housepet, maybe if you've got a teenaged boy and a golden retriever and a drunk layabout husband, you wouldn't notice the smell. I mean, people get used to anything, the smell of gym socks or cigarettes or meth or burnt meatloaf, so maybe that wasn't really a problem for them. But it didn't really act much like a pet. It didn't really want to be patted like a dog, and it wasn't kind of stand-offish like a cat. I offered it a piece of hot dog, and, I dunno, maybe it was the mustard or the kraut, but it wasn't interested. And that was before I had looked up what it ate and knew that this one was more used to fish. Maybe it would have preferred the fried clams, but, you know, I had a hot dog. I didn't have fried clams. But it wasn't interested and, yeah, I was curious, but, wow, that was a stink.

And I kinda wanted to wash my hands after touching it, it was maybe a little bit gross, and I was still finishing the hot dog. Maybe I should have hung around a bit longer and tried to get some more information, but at the time, I didn't think of that. I just figured, huh, fair's different this year. Really, I left it there. I found a washroom which smelled of piss and beer and stale cotton candy, and I felt just as gross coming out as I did going in, and I rode the Ferris wheel and the hay ride and looked at the prize winning quilts on display and watched the tractor pull and the 4H kids leading their cows around the ring. Those cows were the cleanest things at the fair, I swear, some of them had been brushed and hair-sprayed just like a poodle at the dog show.

You know that I like to stay late, catch the last show and the fireworks, but the nachos had something weird in the cheese and my stomach was all gassy and I just wasn't in the mood. And I guess I felt worse than I realized, because, I swear, I didn't notice it again. I had seen it earlier sitting there under the tree and then I just didn't think about it again. I found my car in the field and drove home and pulled over once to throw up the rest of the nachos, and stumbled into bed. Maybe it was food poisoning, or maybe it was the flu, but I spent the rest of the weekend either asleep or throwing up. You should definitely avoid the Boy Scout nacho booth next time you're there. I still feel queasy just thinking about jalapeños.

But come Monday morning I felt okay enough to go to work, because you know how they've started using that software that analyzes sick leave, compares it to the baseball schedule and flags mysterious Monday and Friday calls, so I figured I was better off going in and feeling like shit and instead of staying home feeling like shit and finding myself fired. And, I swear, I am telling it just like it happened, but I'm running with a cup of coffee from the kitchen through the living room trying to find my keys, and I look over at the couch, and the thing is all curled up in one corner of my couch.

I didn't know if I was supposed to take it for a walk or feed it or what, so that's when I looked up what it to feed it, and left out a can of tuna fish by the coffee table. It looked at me as I went out the front door, but it wasn't interested in coming with me. It seemed happy there on the couch, so I left it there. And I was already gonna be late for work, so it isn't like there was anything else I could do. But I don't want it. I didn't try to pick it up or bring it back. I don't even know if it's legal to keep one around. Hell, I never even had a guinea pig as a kid, and now there's this smelly exotic that's settled in my living room.

What the hell am I supposed to do? Stop shaking your head. You know I'm not usually this confused about something, you know that I wouldn't kid about something so weird. I'm not trying to put one over on you. I really need your help.

Remember when I covered for you that time we swore we'd never mention again? Well, this is like that. I'm serious. I saw it, sleeping on my couch, in my living room, this morning, today, and I was awake, and sober, and maybe I had food poisoning or the flu but this thing was there. It was real. And now what? What the hell am I supposed to do? I need your help.

With god as my witness, I am telling you the truth and I will never ask for another favor again. Whatever you want, it's yours, name your price, just help me figure out what to do with this thing in my living room. Really, never again.

Thanks. I owe you one.

shadow masks

Light from under the window: passing reflections from cars. The flash of headlights across the wall, the streetlights cast their midnight shadows. It's never dark, not really. Not like it used to be way back when, back when the moon wasn't nearly as big when it was full, back when the tree branches grew intertwined and thick overhead, back when lamplighters had to walk every night down the streets, touching a match to a flare of gas.

When the nights were dark and deep we roamed at our ease, crossing from shadow to shadow, perceived but not seen. Some people saw us clearly, the young children whose eyes were still so sensitive they could distinguish between the black of a cellar and the black of a closet. But no one paid any heed to the wild imaginings of the children, infants raised by the brothers Grimm, unable to separate dreams from reality. The madmen saw us, as well. I have always felt like the mad were that way simply because they knew too much: they saw too much and they heard too much. What their fellows called insanity was just the refusal to not see all that is actually there. It is not that the mad heard voices, but that everyone else refused to listen. And the mad saw us. They did not like us, but they also did not fear us, not the way the children feared us. The children were right to be afraid. Perhaps part of what made the mad men mad was their refusal to have fear.

But all that was many years ago. The shadows kept shrinking, pulling back. The lamps no longer required lamp lighters, even candles no longer required matches, the whole room bathed in light with no more effort than a switch. The trees were cut down, first for the building of ships and homes, then for the creation of pastures for dumb beasts, the sheep and the cow. I do not know how they managed it, but even the moon glowed brighter, reflecting the light of the earth in addition to the light of the sun. And as the shadows receded, so did we.

Perhaps you have watched a cat try to fit into a box that is smaller than itself. Perhaps you have tried to fit into a suit of clothes from your youth. Losing the shadows was like that; there was no where to fit. Our population had stayed the same, our size had stayed the same, but our world had shrunk. There were fewer and fewer places for us, without the shadows. Our colonies and families split up, individuals finding pockets for themselves, for it wasn't possible to live any longer as a tribe. I can no longer remember the last time I saw my mother; I can almost forget that I had a mother. It is, in the end, no matter.

There are spaces here, between the walls. It is not palatial, these spaces; it is cramped, musty. I have to share the space with a population more numerous than on any city street. Crammed in among the wires and the insulation are several generations of mice, an incestuous community of cockroaches, a family of swallows, one of squirrels, spiders of all types, and a tiny lizard which, I believe, exists no where else on earth. There are others of my type, as well. Not others of my kind, but other species of the shadows. I know they are here because I can smell them, sense them, in the scent of ash from a wood burning stove, in a waft of mothball, in a scattering of pebbles loosened across a floor. I avoid meeting them. They avoid me. It is not that we fear one another; it is simply politeness, respect for undisturbed peace in this society we did not create but must inhabit. And so we know of one another but we do not know one another, and that is as it should be.

A new family has recently moved in, but they are not what I expected. There have been so many families, and the children seem to grow more and more quickly and then they leave and then there is a new family again. Perhaps it is simply the weight of my years, but it seemed that once I was able to see the children more clearly, distinguish between them, remember their quirks and their needs and their fears. Now they all seem the same, interchangeable, and it is lonely, for me, these cookie-cutter children, there is nothing in their essence for me to know them by. And then they are gone. But a new family has recently moved in.

They are different, their infant is different. It has eyes that see everything, big, round, green eyes, and it stares and it sees and it knows. So many of these children have never seen, never escaped from their fog, but this one gazes and does not fear. It has seen me, and it did not pull back, it did not even flinch. I have never had a child so nearby and so utterly content, so completely placid. At first I wondered if something about the infant was not right, if it was perhaps an idiot, or damaged, or blind. But it seems to be alive in a way that other humans are not alive, it has all its senses, and then some. I am enchanted, and I am afraid. I am fascinated, and now almost never leave the nursery.

The nursery is a sunny place, filled with light, but even though there are so few shadows that I almost don't fit, I can't bring myself to leave for a more comfortable corner. This obsession worries me, but it has overtaken everything that once filled my world. Last night, when the moon was quietly tucked away and I had only the shadows of the streetlamps and the passing cars to block my way, last night I stood vigil next to the bassinet. The child was not asleep. It does not seem to sleep, or to cry or fuss as other infants might. I was right next to it, and it was awake, and regarded me in the shadows from those uncritical eyes. I don't know what it saw, but I broke down first. I escaped that unnerving examination just before the sun broke over the eastern sky.

It is impossible for me to leave the shadows; it is not that direct light will kill me, it is that I will cease to exist. I will become non-being. There were always tales of non-being, not so much warnings or nightmares, but reminders. Just reminders. Non-being wasn't something you could experiment with and then just go back to the way things were. Nonbeing wasn't a process or a decision. To become non-being happened in an instant, and lasted as long as time. It wasn't something to be feared, the way humans fear death, but it meant a transition to a place beyond place, and a loss of all we were and all we remembered, and even our families would forget that we had ever once been. So we stayed in the safety and comfort of the shadows. The infant, I feared, would somehow tempt me into forgetting myself, and I would stray beyond the shadow, lost in the moment and the hold of that gaze.

I was not afraid of non-being, but, if I transitioned out of my reality, I wanted it to be a considered decision, not a momentary lapse into forgetfulness. The child scared me because it made me forget everything, everything about who I was and the world around me and memories were the only knowledge I had. Memories are my life blood, my soul: the discarded human memories left piled up in the corner, the rank and rotting emotions in a room after a fight, the fragmented and scrambled memories hastily collected from dreams before dawn. My fellows and I are sometimes called dream-eaters, but we are not hunters, we do not steal memories form human minds. We scavenge forgotten emotions and outgrown passions, we clothe ourselves in childhood dreams and lost moments. And so if I forgot myself and ceased to exist, I would become a forgotten collection of forgotten memories, I would be a non-being.

So I feared the child, feared its magnetic pull night after night, even as I could not bring myself to leave the nursery. Perhaps that was the core of my obsession: there was something in those eyes that remembered back to a deeper reality, one before the womb. The child held in itself the memory of non-being, and to it both being a child and the memory of non-being were equivalent. I could stare deeply into the green eyes and they were unending, and beyond everything that I could recognize were shapes and colors and places that I could not find words to describe, there were emotions that had no parallel in my experience of the world.

I cannot say what drew the child to me, if perhaps it was sorting through my accumulation of wan and moth-eaten memories, discarded emotions, for some guidance about this world it was now a part of. Under its examination, I felt my soul laid bare, I felt everything I possessed and everything I was made of to be paltry, unfinished, worn. But it is not that I was an unfit housekeeper of my soul: I treasured the memories that made up my being, but I was a creature of the shadows, I was a scavenger. I could only collect the discards of the world around me. The child sifted and sorted, and I was bare, but I was not judged. I was empty but I was unashamed; then, as it reached a hand to the edge of the cradle and I touched its finger, the sun rose, and I no longer was.

quod cupio mecum est

Nothing happened. I am sure of it, I am certain. I hold my hands open, in front of me, and cupped in their palms is everything that ever was. My hands are empty, they hold the past, where nothing was and nothing came to be.

The air is chilly, clear blue, a winter's day. Somewhere there is a robin, although I know this without seeing the red breast, without hearing its song. There is a void in the landscape just exactly the right space for a robin, and so there must be one. The shadow of a fir tree stretches over me, across the park, over the snow. I only know there is snow as my feet crunched, they are bare, the toes are cold, and I only know the fir tree as the air is filled with the scent of pinecones.

When I open my eyes, I can see none of these things. I see only a hallway, it is nighttime, the only illumination is the beam of light from under the doorways that line the hall. I do not move. I close my eyes, it is winter, outdoors, my hands cradle the nothingness of the world. I open my eyes. The darkened hallway extends in both directions. Neither fate welcomes me onward; both have a gap just for me, but neither is where I belong. My eyes are open. I move forward down the hallway, carefully counting my steps. I reach a doorway, light spills onto my feet, although I still stand in shadow. I close my eyes. It is winter. With my eyes closed, I reach for the door in the hallway, but there is nothing there. Just winter, just cold space.

My eyes open, my hand has grasped the doorknob, I open it, and without knowing that I moved, I am inside the room. The room is expanding away from me, the walls receding as I watch, the furnishings assuming new forms. A lamp becomes a butterfly; an end table, a small boy in livery; an oil painting of a vase of flowers, an apple, becomes a family greeting one another, the apple a horse-drawn carriage. It is impossible to tell whether the lamp is pretending to be a butterfly or whether the butterfly was pretending to be a lamp. It does not matter, for now the man, an old man, leaning upon his cane, turns away and leads his guests inside. The apple / horse drawn carriage pulls off towards the stables. The liveried boy looks in both directions, sees he is not observed, and goes around to the back entrance to ask Cook for a cherry tart.

The butterfly lands on my nose. I am startled; a butterfly has never alighted upon me before, I am uncertain how to react. I cannot move, and glance down. It is very, very difficult to look in any new direction, but slowly, infinitely slowly, my feet come into view. They have claws, they are stone; I realize that I am a stone lion in this place, just as the butterfly had been a lamp during the moment I opened the door. Slowly I bring my gaze back up. There is another stone lion across from me, flanking the front door. There may be other lions quite nearby, but my peripheral vision is tight, limited; I wonder who or what the other stone lion is in its other reality.

I close my eyes; it is difficult to close my eyes, as my eyes and eyelids are stone, they grate upon one another without tears to lubricate their movement. It begins to rain. I close my eyes. It is still winter, there is the bird and the fir tree, my hands cup all the memories of the world, but my hands are empty. The wind blows over my cupped palms and an echoing nothingness rings out. Snow falls. I open my eyes.

The butterfly has moved to the lion across the way, perched in a sunbeam that crosses the stone cat's back. The drive is made of white pebbles, perfectly round, perfectly smooth, perfectly white. It is no longer raining but the pebbles glow and shine in the light, and as I stare at them for minutes and months, I realize the stones are moving among themselves, to a careful pattern, with a sense of purpose. I choose one pebble, it glows more brightly than the others; at night it is a beacon in the moonlight, at dawn it catches the first glow of sunrise, and even at dusk it retains the remnants of light from the day.

Many, many hours ago, or weeks, or centuries, this rock stood near the gates at the end of the drive. It crossed in front, directly in front, of my paws, and I longed to pick it up, but stood immobile in stone. The pebble has worked its way all the way to the base of the other lion; I do not know what I expect to see. The butterfly leaves the other lion and lands on the pebble, and the very moment the butterfly lands, I am back in the hallway again. I am myself.

It is night. Beams of light come from underneath the doors that line the hallway. I close my eyes. Winter has ended. My feet are wet, but it is not the cold frozen slush of snow, it is the squishy wet of fresh mud. I inhale deeply, bring in the thaw, the sap rising, the earliest blossoms. Not being able to see spring is heartbreaking, left out of the light filled with the promise of summer, but I focus, focus on feeling and smelling the everything of the world. My hands are cupped, they have filled with water from a recent rain, something so light and delicate it can only be a sparrow has perched on my thumb, is drinking the water held in my hands. I want to laugh and cry and in the joy of the moment I forget and open my eyes, and I have turned a doorknob in the hallway and I am dead.

Not recently dead, nothing gruesome, full of illness or blood or mourning. I am in the world of the dead, and I am one of them. There is no light, only the half-light of twilight in the shadows and my physical form is elastic, unbound by gravity or atomic forces. I drift. It is impossible to stop:  when one of the other spirits sighs, or turns its head, or waves a hand, I blow on the eddy of air. It seems impossible to guide my movement, much less to set down an anchor and have the leisure to study those around me. The air is too full of infinitesimal movements; not until I am blown into a whirlpool can I gather my balance, right myself, bring my parts into order.

The other spirits are tethered in place by their memories. They navigate among one another and through space by reliving a particular moment that has come before. I close my eyes, to empty my mind in search of a memory, but once again it is spring and my feet are encased in mud and a tiny bird perches on my thumb, my palms filled with rainwater. I open my eyes. Caught in the whirlpool in the realm of the spirits, I search for a memory. My palms held my memories, but they were empty, they were filled with rain. Here in the world of the dead, I bring my palms up close to my face, I look for my life line, I look for my fate line. My palms are smooth, unlined. I have neither past nor future. The sparrow perched on my thumb is not a memory, for it is there now: it is the present.

The snow, my feet cold, damp, is a memory, and with it I carefully draw out of the whirlpool, anchor myself with the thinnest strand. My memory of snow is not strong enough to hold me fixed in place, it is not vibrant enough to be used as a rudder, but it holds me close enough to myself that I can look around.

At first, I thought all the spirits were identical; they were as much alike as pine needles or the play of light on a lake. As I bobbed and swayed in the currents of their movement and watched closely, I saw that their anchors, tentacles of memory, changed color, grew thick and then faint. I began a taxonomy of memories, good memories and bad; memories of people or of places or of facts; remembered fears or remembered pleasures. I had only my one memory, it was neither a fear nor a joy, but pure experience, but the other spirits were gathering around me with anchors mirroring my own. One had an experience of swimming, as it grew nearer I felt the ocean, cold, salty, wash over me; felt the moment when the heat of sun on the skin was replaced by the chill plunge into waves, although I had never seen an ocean, never swam.

Another spirit grew near, and with it a strong wind blew, desert air, dry, filled with sand. The wind blew and blew and I sensed desperation, the driving horrible thirst for water, blistering heat all around. I closed my eyes. The sparrow had left and it was summer, the ground dry beneath my feet. The sun warmed my back, crickets chirped lazily in the shade of the pine tree. I missed the sparrow, opened my eyes to look for it, and was back in the hallway.

Dawn was seeping into the corridor, there were no longer beams of light spilling outward. I touched one door, then another. They were cool and inert. As the sun rose, the doors disappeared, became smooth, cold walls. I closed my eyes. The sun was setting, the song of the crickets growing magnified. Although I could only sense its shape, I knew the Big Dipper was directly overhead, dropping stars into my open palms.

chiromancy

I could start at the end and work back to the beginning: dispense with suspense and tell a story that explains it all, leaves a sense of final justice, a conclusion. There could be a vague, undefined sense of a happy ending, evildoers punished, the future a blank space of boundless opportunity and benevolent fate. The meat of the story would be about courage in the face of opposition, of changing plans at the last minute and acts of brave spontaneity that saved the episode from the sting of failure. Through all this, your sympathies would twist and turn, eyes widen in suspense, blood boil at the treachery of the adversaries, and still, because you knew the conclusion from the very first line, that certain something deep in your soul would be calm, knowing everything would turn out fine.

But all of that presupposes that there's a happy ending. After all, there's nothing but point of view separating a comedy from a tragedy. Nothing in my introduction promised that the end would be a source of joy or even comfort.

Remember Little Red Riding Hood, and wonder, how desperate the life of a wolf on the brink of starvation, the middle of the coldest, snowiest winter on record. No voles, no woodmice, no rabbits: a wolf at that moment has only one desire. He sneaks into the kitchen of an abandoned cottage, looking for any type of scrap. Perhaps Granny wasn't even there, the winter had been long and cold and she had left her cottage to visit the warmth of another village, the wolf is caught, exhausted and ravenous, and snatches after Red Riding Hood's basket. Even wolves know that humans are unsatisfying prey. It's all in the point of view, whether justice is served or the tale skews in an altogether different direction.

Remember everything that you once forgot. Remember placing fists in a circle: one potato, two potato, three potato. Breath held, hoping, hoping not to be It in the game of tag. That's the ending, there: note it well. It is evening, not yet twilight, summer stretching long ahead, endlessly, a game of tag about to begin, the first seeker unchosen.

What happened to bring all of this to fruition? There is a void, heaven and earth separate, atoms and molecules bond and coalesce and soon we can walk on land, and soon we leave the trees and walk upright, and then the rivers swell and all is water again, but we have forgotten how to swim. That, there, tragedy, so many lives lost, for not having gills and fins: the tragedy of the last surviving member of a tribe, having watched, in horror, desolation and drowning all around.

But remember the ending, a game of tag, a summer night.

More time passes. Men discover geometry, astronomy, trace their fates in the palms of their hand, wander lost in the desert searching for fig trees and wine, and, out of nowhere, the Crusades. The Crusades, the Black Death, kings and soldiers as pawns across the chessboard, the tragedy of ambition. Change the point of view, the pre-industrialized world filled with Venetian palaces and crystal goblets and a clear morning in a gondola, a tryst, a feast. Point of view is in the particulars: life, full of promise and beauty, except for the gondolier, whose wife died in childbirth, who has a household of young children to raise, whose extended family fell to the plagues sweeping across the country.

Time passes. Venice sinks, Atlantis is lost and rediscovered and lost again, the library at Alexandria burns, a thousand ships sink in the stormy Mediterranean.

Time passes. Smallpox is exchanged for syphilis and tobacco and gold, the duck-billed platypus is discovered, there is no Northern passage, but everywhere, the wind blows into internal combustion engines, there is the cotton gin, there is the potato famine, there is a tax on printing, there is a banishment to a small island in the middle of the storm tossed Atlantic, empty and barren.

I have forgotten to tell you of the expression in the whale's eye as it is separated from the pod, as it watches the harpoon's lancing its calf, the ocean stained with blood, so much blood, an ocean of blood, so that oil lamps can be lit and corsets tightened. The sailor returns home, weary, does not recognize his daughter, grown tall from when he left for the Pacific so many years ago. On his way from the docks to his cottage, he passes the fashionable houses lit by candlelight filled with women, tightly laced, waiting for their futures to unfold. They, too, will die in childbirth, although not as in times past, hands are more often washed, doctors less frequently move from the cadaver to the lying in room without taking suitable precautions.

The sailor may return to sea again, where his ship may be torn apart in a monsoon, or he may remain ashore, too old to knot ropes and raise sails and throw a harpoon as he once did. He never believed in old age, and now that it is here, he isn't certain what to do, unsure how to fill his day before the pub opens and after he wakes. His wife takes in laundry, her knuckles swollen, her hands raw and worn. She worries about her daughter, the dangers of the no-good lad that is making promises he'll never keep, the very real possibility that there will soon be another mouth to feed and no money coming in.

Time passes. Lands change hands from aboriginals to explorers to the church to settlers to politicians to businessmen. Railroads fill the sky with the heavy smoke of coal dust as they cross as far as civilization extends. There are assassinations and revolutions and armistices and famines and fabulous wealth, underneath it all the pipe organs plays a counterpoint inflected Requiem as the Holy Roman Empire shrinks from all of Europe down to a neighborhood in Rome so condensed it can be crossed by foot in an easy afternoon's stroll.

Remember, you know the ending: it is a summer evening, a game of tag is about to start, but whether this is comedy or tragedy, whether this is a play of one act or five acts: it's all in the telling. Everything works out in the end, it all comes to a conclusion, but somehow I had forgotten how much bloodshed, how many deaths, how many broken hearts, lead to this point. Everyone who has ever lived has died. Everything that has ever lived has died. Whether the mountains are alive or dead I cannot say.

The scientists would like to interrupt and say that the mountains are almost certainly not alive. However, as the scientists have a long, long history of being very, very wrong about a great many things, I will repeat: whether the mountains are alive or dead I cannot say.

Time passes, the continents drift a bit further apart, volcanoes erupt, earthquakes rend, ships sink, and man grows wings and takes to the sky, soaring in trails of white above the clouds. Mountains are bulldozed and fields are cracked apart to inject heat into water which spins turbines and energizes atoms: when I press a switch the world is lit in a soft glow, even on a cloudy, moonless night. The whales begin to sing again, although they are much declined, but they have forgiven us. On an island, a family sets down its tools, walks away from a vineyard, boards a boat. Farms are tilled, cement is poured, a cloud erupts over a country we know nothing about, a country we have never seen and will never understand, and everyone stops breathing. This is the end. Newspapers circulate headlines in bold.

Except you know this isn't the end, because the world can't end yet. You know somewhere, up ahead, there really is an ending, an ending that has nothing to do with mushroom clouds or poisoned wells or armored tanks or dysentery in covered wagons or gangrene from battlefield wounds or blighted crops or drafted sons or absent fathers or a rat escaped from a trading ship carrying something that strikes in the dark of night.

There is an ending that doesn't smolder in ashes or crumple on shattered foundations. Out of all of these lives and out of all of this time, molecules joined together to form the twisting chains of A T G C nucleotides winding through every convoluted system in the body, they survived, separated, recombined, separated, joined, twisted, grew, and then it is summer again. The air is filled with fireflies and the nervous held breaths of children, counting out one potato, two potato, three potato, four, a game of tag stretching across the yard, around the oak tree, down the street, children poised to scatter like dandelion seeds in the wind, as soon as their fists reveal their fate.

Daphne

I remembered that you were not there, that you would never be there again, that now there was only the ghost of your memory for company, and nothing more. The woods were thick with scars of the past, fallen trees turning into mushrooms, fallen leaves turning into mulch, fallen rock walls turning into a fading story of fields and cultivation abandoned in the river of time. The memory of the woods runs deeper than my memories, for the trees have lifespans beyond my own, and from their anchoring watch, watch the world spin about them. It is not that the moon revolves around the earth which revolves around the sun which spins in the arms of the giant spiraling Milky Way; rather, the roots of the trees pin the sky to the earth, stitching together our past and our future, our air and our soil. The trees are the center around which we all spin, and I am alone in the woods with only your memory walking under the shadows of the trees beside me.

There are moments when I wonder what it would be to establish a nest amidst the trees, to live way up in the embrace of the canopy, to hear the song of the wind as a call to prayer, as lullaby. There are moments when I find an old chimney, lone remaining skeleton where once was home and hearth, and I desire to flesh out the bones of a house with walls of birch bark and floors of earth stamped firm and dry. The woods beckon with the stories of everyone who has lived here before, and I hold on to the glimpse of a land that once flourished under man and now flourishes under nature.

au cœur de la nuit

Still I travel north, pushed into the land of the sun, and even the grays of twilight pale until it is always dawn or dusk and night is erased, a part of the past that has been left behind. Villages appear, tiny huts painted bright red, bright blue, with thatched roofs, and in the thatching wildflowers grow, tiny alpine blossoms in white and yellow. The villages are full of children, the sounds of the market, everywhere a tightly choreographed chaos. The children take my hands, grasp my skirts, pull me towards the maypole in the village green, and everywhere is the singing and the sound of bells that are both foreign and familiar.

We dance, I realize the song is the same song of my dreams from my childhood, that I know these people even though I have never been here before. In this land there is no night, and I ask the children: where do you store your dreams, where is your heart when you are asleep? And they tug my hair and laugh and run towards the edge  of the village where the forest begins. Our dreams are the wild animals, they tell me, we see them, but only from a distance. Our dreams are shy and untamed and do no seek our company.

They pull me back towards the bright cottages, the thatched roofs, and I glance towards the shadows of the forest, where there is movement but not form. And then I let go of the night, I allow my dreams to depart wild and free, and in the pale dawn sleep without slumbering, surrounded by the chorus of song.

paschalis

VI.

In the beginning the stories had not been written. In the beginning the stories had not been told. In the beginning the stories were not yet memories. In the beginning the stories had not happened.

In the beginning it was dawn and I held my pen and I watched the sun rise and it was good. So I wrote that down. Nothing else had happened and so there were no metaphors to draw from. There was no way to describe the feeling of a soul scrubbed clean from all the emotion and anger and disappointment that had passed before, for I did not know of the soul, I had never experienced emotion. That was all: the sun rose and it was good and I wrote it down, and in the writing it became anchored in place and time and it became memory.

In the beginning the sun rose and it was good and I wrote this down, it was my first, my only memory. As the day grew long shadows formed, shadows distinct from their shapes, for the shadows were unaware that they were expected to remain anchored to their forms. The shadows separated from their forms and there were two worlds at play: the separated shadows moved, formed alliances, danced, murdered. The evening grew close, chasing the heels of the afternoon, and as evening arrived shadows sought out the nests of their forms, returning home to roost and sleep in silence during the night. The two worlds were reunited and I watched the sun set and it was good, and I wrote this down as well. My second memory.