Category: Fragments

At some point, walking along the snow-flocked train tracks in the winter evening’s half-light, I became aware. By this I mean: All that I was was now. I had no past to dwell within, chiding myself, steeped in regrets. I had no future lingering in the wings like a Dickens villain, ready to set me…

I never thought I would give you permission to cut down that giant oak tree in the back of the property, the one that had led my grandfather to buy this land in the first place. It had been tall even when he’d seen it as a young man only a year into his first…

Tee hated skim. Crystal knew that with all of ter heart: Tee hated Marcus, body and soul. The way that skee looked at tim, with that glib smirk, that cologne that skee wore in a cloud of sweet seduction, that swagger in sker step as skee stood by the coffee maker. And oh, how tee…

The wanderer stopped at the side of the road, stooped down, and considered an apple that had settled itself into the muddy sluiceway. It did not appear to have come there naturally. There were apple trees in the distance, to be sure: Ghostly fingers reaching up into the late November sky, backed by a gray…

A slow keening spread out across the landscape like a nuclear blast, slow at first and then enveloping everything in its wake. It was several moments before he realized that the noise was silent but within his own head. He looked around, deafened by the cacophony, at the faces of the people on the street…

In the distance: Gunshots. In the foreground: A young girl crouches by a gutter grate, poking leaves from last autumn in between the cast iron bars and listening to the plink-plink-plink of pebbles falling into the water down below. She is black. She is wearing a school uniform. Her hair is in pigtails, held in…

At the end of a long pier, beneath an autumn evening’s sky, over the water that was growing chilly with the coming winter’s winds, in between two otherwise unnoteworthy moments in a constant stream of mentally photographed breaths, as a skip in the fabric of a thumping monotony of similitude, I saw on the island…