Starling Dusk

Winds in the east, mist comin' in Like somethin' is brewin' and 'bout to begin Can't put me finger on what lies in store But I feel what's to happen all happened before ...

Dan sat looking at the late Eleanor Ouellette. The open eyes, now beginning to glaze. The tiny hands with their palms upturned. Most of all at the open mouth. Inside was all the clockless silence of death. “Who are you?” Thinking: As if I didn’t know. Hadn’t he wished for answers? “You grew up fine.” The lips didn’t move, and there seemed to be no emotion in the words. Perhaps death had robbed his old friend of his human feelings, and what a bitter shame that would be. Or perhaps it was someon...

"Snow began to fall; a few flakes at first – then rather more than a few; until a million little flakes were drifting down from a soft, heavy greenish-grey sky. All the buildings of York became a little fainter, a little greyer in the snow; the people all seemed a little smaller; the cries and shouts, the footsteps and hoofsteps, the creaks of carriages and the slammings of doors were all a little more distant. And all these things became somehow less important until all the world contained was ...

"In my mind are all the tides, their seasons, their ebbs and their flows. In my mind are all the halls, the endless procession of them, the intricate pathways. When this world becomes too much for me, when I grow tired of the noise and the dirt and the people, I close my eyes and I name a particular vestibule to myself; then I name a hall." -- Piranesi ...

"The raft was not as seaworthy as I'd hoped. The waves repeatedly threatened to swamp it. I wasn't afraid to die. I was afraid of the emptiness that I felt inside. I couldn't feel anything. And that's what scared me. You came into my thoughts. You filled them. It felt good." --Searider Falcon ...

"The Poisoned Sleep of Tantalus" -- A room. A desk. A chair. A lamp, a dim glow, amber gloam and writhing shadows. The Books stacked high upon the desk, threatening to collapse. The trees outside the window. The wind in the trees. The door closed and locked shut, the rasp of a latch and the click of a bolt and the silence just after. Where has the key gone to now? The sullen towers of storm clouds on the horizon rolling down the hills, a color somewhere between the deepest ocean and the blackest...

"The Grave" -- I do not know what year it is or how old I am, but I do know that I am not quite old enough to care too much about those numbers just yet. I am in my grandmother's yard and she is doing yardwork and gardening in her straw sunhat and ordering me around, telling me to complete various gardening tasks so that she can pay me for pretending to work. As we toil around the yard she tells me the various names of the plants and shrubs and trees and tells me what they require to maintain. M...

"To Kill" -- It is 1996 and I am eleven years old and riding my bike in the sweltering summer heat down the country lane along the long straight three-mile stretch before the road curves and splits off up into the hills and forests where I live and was born. From behind me some older teens, some of whom I will years later go to school with in the nearby town, race past my bike in a convertible at sixty miles per hour, swerving the car toward me as they pass howling and shouting in strange guffaw...

They start giving Stacy Haldol when she is eleven. When she jumps out a fourth-story window and breaks her spine in five places, “they” tell her to do it. To jump. Different they. She smokes like a chimney from a life on neuroleptics. She is 44 years old but has lived one hundred years. She has an IQ of 147. She has a walker.  When the ex-nun hears Stacy coughing and wheezing one day just breathing from all those cigarettes, she says, “You’re killing me with the cigarettes and wheezing today, St...

The babystepping old man with the shuffling gait is in the McDonald’s parking lot every morning hunched over a bit scattering methodically some kind of birdfeed by the curb of the lot’s edge for the pigeons and crows. Looking up from his task momentarily he sees me walking by on the sidewalk by the parking lot. “Buenos Dias,” he says to me with a hillbilly lilt. I wave and say hello and keep walking. Later he’s not there anymore but I see the pigeons alighting in the parking lot where he scatter...

Top Gun: Maverick releases for streaming on my birthday. It is just a coincidence, but one of those coincidences that is not. The last time I saw a Tom Cruise movie I was in a hospital with two IVs in my arms and the taste of blood in my mouth. There was an all-day Mission Impossible movie marathon on TBS or some other basic-cable station. I think I fell asleep somewhere between Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and the end of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. There were some drugs, and they ga...

The spider in the glass piepan on the stovetop skitters in drunk circles, ever-expanding circles drawn wrong as if by an illiterate drawing pendulum, for days and days in circles and circles—until it hits the edges of the pan where then the spider and its circles creep up the sides and then again in hesitation turn around and circle back down as if the edges of the pan are the edges of the world, a world just waiting to be drawn. After a few days more the spider just stops moving altogether and ...

As I round the corner just off the street and into the park at a ninety-degree angle, a man with no shirt and one eye on a very stolen bike holding an apparently empty bucket on the handlebars shouts at me as loud as he can, "Wrong side of the road asshole!" I smile with half my mouth and say nothing and peer quickly askance into his bucket to see that it is in fact empty just as I pass him and keep going into the crimson bloody tarnation of fall's sea of sense and color. A little over a year l...

The starling dusk swarms the loping sun as walking through memories of her yard I wander deeper and as deeper I become all the moments made of flowers and trees unspool like the world as a ball of yarn unraveling then raveling again apart then together everything into a conflation of winter and summer and shadow and shade all as the same moment and in that moment lilacs bloom desperately in the starlight like tiny cobalt fires starving on the sweet sap of moonlight. Then the snow makes all the f...

"Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books." ...