# Pause ## User guide ### Navigation sample::: | Tap | To select | | ◀︎︎ Left side | Story | | NEXT (in breadcrumbs, above) | Next story in a chapter | | ⚙️ Gear icon (bottom, right) | Setting | | Browser's **Find** | Keyword | :::sample To find a keyword, use your browser's **Find** feature: Ctrl F (⌘ F for macOS). Clickable notes appear {like this}. :: like this: This is a note revealed by clicking a token word or phrase. :: ### Copyright Copyright © 2026 by Roger Alan Kenyon All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Contact: zipwits@gmail.com. The characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. ### Introduction quote::: Traveller, there is no road; you make the road as you walk. — Antonio Machado, Proverbs and Songs 29, 1912 :::quote Nothing explodes. No one saves the world. Instead, small lives tip. A cart wrangler starts reading the parking lot like a tarot spread. A radio broadcaster abandons weather charts for the emotional forecast. What happens—and what we hope will happen—lives in the lines, and in what slips between them. ### Blurb Something has ended; something else is beginning to breathe. In the hush between, a quiet waits to see which way you turn. Lyrical is a collection of narratives that linger in that interval. Here, a copier chews up resignation letters. A milk-carton face gazes through lake ice. No heroes, no finish lines—just the slow tick between heartbeats when the day tilts. If you’ve ever paused on a threshold, unsure which foot to lift, step inside. These stories won’t hand you a map, but they’ll stand beside you on the porch until you choose the next step. # Decisive Places ## Rooms I find myself already inside ### Cartomancy flow::: A guy like me, you don’t grow up dreaming of carts. You end up here, orange vest, one rubber wheel screaming on every train of metal. They scatter them like breadcrumbs across the lot—half-on curbs, marooned in the oil stains, lined up neat by the ones who still believe in systems. One slow Tuesday, I notice two nose-to-nose by the cart corral. No reason for it, nothing around but a crumpled receipt and broken pen. At the end of my shift, the cashier says, “They finally did it, called it quits, you could feel it in the break room.” I remember those two, bumped together like an argument that never learned to walk away. Next week, there’s a whole herd jammed sideways across the handicapped space. One upended, done for the day. That night, the assistant manager dropped his name tag into the trash and never returned. After that, I start paying attention. A perfect row of four by the returns bay on a Monday morning, lined up like soldiers. By lunch, they’ve hired four summer kids. Three of them pushed into the hedge, half-hidden, one wheel caught like a hand that doesn’t want to be seen. That evening, the loud girl from produce shows up with her hair cut off, eyes red but proud. I don’t tell anyone. What would you say? Hey, your life is spelled out in steel wire and bad steering between the coffee shop and the tire place. It keeps happening. A ring of carts around the light pole, a loose circle, a gap at the north side. Later, there’s talk at register three about some kind of neighbourhood watch starting up, one old guy missing from the sign-up sheet. Two weeks in, I start testing it. On a slow afternoon, I pull one cart away from the loading zone, ease it down to the far corner by the busted stop sign, and leave it there like a question. The next day, a woman I’ve never seen stands at that sign for a long time, no bus schedule there, no reason, just staring at the road like it’s about to answer. I move pairs apart, I close circles, I snake a whole crooked line right up to the sliding doors. Inside, some guy at customer service wins fifty bucks on a scratch ticket and tells everyone the streak is starting. They start calling me “prophet” as a joke because I always seem to know when the rain is coming, when the rush will hit, when the registers are going to freeze. They don’t know I’m reading my own scripture in the parking lot. One evening, sky low and storm-yellow, I come out to a mess. Steel frames everywhere— pointed at each other, pointed away, one jammed into the yellow pole, two stacked like they’re trying to climb out. In the middle of all that, there’s a clear path from the returns bay straight down the aisle between cars, all the way to the road. Nothing blocking it, no wheel tracks, just dry concrete pale as a finger-bone. I stand there with my hands on the handle of the nearest one, feeling the shake of the bad wheel before it even moves. Maybe it’s just lazy customers, wind, gravity. But the line is there, and my name is humming in it. I could drag them back, break the pattern—circle, pile, chaos. I’ve done it before. Instead, I leave that path open, stack the rest where they belong, feel the night watching. Clock out. Punch, hollow clack. The manager asks if I want more hours. I say, “not tonight.” Out in the lot, I walk exactly where the concrete is bare, past those sleeping in their rows, past the diesel green by the drain, all the way to the curb, where the town starts being something else. Cars hiss by. The store hums behind me like a big quiet animal. I look down at my hands, empty, no handle, no metal rattle, and for the first time in a long time, there is nothing to push. The prophecy doesn’t say what happens after that. Which, for once, is the best part. :::flow ### Chance of kindness flow::: The ad said: Weather Person Needed. No Experience. No Drama. Which was a lie because this town was nothing but drama, and no one here knew the weather. The station was a brick box with a bent antenna, as if it had half a thought. The manager was chewing on a pen. “Can you show up on time and talk without freezing?” That was the whole interview. Next morning, it’s me, coffee that tastes like dust, and a microphone older than I am. She hands me a script: numbers, percentages, all those little lies about control. Out the window near the harbour, a guy in a red jacket is arguing with a gull over a French fry. So I say: “It’ll be pleasant, light wind. If you’ve been meaning to forgive, this is a good day for that.” No one bursts in to drag me out by the headphones. The second day, skip the printout. “Clear sky, chance of thinking about old mistakes at red lights. Breathe when it turns green.” The calls start. A trucker: “You can’t call it a ‘gust of regret’ when the flag isn’t moving.” He laughs like he hasn’t in a while and hangs up. A woman leaves a message: “You said there’d be fog last night for people who can’t sleep. I opened my window, and it found me.” I keep going. “Scattered courage along the waterfront. Watch for people telling the truth too fast. No advisory issued. Take your chances.” The baker starts writing my forecast on a chalkboard next to the croissants. · TODAY: LIGHT SPENDING · MORNING CHANCE OF LONELINESS · SUDDEN HOPE AROUND 3 P.M. The grocery store kid nods at me when I buy milk. “You were right about that ‘afternoon doubt.’ Aisle four was full of it.” One night, the sky is clean like it’s been wiped. No excuse up there for anything. Inside the phones are already blinking. I go on air. “Officially, clear, calm, no trouble. Unofficially, there’s a front stalled over three apartments and one rambler with the porch light on. If your chest feels heavy when you open the fridge, that’s local pressure. Stand near a window; let some of it out.” Afterwards, the manager leans in the doorway. “You’re supposed to read the weather, not rearrange it.” But she’s smiling and doesn’t tell me to stop. Maybe this is how it works: I say “chance of kindness before noon” and some bored clerk bags groceries a little softer. I say, “Watch for sudden clarity on the bus route,” and a woman looks up from her phone and finally decides to leave or stay, or call or not call. I’m no seer. I’m just the one with the microphone and an old habit of paying attention. The town keeps waking up. Alarm clocks, kettles, dogs scratching at doors. They think they’re listening for rain or sun or wind. Really, they’re waiting for someone to say: this is how it feels out there today. You’re not wrong for feeling it. Go on. :::flow ### Shelter bingo flow::: When the soup pots are scrubbed and the cots are still folded against the far wall, Sister and I wheel out what’s left of the card catalogue. Four oak drawers, brass pulls cool to the touch. The library upstairs is gutted. Only brittle index cards survive. Yellowed, typed, stamped with dates ending before I was born. I draw five cards and study them like a poker hand: · Astrology—Beginner’s Guide · Breadmaking—Sourdough · Golden Retrievers · Lorca, Federico García · Tires—Basic Repair Not books I’ve read, but words I like pronouncing. Matty sits on a milk crate, shoebox in his lap, and becomes the caller. “Science fiction—anybody holding science fiction?” Seven heads shake no. The prize tin rattles with odds and ends: a chipped mug, a roll of mints, a bar of soap that guarantees first turn in the shower. That’s the one I’m after. “Virginia Woolf—any Virginia Woolf out there?” Mrs. Dorsey flips a card and grins. “First letter B—Brontë, Baseball, …” I lay my Sourdough card face-down. A pencilled note on the back says Try page 56, but the book is long gone. One down, four to go. Every flipped card is a knock on a locked door, just in case you’re inside. Jody wins on Intro to Poetry—volume never returned—and hoists the handle-less mug like silver. We reshuffle. I keep Astrology and swap the others for fresh luck. Matty digs again: “Cookbooks? Spanish Civil War? Origami?” Each shout is a firefly in the night. Bingo is a stubborn ritual, holding the night open a little longer, a reason not to crawl to bed hungry or sad. No miracles—just the mercy of being seen, of hearing your card called. Most prizes end up abandoned by the radiator, but the soap bar travels pocket to pocket, promising hot water at dawn. :::flow ### Farmer’s talking cow flow::: Tuesday night at Mariner’s Rest, the air smelled of fryer grease and floor varnish. Nick—combat-veteran eyes, news-junkie shrug—nursed a single malt while I worked on a pilsner that tasted like better days and told a joke about a farmer with a talking cow. Nick’s laugh hit the ceiling fan and rained back down. The bartender slapped the bar so hard the pretzel bowl bounced. Fast-forward to Saturday afternoon, to a funeral home foyer with a carpet thick as the word “plush.” Mr Thompson stood beside his wife’s closed casket, floating in that numb space widowers occupy. The room needed air, so I offered the same farmer-and-cow routine, soft voice, respectful pacing. When the punchline hit, the room went as dead as Mrs Thompson. Two nights later, my cousin Maria dropped by—the one who once convinced me raw jalapeños were candy. For nostalgia’s sake, I fried grasshoppers like our grandmother did: salt, lime, quick sizzle. Maria recoiled as if it were broken glass. “How can you still eat those things?” Same kitchen, same smell of citrus and oil, different appetite. After she left, I sat in the glow of the bistro sign across the street, replaying the three scenes. Exact words, same crunch, wildly different echoes. A joke, snack, even a truth behaves like a radio signal: you need the receiver tuned, antenna up, static down—or nothing gets through. I ate the last grasshopper, tasting lime and context. Truth needs ears wrapped around an open mind. :::flow ### Prissy marble flow::: The east lobby, its prissy marble, you know what I’m talking about—must be a bear for you on day shift. Three-thirty, the ballroom done, I step out and see shoe prints. Red clay zigzagged in from the street. Beyond pigeon-toed, you know, how’s a man even standing like that? Prints start at the revolving door and end opposite the elevator. No exit, no more prints, just wall. A tulip petal stuck in the panel. On my round, I found a tulip pot riding an elevator, leaving a water ring. Roof garden’s potting mix, red clay. The kitchen steward kept herbs there. Then the stroke stole his balance. Yeah, I knew him. His wife—a chambermaid—died last year. That panel once held her plaque: In loving memory of Avelina Reyes “Shine a floor clean enough to dance.” Somebody’s angry they pulled it down. Leave the red steps for management—let them wipe regret off prissy marble. :::flow ### Pigeon man flow::: The pigeon man never looked up. He fed them from a paper sack like he owed them something. I watched him every Tuesday until I realized I’d started bringing my own bread. There’s a kind of gravity to repetition. One week, he didn’t show. The pigeons waited anyway. That’s the week I finally applied for the job I said I didn’t want. :::flow ### Fountain quarter flow::: The plaza is almost empty, its cobbles slick from last night’s rain. I drift to the fountain, running a thumb over the stone, past carved hearts and weathered initials. A lone quarter rests on the rim, brighter than the bronze nymph at the centre. Maybe it’s lost by a child, pockets swaggering with tin whistles and bus tokens. I picture the faces of those who pitch wishes without returning to collect. Pigeons edge near, quick-footed accountants darting but never daring to claim the coin. One flick and I could send it skittering in, gather the wish for myself. Instead, I leave it—a wish belongs where it lands. I sit and watch as the city wakes. When I rise, a slice of sun sets the quarter aglow. The pigeons flutter; the quarter stays put, balanced above its destination. :::flow ### At pool’s edge flow::: I stand at my pool’s edge, morning light casting a golden glow over the water. It’s a strange impulse that has seized me to swim across every pool in the neighbourhood. “Why?” my wife asks. “I feel that I have to,” is all I can offer. The first few pools are a blur of chlorine and adrenaline. Tom Henderson leans on his rake as I approach. “Jack? What the hell are you doing?” “I’m swimming every pool in the ’hood.” “Why?” “I’m looking for something, but not sure what.” Tom’s pool is half-drained; his kid lost interest. Mrs. Martin sits by her pool, tears streaming down her face. “Mrs. Martin? Are you okay?” “Oh, it’s you, Jack. I’m fine, just … life, you know?” I don’t know, not really. The Martins always seemed to have everything figured out. “Can I still swim across your pool?” I stare at my feet, awaiting a reply. She laughs. “Sure, why not? Maybe you’ll find what I lost.” She holds a chewed dog collar; I recognize the tag. By the last pool, my body is weary; my skin, wrinkled. My wife waits, a towel in her hands. “So? Did you find it?” “I found something,” I say. “Everyone has their own pool to swim across.” “Welcome home,” she whispers. :::flow ### Bus space flow::: The bus moves and everyone sways with it, a horizontal elevator full of people who got up too early or stayed up too late. Nobody talks. Nobody smiles. Mornings aren’t built for that. Heads tilted, eyes on phones or windows. You can hear the engine clear its throat at every light. The brakes sigh, and we remain suspended. I think about space. Not rockets and helmets, but the kind between people. Here, we’re all trying to find equal distance without measuring tapes. You feel a knee too close and you shift, I shift, and that’s the whole negotiation. A backpack swings, a stroller edges past, and we make room without saying anything. A turned shoulder becomes a wall. A nod when someone sits beside feels like a truce. We’re all different—different keys on different rings, different doors waiting—shapes in heavy coats, trying not to bump into each other. Everyone guards something they’d rather not spill in public. But there’s a rough kindness in the way a hand shoots out to steady someone and then disappears like it never happened. The bus moves on. We leak out one by one into our separate days, leaving a warm seat and a little folded air that holds our shape until the doors close. :::flow ### First light flow::: I slip from my wife’s soft snores, swing out of the feather bed, and land in boots as worn as my splintered bones. Three pats along the wall, and the hiding switch finally clicks. My hat and coat, having weathered more storms than their maker intended, are reluctant to replace the warmth of slumber— or guard against the breeze carrying crows in the first light over the horizon. The barn door and I groan as one, opening to a world of braying, bleating, and clucking reminders. The air is half hay, half manure, all obligation. So I move from stall to stall, boots sucking mud, while the red sky decides whether to keep its warning. :::flow ### Wordlessly flow::: “When the dogs are barking,” Elinor said, sliding the screen door, “it’s best to see what’s on the street.” A disc flew in, the kind kids toss to one another. She flicked it back with more finesse than she possessed. That launched the pups in pursuit. “They’ll be back. Hunger has a way of finding home.” Elinor found the envelope on the stoop. Another letter from the pastor. Last September, she was relieved of duties as choir master with a letter much like this—for the curse of perfect pitch. Try as she might, Elinor could not conceal the need to help others find the right note. After note, after note. That worked well when she was resident conductor at the University, but the pastor preferred a church setting more forgiving. Members of the parish were less inclined to return tolerance, and in a small town, disgruntlement multiplies in a neighbour’s ear. She was let go, and the spring concert did not go well. The pastor’s letter said so, though in other words: “Come back, we need you.” Instead, Elinor accepted the role of guest conductor far from home. Through the wonders of technology, we kept in daily contact. “Missing you” became “feeling lonely,” became “the food inedible,” and the heat “unbearable.” Each message wrapped in a plea, but the woman who left was not the woman who returned. Elinor was placed in care, and her world became smaller. She knew, despite the hunger, there was no finding home. I practiced a song with her. No longer with words, Elinor tugged on my finger when a note was not on key. Her pitch remained perfect, and we practiced with every visit. The tugs came less often. The pastor woke me: Come quickly. And so I sang my song for Elinor. Wordlessly. Perfectly, at least to her. I sang my one love song, as full as the moon, and returned home to my dogs in silence. :::flow ## Settings that sharpen the question ### Belly-full, aisles empty flow::: Cart wheels stamp rubber signatures the buffing machine never erases. The night manager ticks the checklist anyway. Clean enough for the morning rush. Flickering fluorescents reveal more than they hide: mop water drying to a milky film, fingerprints on every cooler handle, a bag of jalapeños abandoned between rival brands of orange juice. Someone couldn’t be bothered to walk back to Produce. What else do we set down and forget? I picture this little store inhaling a day’s worth of coins, then exhaling every customer, leaving shelves belly-full and aisles empty of thieving feet. Nothing moving but the midnight trucks, beep-beep easing into the dock until the bump of tires ends with a hiss. Inside, the skid-mark stories wait for tomorrow’s lights. :::flow ### Hard copy flow::: The graveyard shift is me, hot plastic, and the fluorescent hum. Four hulks stand in a row, each with its own glitch. One smears; two squeals; three naps when it’s needed most. Four stays polite—until it isn’t. The sign says OPEN, but the shop is mostly moths, toner dust, and one kid in a hoodie. He slides a job application into Machine 4, hits START, then steps back like he lit a fuse. Machine 4 coughs, shudders, and spits out half-words—motiv… relo… regret…—like it bit into a lemon. He swears softly, apologizes to nobody in particular, and leaves without trying again. By week’s end, a snowdrift of rejected paper has gathered under the counter. · resignation letter stripped of “I hereby…” · custody form with both names gnawed off · note to a boss that never reaches the word “enough” Flyers glide through, coupons skate, choir programmes sing. Only the heavy stuff jams. A nurse in thick-sole sneakers feeds her CV into Machine 1. It yields clean, page after page, no smears, no drama. She leaves a peppermint on the counter—hazard pay for the lighting buzz. A guy in a bright tie brings in divorce papers and a box of old photos he’s not ready to throw out. Machine 3 prints his copies like a champ. He walks out lighter by a weight he thinks is paper. One night, I bring in my own stack. Nothing fancy. A formal complaint with bullet points about overtime that never hit the paycheque, the word “hostile” docking like a grey ship. A rental application for an apartment that does not share a parking lot with this place. Machine 4 accepts the complaint with a gentle handshake; for a second, I think I’ve imagined everything. Then the motor growls, and the page lurches sideways into teeth. When I open the hatch, the words have braided themselves into ribbons that all end in “but.” I pick out one curl of paper stuck to the drum: “…enough.” That’s all that survives, sitting in my palm like a fortune. For the lease, I don’t risk it. I give it to Machine 1, the smudger, the safe one, the one that wounds ink but not intent. It rolls through with a steady clack, printing my name eight times as though it’s already on the mailbox. Out front, the first commuter rattles the locked door, reads the hours, tugs once more. He’ll be back. I won’t. I shut the main breaker, listen to the hum drain from the walls, and drop my name tag into the trash with the paper shreds. The key, fed back through the mail slot, lands with a hollow ping. Dawn smells of diesel, and I walk toward a bus I’ve never taken. :::flow ### Shop of pawns flow::: The guitars that once dangled like hit singles are gone. In their place hang bicycles too small for yesterday’s riders and, worst of all, racks of baby clothes—tiny sleeves folded out of somebody’s Plan A. Mid-morning, a woman edges to the counter, eyes flicking for exits. She sets down a shoebox; inside, a porcelain doll with lashes glued shut. “One more.” I shake my head. The shelves already sag. Her lips tremble; she unclasps a locket whose chain glimmers with memories she can’t afford. I nod. The register chimes, too much like a bell for last rites. Fred barrels in, cheeks blotched, slamming a broken wristwatch. “Fix it!” “Fred, we pawn—we don’t repair.” He leaves without the watch, fear ticking louder than the clock on the wall. Then chaos: a teenage boy shoving a mountain bike through doors built for walkers. Tires jam; the frame clatters. I know that face, freckle by the eye. Dad, I—” Guilt outruns him down the street. I stare at the pawn ticket in my hand—need traded for hope, hope tagged for someone else’s need and realize the wheel has rolled over my own front step. :::flow ### Intruder flow::: Keep your beams high on Old North Road tonight. I nearly clipped something that had no shadow. It came barreling from behind the Quick-Mart, where half the security bulbs are out. Head low, shoulders like rolling luggage, it owned the pavement. Black on black; impossible to see until it filled the headlights. I thought it was a stranger, but the stranger wore fur. Trash bags lay torn open, snack wrappers skating down the gutter. Supper for a wanderer. Ease off the throttle if you’re out that way. What I almost hit was a bear, heavier than my hatchback. Call it an intruder if you want, but remember: we set the table. :::flow ### One side, please flow::: The departure hall glitters like a great terrarium—steel vines, glass leaves, fluorescent sun. In this ticketed biome, every traveller tows a small, wheeled future. “Going somewhere better,” the loudspeakers vow, pumping syllables through recycled air. Two elastic belts corral the crowd into a single slow serpent. Its scales are laptops; its rattle a chorus of zippers. Overhead, the departures board flickers: cities blink in and out of existence like dying stars. “Stand to one side, please.” The agent’s monotone splits the serpent, shearing off four mismatched atoms: · a cuff-linked businessman steeped in bergamot and nerves · a mother rocking a milk-drowsy infant · a magenta-haired girl with earbuds the size of medals · me, passport sweating in my palm, wondering which algorithm flagged us as errors. The river of belts and shoes keeps flowing—bagged liquids held aloft in clear plastic penance—while our little island harbours the same unspoken question: What’s wrong with us? The businessman grips his watch as if time were overdue. The mother hums a song only the baby understands. Magenta Hair death-scrolls gum, snapping like a protest banner. I audit the sounds: the tumble of trays, the thunk of luggage, the soft click of possibility shrinking. “This is bullshit,” Magenta flares, a flare shot from a lifeboat. The baby punctuates it with a sneeze; even the watch ticks harder in assent. The agent glances over, bored deity guarding a narrow gate. “Random secondary,” he shrugs, turning back to the stream of compliant bodies. Random as hailstones. Random as love letters lost in the post. Time coagulates; talk seeps through the cracks. The businessman’s daughter plays cello in London. The mother was to meet her husband at Gate 42. Magenta is flying to a gaming convention where nobody will ask her to tone it down. Even I confess: “I’m going home for a funeral, but I keep pretending it’s a vacation.” At last, the agent waves us forward with the casual grace of someone flicking crumbs from a table. We rejoin the living river, feed our offerings to the conveyor, and pass beneath the blinking arch— neither cleansed, nor condemned, only briefly visible to one another in the fluorescent hush. Flights still board, coffee still pours, possibilities still taxi down lit tracks. For one breath we hover, four strangers wired into a transient tribe—then scatter toward our separate Elsewheres. :::flow ### Doing solitary flow::: There was a time when I thought I was something special, waving my arms like a maestro, certain the world took its cues from me. Then the hearing blew—sudden as a fuse. Now I’m stuck in a box, a silo of stillness, grimacing at the irony of deafening silence. “You’ll figure it out,” I mumble in words that tumble like shells with all the pow blown out. The courtyard beneath my feet feels more than my ears. Then, I see something as ordinary as it is at first meaningless: leaves dragged by a stubborn breeze. There’s this maple, scratching the concrete with brittle fingers, resisting the wind’s insistence on pushing its way to elsewhere. They don’t know each other, but they’re caught up together in the same struggle for victory. It’s a language I grasp in silence, able to listen because I cannot hear. Turns out silence has its own subtitles. :::flow ### Lusitania’s last encore flow::: I breathe against the southern coast of Ireland. Slate-grey and restless deep. Mornings, I polish the hulls of steamers. Tonight, I cradle a brass-lit palace drifting across my ribs. Above me, laughter clinks with crystal. Below, torpedoes prowl like blind sharks. I know what is coming, yet I keep my counsel. On the promenade deck, he walks—Ethan, the smooth-tongued. Lapels flapping like gull wings. “I sell salvation you can button,” he tells the ladies. I taste his confidence, salt-sharp. The coat he wears is puffed with cork and lies: unsinkable, unbeatable, inevitable. Coins jingle; fear stays leashed—for now. In the grand hall, a vaudeville troupe powders its courage. A girl in spangles twirls a parasol. A baritone juggles punchlines and pool cues. They rehearse for Eden while I whisper Judgment under the keel. Their music rises—banjos, clarinets, a snare drum mimicking my own heartbeats. A German U-boat exhales metal into my blue lung. The ship shudders; chandeliers gasp. Decks tilt like unanswered prayers. Ethan mounts a table, hawking hope that cannot float. His words drowned in the roar of bursting bulkheads and the animal cry of 1,200 souls. I open my mouth; the Atlantic drinks. The troupe refuses my silence. They play while carpets sluice with champagne and seawater, while lifeboats creak, while the ship folds into me like a collapsing stage set. Their final chord is a high C that slices the night—I carry it down, a pearl in my dark pocket. Ethan’s miracle coat balloons, then betrays him, cork popping free, he clings to a floating deck chair, shares a final swig of top-shelf whiskey with a stranger, and slips beneath my skin. I hold him—not cruel, only complete. Years drift. One afternoon, I burp a green bottle onto a quiet strand. A boy pries out the note, words blurred but two still legible: Ethan Hurry The paper smells of rust and orchestra smoke; the boy begins collecting my secrets. Those I spared meet each May beside pub hearths, raising glasses to me, to luck, to guilt. Their laughter wobbles like a lantern in gale wind. One by one, they toast. One by one, I reclaim them until only stories attend the reunion. The boy grows old. Tonight he stands at the water’s edge, my bottle cradled like a soft-shell egg. I lap around his boots, humming a tune I learned from banjos in a ballroom. He asks what I remember. I answer in foam and hush: Coats sink, music lingers. Promises falter, courage carries. Listen—you can still hear the high C riding my tide. :::flow ### Yours then mine flow::: The sun scorches the street, but there you are, pushing that stubborn reel mower up and down your yard, then crossing into mine. A trim, not a full cut. And why not—every day you’re at it, unless the rain rolls in. When winter takes over, you trade the mower for a shovel, clear your square of concrete, then mine, breath puffing in little ghosts. When the ice comes, you know when to quit fighting and let the elements win. You have years stacked behind you like boxes in a hallway, but you never act as if it’s a chore. All you want is a bit of talk, a few words tossed back and forth. Maybe next year we'll marry and make a clean deal of it. If we can’t find better, let’s make it a pair. I’ll be your worthy default, the one you turn to when the day’s work is done. You will be my familiar, a constant in a constantly changing world. Together, neither young nor old, we’ll sit on the veranda when the day cools and talk. Or not. And that will be enough. More than enough because we have each other. :::flow ## Conversations fixed in place ### Three stops to the river flow::: You’re bleeding on the seat, man—it’s starting to pool. It’s the sleeve, not the seat. I’ll wipe it when I get off. Your hand’s shaking so hard, I bet wipe-down never happens. Seriously, dude—blame the bus; everything’s rattling. The bus doesn’t have a knife riding its hip. Stainless catches the light; hard to miss. If it worries you, move to another row and let me ride in peace. I ride this route every night. This is where my knees fit, so I’m staying put. I’m not looking for trouble with anyone here. Everybody says that right before trouble kicks in the door. The blade’s for me, White Knight, not random strangers. Self-harm doesn’t make us safer; just changes who cleans the mess. You don’t know my story. Don't pretend you know me. I know you picked a seat out of camera range, and keep staring at your shoes. Buddy, really? Maybe I’m just tired. Tired leans on the glass; tired doesn't bring hardware. Fine—HR boxed my life and walked me out like luggage. Cardboard with a guard escort—I’ve done that dance. Then you get why I’m finished, now get out of my face. I get why you’re wrecked, not why the river deserves your pulse. Rent spikes next month and the account’s empty; math is math. Endings are rarely that clean, and you have three stops to edit the equation. Why do you care at all? This a priest thing, earning a saviour badge? I treat this bus like a second apartment and don’t want police tape on the upholstery. Second apartment—homeless? Maybe I have a bridge for you. I bake nights on Maple; ten to dawn, I know every rattle in this tin can. A baker, not a shrink. Flour doesn’t hand out licenses, but I listen better than HR did. Listening won’t refill my wallet, not even my belly. Might keep you alive long enough to figure out what will. You sound so certain. You think one chat flips a switch? My stop’s in five; there’s a sink in the bakery for the blood and a tray of rolls nobody’s buying. You give bread to every stray? What if I stay on? Then I get off alone, you keep the knife, and we both replay this ride forever. Give me one reason to hand you the blade. It’s heavy in your pocket; heavier in your head. I have thicker pockets and lighter thoughts. You ever walk to that rail yourself? Looked once, decided the water was colder than the future. What stopped you? Give me a reason and don't make it pray. Owed my buddy twenty bucks for rent; Dying felt like skipping the tab. Twenty bucks saved you? That's some small anchor. Small anchor holds if you grab it; maybe a cinnamon roll does the trick for you. If I get off with you, I keep the right to bail tomorrow. Keep what you want; I’m offering tonight. You decide what tomorrow is. :::flow ### Terms and conditions apply flow::: You changed the locks without asking—I felt every new tooth scrape my throat. I pay the rent in full and on time. The lease doesn’t mention your feelings. You signed twelve pages of my feelings; they called it “no structural changes.” A deadbolt is not a renovation. It’s basic backbone, basic security. You call it security; I call it a metal stutter in my studs. If you didn’t groan at 3 a.m., I wouldn’t need extra locks. You leaned a ladder into my ribs and called it “just checking the gutter.” I was checking if you were leaking. The inspector’s coming Tuesday; market’s hot. Inspector tastes like eviction; why invite a stranger under my tongue? If I sell, I clear the sum. Maybe I finally breathe. You breathe fine; I count every breath through your vents when you jitter at 2 a.m. Jitters don’t pay the mortgage. A sale does. New start, clean slate. Open concept is hollowed-out hope; staged fruit doesn’t know your coffee order. You think you know my habits because you hear me pacing. I learned your passwords by echo; I hum them in the pipes when you forget. So you’ve been editing my outages, stalling my glitches? Your hand shook on the keyboard. I froze the signal until you stopped. That’s not comfort, that’s control. You remember everything. Bad framing started when you whispered “I don’t deserve this place” into my plaster. I’d just lost the job. One black night, too much noise in my head. You were rehearsing leaving; the words left fingerprints in my frame. All the more reason to sell. I’m tired of falling behind. Behind what? The neighbours’ driveways, their debt, their shine? Behind who I thought I’d be by now. This house is proof that I failed. These rooms saw you bake bread at midnight, laugh on the line, dance badly in socks. They also saw me faceplant on bills and let the bank ring out. If you sell, I become listing photos, then blueprints, then a broken pile. Houses don’t get a vote. That’s how ownership works. Tell that to the stair you dodge each morning because it complains under your heel. It complains because it’s rotten. Like the patch over the kitchen. Rot set in where the leak met your silence; we both let that spread. I couldn’t afford the fix. I still can’t. You could afford a therapist before you could afford another realtor. Therapists don’t fix roofs. Banks don’t take emotional equity. But you sleep sounder when you speak; I creak softer when you’re honest. Honest, then? I did list you. Appointment tomorrow at four. So that’s the knock I keep hearing, hours before anyone arrives. If the offer’s high enough, they’ll gut you and I’ll run. Run where? To another echo that doesn’t know your nightmares yet? To a smaller space. Less pressure. No history watching me fail. You don’t want less history; you want one room that forgives it. You can’t forgive. You’re nailed to my worst days. Or you call the bank before the broker and ask for a breath instead of a buyer. You think they’ll listen because my house has opinions? They’ll listen if you show up early, paper in hand, voice still shaking. If I cancel the showing, we’re stuck with each other. Stuck is one word; rooted is another. Rooted sounds like work. It also sounds…less lonely. Lonely was the month before you moved in; rain walked through me like I was nothing. Fine. I’ll stall the sale, call the bank, ask for time instead of escape. Time is what I’m built of; escape is just a door you slam. If they say no, we’re back here. Same cracks, same debt. Same roof over your head, same windows learning your seasons. And if they say yes, you’re stuck with my attempts to fix things. Attempts are lighter than wrecking balls; I was always meant to live under repairs. Who owns who, then, really? Last chance to claim the title. You own the choice; I own the echo that answers it. :::flow # Weathering Life ## Red sky at night ### Grandmother’s goldfish flow::: My grandmother’s goldfish has outlived two husbands and a kitchen renovation. The latter hurt more. Unbothered by gossip or grout, the fish watched laughter flare, storms drum. It felt the hush when new tiles set. It heard prayers in the pipes each dawn. Memory unbroken, its mouth puckers at stories no one else remembers. That fish is the only thing she trusts to keep her secrets, swimming serenely on shifting wallpaper. :::flow ### Threshed flow::: The farm reeks of pig and Hereford manure—sharp notes jabbing every gust. Past the pens, wheat swells to our chests. To a platoon of cousins, that’s the Pacific. We drop to hands and knees, submarine-style, popping up as periscopes, shouting bearings only we understand. Hide-and-seek lasts until Grandpa’s cowbell calls us to fried chicken and skillet greens. Straw in our hair, grins wide as cobs, we sprint toward the house. Toward Dad’s halting palms as he scans the wake we carved. Grain flattened cannot be thrashed, but—standing up—we could. “Threshed,” my older brother whispers, because vocabulary is his favourite weapon. A distinction, I point out, that doesn’t change much. Besides, back then, we knew no better. Wheat heads were scenery until the combine made them income. Years later, I understand Pa’s tight jaw; each crushed stalk meant pennies gone before harvest. Still, when summer winds ripple through tall grain, my shoulders dip, ready to dive into an ocean of bread. :::flow ### Chairs flow::: Sunday settles in a pot-roast haze, the table still cluttered. Dad’s chin drifts to his chest the way it does now that clocks seem to move faster on him than on the rest of us. My daughters nudge each other, waiting to see which orbit he’ll choose when he comes back. He stirs, head tilting like a radio dial finding the station. “I’ll be right there,” he promises—none of us knows where “there” is, but the intent rings true. Mom sees the danger first: his water glass is slowly circling toward the edge. She slips in, lifts the slice of shoofly-pie (he likes the name, not the molasses), and steadies the glass mid-wobble without spilling a diplomatic drop. Dad blinks twice, spots the Windsor chair under him, and picks up the conversation he thinks we were having: “All turned on a hand lathe,” he announces, patting the armrest. “Not a lick of electricity touched these hickory beauties.” The girls exchange a glance across the gravy boat. Grandpa might lose the thread of lunchtime, but he can splice it to a decade-old woodworking tour with every spline intact. Above us, the kitchen clock bumps forward; beside us, a man and his chairs stay perfectly on the mark. :::flow ### Missing manual flow::: Wobbling on training wheels, my son asked if this is how I learned. “Nah. I just read the directions.” We both laughed. Grandpa’s directions were simpler: steer or kiss cement. “Scraped knees talk louder than talk.” He was right. Within a week, the pedals were part of my feet. In Mr. B’s typing class, he threw tea towels over the keyboards so no one could cheat. Letters vanished; muscle memory typed without consulting the eyes. I think about that each time I visit Grandma. Twin needles flick like synchronized swimmers while she chats about grocery prices, and a cable-knit unfurls beneath her fingers. She hasn’t glanced at a pattern since coffee was a dollar, letting hands remember what her mind no longer needs. Grandma, too, lost the manual. It drifted to her toes, and it’s still there, tying her shoes. :::flow ### Bumper cars flow::: The lilacs hit that over-sweet note this week—the signal of spring’s surrender to summer simmer. The carnival trailers will be unfolding metal ribs beside Memorial Field by Friday night. We liberate our gym sneakers for a more pressing purpose and jog—laces slapping, tickets sweaty in our palms—to the bumper-cars. The track throbs. The air tastes of ozone and spilled cola. We know which cars are ours. Yours, scuffed red; mine, chipped blue. Because the faster we spot each other in the jam, the sooner the hunt begins. First impact always comes by the far rail, a full-body jolt that rattles the steering column and rib cage. Second hit is an ambush: you pretending to spin out, me charging, both of us timing the swerve so fibreglass bends to fibreglass. Brothers knowing where to lunge at each other. The world outside the pavilion tunnels into bokeh—spinning bulbs, moths, somebody else’s pop song. All I can see is your grin framed in that ridiculous rock-’em sock-’em red car and the unsaid agreement that no other target exists until the ride operator throws the master switch. Beyond the rail, our sisters are bookends beside Mum, pink cotton candy forming sticky clouds around their wrists. They roll their eyes, boredom performed for maximum effect, but I catch Mum smiling into the chaos, like she remembers a tilt-a-whirl deal of her own. Lights flash. Power cuts. Cars heave to a halt, seemingly too heavy to have ever run at all. We climb out, shins bruised, the scent of lilac drifting in from the field’s far edge. Same routine every year, yet somehow it feels like the first swing of summer—motion ours alone. :::flow ### Kiddom of dirt flow::: We were filthy poor, but never poor in play. The world gave us dirt—we took it, bruised palms and laughing, as battlefield, as bounty, as kingdom for a day. With adults elsewhere, we carved a swimming pool—a dream dug into the side yard clay. Hands full of summer, hands full of grit, mosquito-bitten, shovel's swinging, my brother's hands, my hands, clay and sweat and hope in every scoop. Kids tending to one another in a world not yet made of headlines. We pressed our luck with BB guns—discoverers, not delinquents, learning a cardboard coat is adequate armour if you double the layers. Should’ve put that in the Science Fair, not magnets and brine shrimp that look nothing like Aquaman on a comic-book coupon. We had a shovel. We had a hose rusted to a faucet hiding in a thorny bush. Short straw sent me to the spigot. We had a mud pit, less square than round, large enough for four kids—or for queen Donna, older and bold in a onesie bathing suit, wallowing with us. The cycle was to sit in the squishy pit, run in the sun ’til the mud fell off in crusty patches. Rinse if needed. Repeat forever if you could. When Mom came home, she slipped past the thorn bush without a scratch. Without a word. Not a glance. Donna retreated across the street with her sister, leaving mudprints to dance on the asphalt. Mutt, who proved two layers are needed, flung muddy trunks across his pink Spyder’s banana seat, plastic tassels catching the wind with hand-me-down pride. Dad’s justice came slow and steady, like gravel drive under tired feet. Fill it in, however long it takes. Wash off, go to your room. A room we shared, a supper we missed. Also missing was enough dirt to fill the hole. Donna took some, but the rest was gone. Maybe the yard swallowed it, like so many of our days. We snuck dirt from behind the woodpile, tucked pine needles to hide where the earth lost itself. Dad’s boots discovered the pits; eyes sharp, words final. The doctor's daughter won the science fair, her triptych bright behind beakers and coloured tubes. My brother did something with yellow light—was it from a prism or yellow paint? Me? Still wondering whether brine shrimp navigate like pigeons. Still wondering where the dirt went. Uncle answered in metaphor. Mud packs tighter than dirt, like when you stir ice cream. He should’ve taught science, but we learned all the same. :::flow ### Room therapy flow::: Every other Tuesday, right at twelve-oh-one, the house hands itself over to Liz. She arrives in an apron big as her mother—faded checks, pockets full of clothespins and wisdom— and tunes the radio to a station that plays only saxophones and weather reports. Liz starts in the kitchen, leaving the runway counter clear for takeoff. More than clean, she counsels chaos to calm. More than shine, the floors glow with serenity. By the time for early tea, order is restored, dust and August heat be damned. Blue Jays out back are voyeurs to her therapy, her seal that no dust or dishevelment may daunt. Liz went silver years ago, her boys grown and flown, knees that complain on stairs. Yet she works the rooms as if tuning a piano. Tighten here, soften there, finding the note that stops the rattle. She folds the apron, packs the calm, and leaves on the breeze she rode in, blue jays lifting after her. Serenity isn’t an accident; it has an appointment, and Liz keeps it. :::flow ### Back-pedal flow::: Mum swore she could still coast no-hands down Maple Hill, but the last time she rode was before I was born. Today, she asks me to raise the seat on my daughter’s bike, saying balance lives in her bones, just waiting for an invitation. We wobble to the cul-de-sac, three generations of women in neon helmets: my youngest, me, and Mum gripping handlebars like a prayer wheel. First pass, the pedals stall—arthritis, fear, gravity, who can tell? Second pass, I jog beside her, a hand on the back pocket of her jeans, the way she once pinched mine on a Schwinn with streamers. I let go. She doesn’t notice. Wheels find their sentence, long and unpunctuated. For half a block, she’s thirteen again, braid flying, tires thrumming now, now. The bike drifts, bumps the curb. She steps off laughing, amazed to be upright. “I thought the trick had left me,” she says, smoothing her hair as though closing a chapter. My daughter carts the bike home, wide-eyed— balance can hide for decades, waiting to be called. I watch Mum’s shoulders loosen, lighten, and wonder what other skills lie folded inside us, patient as Sunday linen. :::flow ### Flower tour flow::: Grandma dropped two cardboard badges shaped like tulips. “Passes to the Garden Walk. We’re going to spend Saturday getting culture in our shoes.” First stop: a lawn manicured to the shine of a close shave, ringed by planters big enough to gobble a toddler. Bronze dragonflies bobbed on steel rods. A gazebo squatted like a wedding cake nobody would cut. I veered off the gravel path and knelt by a clump of wild roses pushing through the fence from the lot next door. “These are the best,” I said, snapping a photo. A visor-topped volunteer materialized beside me. “The tour is about landscape composition. Please stay on the path, and take in the whole design.” Translation: eyes forward—ignore the scrappy blooms that sneaked in. We obediently strolled the perimeter while Grandma recited plant Latin—Hydrangea macrophylla, hosta Sum and Substance. A single breath of lilac drifted over the boxwood. “Bet the gazebo steals every drop of sunlight those roses need.” My words surprised me, like they’d slipped out without ID. Grandma squeezed my arm, grin tilting. “Now you know,” The docent droned on, none the wiser, but Grandma and I stood there sharing a secret. Sometimes the showpiece is the thief, and the stubborn bloom that grows anyway is what’s worth the ticket. :::flow ### Double struck flow::: Out past the north fence stands an oak that looks sand-blasted—no bark, just pale muscle spiralled from root to crown. Ask Grandpa and he’ll pour you a coffee-cup sermon about the night it was double-struck. “First bolt ripped a zipper down the trunk. Second one finished the job, leaving the tree panting smoke.” “Bolt, singular,” Grandma snorts, slamming the mixing bowl like a gavel. “The first—and only—hit your grandfather.” Then she sets the record straight while he grins into his mug. Summer storm rolling in, I was in the barn doorway. “Get your hide inside—those clouds are loaded with lightning. You’re not much, but you’re all I’ve got.” Grandpa, wheat-field sweat gluing his shirt to his spine, tilted his head at the sky as if it owed him an answer. Lightning obliged. A clap loud enough to knock the swear out of a sailor blew off every stitch of his sodden clothes—buttons, straps, the works—and raced down to the oak behind him. Grandpa swears a second bolt followed because two booms sound braver than one. Grandma says the encore was him: a pink streak bare as truth itself, diving behind the milk cows, stuffing fistfuls of straw over nether once covered. The barn filled with sap smoke, sweat, and the laughter of one stubborn, darling man. The oak still stands, mute witness neither storyteller can edit. Some afternoons, they lean on the fence and study its scar, each certain the gap in the tale is wide enough for the other to fit. :::flow ### Hearty surprise flow::: Throwing a surprise party for Great-Gram was a gamble—ninety years and a pacemaker. Still, she always said, “If a heart’s going to quit, let it be during applause.” We draped the church basement with streamers, crouched behind the punch bowl, and yelled our lungs out when she shuffled in. She didn’t clutch her chest; she clutched her purse. “Foolishness,” she barked, then took the microphone we hadn’t planned to hand over. Between opening gifts, she issued historical corrections and marching orders: “Edna, stop dyeing your hair; you’re fooling no one.” “Linda, quit your job before it quits you.” Anyone under forty was invisible—no room left in her outline for marginalia. The last box came from Ava, a diminutive great-granddaughter who still says ‘pasghetti.’ Inside: a single lottery ticket curled like a tongue, tied with a shoelace ribbon. Great-Gram snorted, scraping the thing with a butter knife, and uncovering every matching number a ticket can hold. The room inhaled hard enough to change weather patterns, then erupted. Great-Gram tilted, stage-left, one hand to her brow—textbook Victorian swoon—and crumpled like a dropped curtain. Paramedics thundered in, found a pulse steadier than ours, and rolled her out—waving like a pageant queen. The next morning, she rang from the hospital lobby. “Tell the lawyer to set up college funds for the little ones. And get me real coffee—this place serves chicory left over from the Great War.” We always figured she’d outlive the rest of us. Looks like she might bankroll us, too. :::flow ### Scent home flow::: A shoebox lives on the top closet shelf, taped seams yellowing, pen-sketched with MAIL—DO NOT TOSS. Inside are letters my mother and grandmother wrote during freshman year, when long distance meant a stamp and patience. The pages still carry their voices—Mom’s looping optimism about exams. Grandma’s recipe for pot-roast annotated with TURN POT HALF-WAY, DON’T YOU FORGET. I can recite every line, like hymns, but the power is in the envelopes. I lift one, ease open a corner, and inhale. First note: Ivory soap and the wind that whipped our backyard clothesline. Second: the faint smoke of Gram’s wood-fired range mixed with the lavender she kept in dresser drawers. One lungful and I’m on the cracked front walk, mailbox squeaking, dinner bell buried in the dusk. Thirty years dissolve faster than postage glue. The letters tell me what they told me, but the air they trapped—the last breath they took before sealing—sends me home. :::flow ### Cash Stacks flow::: My father used to pay creditors in cash by folding money into envelopes labelled with a carpenter’s pencil. Gas, Phone, Rainy Day. The envelopes lived in a cedar cigar box. In February, when the furnace gulped dollar bills, the Rainy Day flap thinned to rice paper. I was the spreadsheet kid, fifteen and sure formulas could cure ulcers. “Numbers in, numbers out,” I would tell him in what might have been an infantilizing tone. He was too busy to notice, eyes on those envelopes the way a farmer studies the sky, guessing which cloud would break first. Given the toll it took on him seeing the weight of needs and wants, we abandoned that system. Tonight I call him, Bluetooth speaker humming hold music while I download late statements. “Is this what you and Mom would do?” (I ask because I never saw them act out any payment schedule.) “She took care of it … deciding which bills to pay and which could mellow a month.” “Beer and cigarettes, Dad—always had room for those, but not so much dental insurance.” Silence settles. His tone drops to ground level. “There’s an envelope you don’t label. It fills itself with what you meant to do better.” I flip through my stacks and feel the invisible one he just slid across the line: Regret, payment due. I take a blank envelope, write Dad across the front, and tuck in a plane ticket. Numbers out, something better coming in. :::flow ### Dog shelter flow::: Two-faced January blinds me with sun on fresh snow while picking my pockets for heat. Wind slips through every zipper tooth. It’s cold. Colder than a walk-in beer cooler. Cold enough, my breath puffs huddle for warmth. The dog shelter is stone and squatty like its sandstone cousins in the postal service, minus the pensions. The windows are foggy with the howls of hopefuls. The air inside smells of wet fur and whatever sadness smells like when it dries on linoleum. Barks welcome. Howls beg attention. Whines plead a case for time served. Then I see her—shivering as if she, too, stepped in from January’s refrigerator. I kneel and offer an open palm to her ginger soul. “Daisy’s ’er name,” the volunteer offers, clutching a clipboard of assurances. “It’s taken ’er time to trust again.” Taut with doubt, Daisy leans in, nose cold enough to write her name on glass, and taps my fingertips once, twice— and owns me. Outside, snow squeaks like styrofoam rubbed together. I estimate the temperature by that squeal of ice crystals. As we walk, I promise warm hands and a soft bed. I tell her about the apartment thermostat, about blankets all her own, about night walks where summer smells like tomato vines. She doesn’t look up. The leash is just geography. The walk, like any other. Forward is forward, moment is moment, and dogs don’t waste inventory on futures still in the box. But I do. So I match her stride, let January steal whatever heat it wants, and keep my promises aloud until the wind carries them home. :::flow ### Grandpa’s stopwatch flow::: The day after we scattered Grandpa’s ashes across the soybean field, the estate lawyer called. “It’s time for everything to be appraised,” he said, voice polished like cuff links. Grandpa carried time the way some men carry pocket knives—always within reach, always ready to open a story. His nickel-plated stopwatch, crystal scuffed by barn boards and church pews, rides now in the coin pocket no coin ever fills. Its hands rest at 8:08, as if dawn and dusk signed a truce. Pendry’s Jewelry is a sliver of a shop that smells of cedar shavings and clock oil. Mr. Pendry—stooped, apron the colour of tarnished brass—peers over a counter crowded with ticking hearts. “Let’s see what your heirloom’s hiding,” he says. The case opens like a silver clam. Tweezers lift grains of brass no wider than sand. “Mainspring’s sprung,” he murmurs, then grins, “or the escapement escaped. Could be a split hairspring or a gear train that got off at the wrong station.” Big jokes about small parts—pure Grandpa. Pendry prods aside the balance wheel; an engraving glints beneath it. C R K 14 May 1955 First Dance “That’d be your grandmother,” Pendry whispers, voice soft behind the glass. I taste soybean dust at the back of my throat and catch, just faintly, the citrus cologne Grandma favoured. Pendry clears his voice. “Two choices. Restore the original movement—faithful, but costly. Or drop in a quartz module—cheap, accurate, and easier to sell. A collector already called.” Collector. I picture the watch ticking again with a plastic pulse. Then I picture it as it is—holding the minute Grandma said yes to Grandpa’s outstretched palm. Perfection, Grandpa said, is when there’s nothing left you’re willing to give up. “Nothing to fix,” I tell Pendry. He nods and returns the watch—still stopped, still perfect—for safekeeping in that small pocket no coin ever fills. Time moves. He doesn’t. The watch says both can be true. :::flow ### Blind lead flow::: I sweep my cane like a metal detector, hunting treasure. In the lobby, that means their feet. The way they part before my white stick, you’d think it stings. Elevator riders hug the walls while I tap a toe, weighing a practice swim. It might surprise them to learn that this blind man is captain of the team. Then a breaker pops—sudden dark—the lobby goes blind at once. “Hand to shoulder,” I call, and feel a few of them cling. My cane clicks a steady sonar as we wind down the stairwell. Generators clear their throats; glass doors exhale. The building smells of ozone—lightning when it goes to ground. Faces blink like shaken blossoms when the lights surge back on. They’re slow to let go; their hands have learned new Braille. I never saw it coming, but felt a current tighten in the quills. Now I steer by pulses in the dark, a tide no sight can chart. :::flow ### Listening tree flow::: The summer I turned nine, my father led me beyond the hayfield to a white oak that stood apart from the hedgerow. Its limbs rested like folded wings. “Sit,” he said, settling against the trunk. “This one listens better than most.” We stayed until the first bats stitched the sky. He spoke of the farm losing money, of my mother’s illness, of mornings when he couldn’t tell whether the sun rose or set inside his chest. I offered the fierce, private freight of childhood: · the barn-fire dream, · the terror of spelling bees, · the wish to be as tall as the silo so I could see whether the world had an edge. Each confession vanished into the bark like rain into loam. Walking home, our pockets felt lighter. After my father’s funeral, I found the oak still standing. Scarred by ice, lightning, even a chainsaw’s bite—yet it held the slope like a last vow. One April afternoon, full of frog song, I brought my own son. He was seven, all red sneakers and questions. “Did this tree talk to Grandpa?” he asked, circling the trunk for a hidden mouth. “Grandpa talked,” I said. “The tree listened.” He pressed his ear to the wood. Eyes closed. “Grandpa says he should’ve kept bees. And you should stop skipping breakfast.” The words were so purely my father’s that I went still. Then my son wagged a finger at the oak. “Never talk back to your father. You’re a tree—so listen.” His warning drifted with my laughter through the clearing and settled among the first blue violets. I brushed bark dust from his cheek. We leaned against the trunk until our heartbeats matched the tree’s slow rhythm. :::flow ### Training-wheel scales flow::: Work lights hum in the empty school auditorium. The custodian’s keys give my daughter and me after-hours access for her clarinet practice. She fingers scales that sound like a bicycle climbing—wobble, catch, glide. Between arpeggios, she asks why Grandma never misses these sessions, though she lives two time zones and a season of snow away. I fumble with geography, grief worse: Grandma died last March. My daughter pauses, squints at the balcony. “She’s there,” she insists, pointing to the exit sign’s red glow. I see only dust motes in the light. She plays again, one shaky note smoothing into another. The melody steadies, and for a breath the rafters vibrate like spokes finding speed. I pretend to adjust sheet music so she won’t notice my hands trembling, unsure which balance is harder—reed to mouthpiece or parent to loss, wobbling for traction. After the final chord decays, she packs the instrument, runs down the aisle, and waves at the balcony once more. I thumb the stage-door switch; lights clack off, leaving the room dark but not empty, as if applause just folded its wings. ## Red sky in the morning ### Last parade flow::: June zipped itself into blue jeans and fired up the backyard grill. My kids wore their weekend faces. Mum, sunhat flapping, waved flags to Dad, in the cab of Engine 4, honorary driver for a day because nobody had the heart to say no. “No” was already drifting through the crowd, mixed with the scent of charcoal and freshly-mowed grass. It lurked in budget spreadsheets and liability premiums. Today, though, the siren whooped, and Dad eased the tomato-red truck onto Maple Street. The procession unfurled behind like a picnic blanket: banners snapping, balloons nodding to every breeze. The school band marched a tune, their brass rolling through like a freight train. In its wake, sweat-sticky kids, laughter bright as bells, launched themselves off curbs after a clown who flung taffy beneath a sandwich board that declared: THE END IS NEAR! As the final float rolled past—a flatbed with a choir and twinkling lights—none knew we’d just applauded our last parade. Next summer was earmarked for roadwork and online fireworks. The floats turned the corner, and the route returned to being a street—a leaf detached from its branch, unaware of the change of season. :::flow ### Suspicion flow::: “Come celebrate Frank’s 50th,” the invitation read. The driveway obliges: paper lanterns, a cooler sweating on the porch, Sinatra leaking from a Bluetooth speaker. What stops me is the arch over the door—not prefab foil from a gift shop, this is a hand-tied halo of green and cream, colours of belief in a body of doubt, —resting against the entrance archway like stuck-up bits too tall when the truck went under a bridge. From the sidewalk, you’d swear the wire script says HAPPY 50! NEVER THOUGHT YOU’D MAKE IT! Step closer and the message tilts: HE DID IT HE WILL AGAIN Inside, the house buzzes with cake logistics and weather talk. Marie—Frank’s wife, tonight’s curator of fun—glides among guests, laughter polished to a shine. You wouldn’t know she’d been in the minivan beforehand. Forehead on the steering wheel, bracing herself. Frank works the room, replaying golf shots, never noticing his name hanging overhead. Looking up has never been his gift. I pass Marie a bowl of fruit salad. Her eyes meet mine long enough to confirm she won’t take the banner down. Let it offer its warning in whipped-cream colours. Guests duck beneath the arch, reading only what they’re ready to read: milestone, not omen. Lanterns wilt as the night cools, but the handmade arch holds till dawn—proof that doubt can be festive if you dress it up and let it mingle with the confetti. :::flow ### Thanksgiving flow::: Throwing a beer can, Bob, isn’t the way to get my attention even if it’s empty. Tossing the turkey out the door—now I have your attention, long enough to say I’m leaving. :::flow ### Lumens flow::: “Shirley’s at my place,” Mom mutters, lugging the big blue suitcase—our cruise gift after Dad died, never used. “Okay, but why’re you here, Mom?” The top unzips to reveal no clothes, just light bulbs. A dozen packages, head-to-toe like efficient coffins. “To shed some light, replacing one every time a family secret burns out.” She meant Joey and the firecrackers, too close to the Jeep’s gas tank. And, I suppose I’d told about Dad peeing in the sink. One bathroom, six kids. Five-foot Mom pulls out the step-stool and squeaks metal threads of the kitchen bulb. “School windows, winter of your teen years, who did it and who couldn’t sit for a week, not the same boy.” Click. Fresh bulb. “Aunt Lila’s engagement ring. Nobody mislaid it. You knew I pawned it for furnace oil.” Click. The brighter the house, the softer her voice, turning upset into amperage. I offer LEDs. She waves me off. “Secrets ought to cost something.” As she reaches the hallway fixture, the doorbell rings. Shirley, red-eyed, holding an unboxed bulb of her own. “Mom said I could trade this one in person.” Suddenly, the inventory isn’t about the past. It’s an offer to name what remains in the dark. Mom stands on the step-stool, palm up, waiting for Shirley’s bulb. The light is bright enough to show dust we never noticed before. :::flow ### Sarah at seven flow::: Sarah turned seven on a Saturday, stitched with streamers and buttercream. Two balloons sailed up—emerald and sapphire—her cheeks puffed, laughter looping like ribbon. She drew breath for the third. There was no third. Choking, wheezing, arms flapping around the room. Sarah seizing, parents pleading, throwing phone numbers across the patio. We stood frozen: best friends, cousins, kids from the neighbourhood. We wanted to help. ( We wanted to watch. ) Watching was our mistake. Sirens streaked red across the driveway; the music was off. The party favours were evidence. Sarah stays seven forever and my mind refuses to pan away from those two balloons, bobbing with every gust of door. :::flow ### Fill with hollow space flow::: Three guys in red shirts and cargo pants pull up in a moving van, here to fill the house with hollow space. Furniture goes first—the couch tattooed with last year’s merlot, the coffee table dinged where her wineglass landed when voices grew too loud. They bubble-wrap the lamp she said threw accusatory light, and stack boxes marked “Living-room,” “Kitchen,” “Bed,” as if the categories still held. Smiley-face cardboard boxes swallow the worn and the worn out. The rooms are stripped of memory. What the manifest omits is the shouting, swearing, shunning, wine-bottle-filled recycle bin, police in the living room. But what they’ll remove most won’t be taken in their swollen van. It’s her moving out. And me moving on. By noon, the rooms echo. They drive away, taillights winking, van fat with furniture and phantom noise. I stand in the doorway listening to the hush she wanted. Installation complete. :::flow ### Elixir of truth flow:::: In a mini-storage row where metal doors wheeze like smokers’ lungs, I rattle open one bought blind at auction. Inside waits a hoarder's gold: two mattresses bearing the dents of old sleepers, cartons of tax years no one wants to remember. At the back, against corrugated tin, sits a wooden crate whose ink stamp has bled in the damp: ELIXIR OF TRUTH. Bottles sleep in straw, their Prohibition glass faintly green, as if the old law still stains them. I think of my ex and all the truths we left unspoken. Wine can’t fix silence, but a shared glass is an excuse to sit down. She arrives, coat still buttoned, eyes mapping exits. The living room smells of dust and nervousness. “You still treat life like a yard sale,” she says. “Always some miracle buried in junk.” Yet her fingers graze the stem; curiosity edges out caution. She drinks first, and it goes down like water. Nothing happens. I start to say, “The accountant called about the settlement,” but what comes out is: “I was afraid you’d see how small I felt, so I made you smaller when we fought.” The words come unarmoured—no jokes, no blaming the weather. Her eyes glaze, then clear. She sips again, as if checking the dosage. “I told everyone you didn’t try,” she says. “Easier than admitting I didn’t know how to help.” We talk until the streetlights outside shiver in unison. No scripted apologies, no edits. Just two people in the wreckage of a marriage with the lights finally on. At some point, the talk widens, like a river opening into a delta. “Imagine the ads,” I say, tipping the bottle so its last amber catches the lamp. “Billboards that confess: We made you feel ugly so you’d buy this.” “Or courtrooms,” she adds. “No grandstanding—just a judge, a table, one glass. ‘Tell me what happened,’ and then they actually do.” Could secrets survive, or would we settle for one long, uncomfortable silence on live TV? She rolls the empty glass, watching the drops cling. “People need a few shadows,” she murmurs. “Not every thought should wander outside in its underwear.” The bottle lies on its side, label sweating on a ring of condensation. We are not in love again. No movie kiss. No plan to move the couch back in. The past stays what it is: late nights, slammed doors, lawyers billing by the quarter hour. But we can look at each other without reaching for weapons. Hand on the knob, she pauses. “If you find another crate, don’t auction it. Start with neighbours. Families. Anyone brave enough to hear themselves.” Then she leaves, footsteps fading down the hall like a sentence ending exactly where it should. :::flow ### Detritus of a life flow::: The first time I set foot in my ex’s apartment was after the funeral. I found the detritus of a life lived apart, and a piano jammed into the spare bedroom. Sheets of velvet covered the walls, dozens of egg cartons stapled over them. Scores inked in ballpoint filled the bench, crowned by a conservatory rejection. Maybe she wanted the privacy to play where the standards of others could not enter. Or maybe she preferred silence to praise, writing rejection on her worth, not her work. Under the letter lay our divorce papers—another form stamped withdrawn. What endures is devotion, not mastery: a life counted in muted stabs at beauty. :::flow ### Recess The playground waits on Stuart Street, hemmed in by cedars and a fence that never learned to keep anything out. It waits in the arrested light of three o’clock. All summer it rang like a brass bell—kickball thuds, penny-whistle laughter, the metallic gasp of chains under sudden flight. Mrs. Alvarez called it her “free day-care,” sipping iced tea while her twins raided the monkey bars. Mr. Lewicki set his chessboard on a picnic table and coached any kid willing to swap a bishop for bubble gum. Life moved in Mayberry circles: slide, sand, sunset, supper. September buckled the heat. Paint cracked along the carousel in scalloped petals; dandelions blew white confetti between the swings. Teachers practiced drills that, to 7-year-olds, felt like a new kind of hide-and-seek. One boy—Eli, freckles crowded across his nose—asked if monsters used doorknobs. No one answered—until the monster did. Thursday, sky the thin blue of typing paper. Three bursts turned the air into hammered tin. Birds fled in a single, dislocated sheet; gravel leapt, clattered, stilled. Eli’s breath never exhaled. A red sneaker lay on its side, wheel-spun by wind. The town tried to cauterize the moment. Vigils; lasagna in disposable pans; yard signs that said ENOUGH in red block letters. Parents lobbied for metal detectors, counsellors, a law with teeth—anything— but the statehouse counted votes and prayed for a quieter headline. Meanwhile, the holes in the rocket-slide rusted into little iron sunsets. A year passed like someone holding their breath. The school reopened with reinforced glass and a memory wall. Kids played four streets over, as though laughter itself needed a fresh address. Only the playground remained in quarantine, locked behind cyclone mesh. Wind pushed the empty swings into slow applause; maple seeds spun where children used to. On the first anniversary, Mrs. Alvarez brought a can of turquoise paint and a step-stool. Her twins—now nine, now afraid of fireworks—helped roll colour over the carousel’s flaking skin. They added yellow stars, one for every name carved into the new cedar bench: Eli, Marisol, Jonah, Miss K, and two more bright initials. When they finished, the merry-go-round looked like the night sky pretending daylight. At dusk, a teenager on a skateboard rattled past, slowed, and ducked through the gap in the gate. He nudged the empty kickball with his shoe, then set it on his board and pushed off—ball balanced, wobbling but upright, like something learning to continue. For a breath, the yard felt almost possible again. The mothers watched from the curb, keys clutched like talismans. They didn’t dare step inside, but they didn’t look away, either. Tomorrow is not a contract, only an invitation. On Stuart Street, the invitation begins with fresh paint drying in the dark while silence recites every name. :::flow ### Finding home flow::: Saturday, first snow of December, the hardware store hums its fluorescent hymn, shelves glinting like church bells. My grandson and I thread through bins of screws high as his shoulders, digging for tarp clips to fasten the shed roof tight. Halfway to Plumbing, he tugs my sleeve. “Grandpa, that lady—is she lost?” Five aisles over, a woman drifts past drill bits, fingertips stroking blister-packs as though texture might answer a question words can’t reach. SALE strobes pulse red across her damp eyes. “She’s just shopping.” But the boy keeps tracking her the way a sparrow follows bread crumbs. We spot her again in Paint, then in Lumber, her cart empty as an unmailed letter. “She’s not fixing anything, Grandpa. She’s looking for something not on the shelves.” I kneel for roofing nails; knees creaking like old hinges. A tap lands on my shoulder, and I jerk up straighter than I have in years. She stands there, coat misbuttoned. “Could you help me pick a gift? For my son. Something that says I care.” Toolbox—too heavy. Picture frame—too silent. Work gloves—too ordinary. She settles on a coil of paracord—midnight green, strong and supple, meant for holding what wants to come undone. At the register, she thanks me as if I’d ferried her through fog. Outside, snowflakes spin under parking-lot lights. My grandson presses forehead to the window. “Did she find what she needed?” “Maybe.” In the mirror, I still see her circling the aisles as she does every December, searching for a son who never found his way home. :::flow ### Creases flow::: My face is a topographical map of nights I half-remember and truths I can’t forget. Here, a laugh-line carved by tequila and mariachi at three a.m. There, a crease earned the morning my daughter took her first steps, then another on the night she never came home. August 8 begins with the colour of bruised peaches. I know this because the detective reminds me of the date every time we sit across the metal table, his pen poised like a syringe drawing blood. “Walk me through the afternoon,” he says, as if my hours are birds I can coax back into the cage. But memory is scar tissue: tough, insensate in places, painfully tender in others. Perfect skin belongs to people who never had to choose between reach and recoil. Malloy slides a cup of black coffee across. He expects a tidy grid, every hour stamped and filed. All I can do is shrug at the fluorescent ceiling. The event—sirens, asphalt heat, the blossom of police tape— burns in technicolour on the screen behind my eyes, but the date? It drifts in fog. “It’s funny,” I tell him, tracing the rim of styrofoam like I’m reading Braille, “people say the heart forgets the bad, spotlights the good. I say: erase the bad and you amputate the story.” I don’t mention my daughter by name; I keep her folded safe in the silence between heartbeats. I give him what I can: a street corner, diesel in the air, a scrap of birdsong floating above traffic, and—bright as a bruise—her peach-coloured backpack. Memory isn’t an archive; it’s weather. When the interview ends, I step outside into late-summer dusk. Neon from the bail-bond office flickers, rinsing my hands in butcher’s pink. I study their calloused geography: laugh lines, grief lines, a burn from the engine block I fixed the day my marriage threw a rod. Every mark a receipt—proof I showed up, endured, sometimes even danced. One day, the earth will yank its tarp across my life. All that will remain is a face crowded with stories, plot twists tucked deep in every crease. :::flow ### Faith unkept flow::: The rocker in the front room still carries the shine of Grandpa’s planer, though the denim of three generations has worn twin valleys into the oak seat. Most afternoons, my uncle parks there, knees pumping just enough to keep the floorboards talking— hopeful for the mailman, but prepared for a grim visitor who doesn’t knock. Two summers ago, he sold his pickup and flew overseas to a healer who claimed faith could rethread muscle like a loom fixes a frayed rug. He came home parade-ground straight, words tumbling out of him in tidy rows as if the librarian of the universe had finally stamped his card. But certainty, it seems, has a half-life. A couple of months later, the rocker was back to its slow tide: creak-forward, sigh-back, the mail slot clinking at 11:15 with nothing but grocery flyers. His shoulders slumped around whatever puzzle he still couldn’t solve. Dad stands in the doorway, rubbing sawdust memories between thumb and forefinger. He once said, “Leave belief to your uncle.” Now Dad shakes his head, listening to the rocker preach its quieter gospel: some questions outlast posture, and a good chair keeps better time than many a cure. :::flow ### Have you seen me? flow::: Day seventeen without my brother. His school-photo smile—too neat, too nervous—looks out from every lamppost I can reach. On the pole outside Jinni’s Liquor, a row of kitten flyers hangs beside him. A man tears off a phone-number tab, tucks it in his pocket, and never glances at the kid in the tie. Forgetting, I’ve learned, is better for business. I keep walking. At each coffee shop, I press fresh tape over yesterday’s rain-curl and drop a pin on my phone. By dusk, the screen glitters with dots: corners, doorways, bus shelters. Zoomed out, the dots sketch the outline of a long-legged creature. I call it Vapour— brother of Sucrose, whose constellation marks every bakery in town. Vapour crosses Main, steps over the river, and ends where the factory vents breathe steam into the night air. I stand there, palms burning from the tape dispenser, watching the cloud rise and thin— waiting for the lost to walk out of the mist. :::flow ### Milk-carton winter flow::: The lake froze ugly this year—fractures like lightning trapped under glass. Dad drills the first fishing hole, slides the auger aside, and tells me today would have been my brother’s twenty-fifth. We bait hooks with waxworms that look like commas, pauses in a sentence neither of us finishes. While we wait, Dad pulls a folded flyer from his parka: the old HAVE YOU SEEN ME? milk-carton photo, face too young, colours sun-bleached. Wind licks the edges. I half expect the ice to answer, but it only pops and settles, translating grief into geology. A perch finally tugs; Dad reels it up, silver spasm in winter light. Without speaking, he frees the hook and sets the fish back, pressing the paper photo over the hole like a lid. Water swallows the image, ink blurring into something unphotographable. Driving home, heater rattling, he says, “Maybe answers thaw in spring.” I nod, studying the shoreline where snowmelt scribbles channels—thin rivers looking for the lake they already belong to. :::flow # Edges of change ## Things that decide more than they should ### Prescient creature flow::: My sister keeps a shelf of toy prophets: a Mason jar full of fortune cookies, tarot cards still in an elastic band. My favourite is the Magic 8-Ball I’ve been consulting since homework asked bigger questions than I did. Tip it, and the blue triangle swims up from the ink like a submarine with opinions. REPLY HAZY—TRY AGAIN. Most days, that mercy was enough. Yesterday, the coin-sized portal was clouded; answers like graffiti in the fog. I pictured the oracle down there in midnight, coughing up wisdom for anyone with a yes-or-no panic. The seer deserved daylight. I emptied the glitter from my sister’s snow globe, funnelled in water, and freed the tiny decider. It plopped into its crystal-clear pond, and for the first time, I could read all twenty verdicts at once: OUTLOOK GOOD, DON’T COUNT ON IT, ASK AGAIN … Nineteen rejections for every promise. The cost of knowledge, paid in options lost. Magic, I realized, lived in the mystery. I set the globe beside the snow-stranded Santa, facing inward like a monk who has said enough for one day. I didn’t shake for permission. Some magic you leave resting, grateful for the secrets it keeps. :::flow ### Treasure machine flow::: I nose the hatchback into a slot beneath an amber lamp and kill the engine. Two blocks away, the bank glows an aquarium-green hue, an unlocked vestibule protected by safety glass. I lean against the brushed-metal ATM. Its screen bathes the space in glacier blue. Stainless fins extend from the sides like urinal wings. The ritual begins with ‘this-or-that’ questions a conveyor belt could appreciate—language. Account. Yes / No / Other Amount? My thumb hovers over ENTER. A soft whir, and the slot drops a warm stack of bills, scented with ink and starch. Not pirate doubloons, not temple bullion, just crisp twenties—still, the mind wanders. Somewhere in Zürich or perhaps Dubai, an ATM vends gold chips. Picture a vending machine attached to a vault—B2 cola, B3 ingot—thirst or fortune clinking down the chute with equal ease. The screen blinks GOOD-BYE. I pocket the notes, feeling their ambition heat my thigh, and step into the street. Across the way, a pawn shop hums GUITARS-GUNS-WATCHES in pink neon. A corner bodega hawks POWERBALL hope. Every doorway, it seems, is another slot waiting to be pulled. I slide behind the wheel, fan the cash like feathers on the dash. Tonight, they’ll trade places for dinner and something glittering in a display case— each of us wondering which one will spend the other first. :::flow ### Jagged mug flow::: Night keeps its coat on inside the Old Elk Tavern. A lone bulb buzzes like a wasp trapped in a jar, bruising the amber light. I watch storm-eyed regulars shoulder in for cheap liquor—old men hunting redemption for wars nobody won. Beside them, ink-fingered poets brood over half-drained glasses, wannabe Dylans mourning songs they’ve never written. On a Pine-Sol shelf squat the workhorse mugs—thick, iron-jawed ceramics that outlast the bouncers. They go through the wringer—scrubbed clean of history by a dishwasher sick of its own rinse cycle. Except one, a pale blue brute with a crescent-shaped chip on its rim, as though the moon took a bite one reckless midnight. The wound grins: I was dropped, but look how I pour. The dishwasher hates it. Every cycle, it clatters like a prisoner rattling tin against cell bars. Tonight, the rebel finds my hand. A stout as dark as unslept hours foams over its jagged rim. A poet leans in, voice brittle as autumn. “That mug is us. Bruised, yes, but honest enough to bleed in daylight. Better chipped than flawless and forgettable.” For a breath, the jukebox hushes, fists unclench, and the neon sighs. Then the barkeep sees the danger—one wrong sip, porcelain could cleave a lip— so duty steamrolls nostalgia. He snatches the mug mid-sentence, hurls it toward the trash with a crack like a gunshot smothered by sawdust. The poet winces as if a rib snapped. I fail—gloriously—to swallow a laugh. “Sometimes,” I tell him, sliding an unblemished glass his way, “the squeaky wheel is swapped for a quieter spare.” Across the room, shards glitter in their plastic coffin. When morning drags her pale self through the swinging doors, maybe the janitor will pocket a fragment—maybe not. The mug is gone, but its pieces still catch light. :::flow ### Daisy cave flow::: Scraping wallpaper in the front parlour, I discovered the house had a wardrobe worthy of a vaudeville star. Neutral beige hid psychedelic paisleys and beach-party yellows of the mop-top era. Under them, Victorian peacocks strutted over burgundy silk. Each peel felt like undoing a button on someone else’s overcoat until the plaster stood there shivering, waiting to see who I’d ask it to be next. I’m no muralist, only stubborn, so I carved a daisy into a dried paint roller with a pocketknife. Dip, roll, repeat—the hallway filled with blooms that looked almost intentional if you didn’t squint too hard. Rolling out that crude border felt like casting shadows in Plato’s cave—copies of a flower flickering on plaster. Cheap trick, maybe, yet every stamp left a jagged petal the stencil hadn’t planned, like fingerprints the house and I exchanged. Halfway down the staircase, I paused, dizzy on latex and history. By dusk, the foyer was a field of crooked rows, petals veering off-course whenever the roller skipped. But the place finally breathed at my pace. House changing owner, owner changing house; neither of us flawless, both recognizable. They’re copies, paint clones, but unique because they are mine—in a house that’s becoming mine as we transform one another. Tomorrow—the dining room. Might be stripes, maybe stars. But whatever lands on those walls will carry the same crooked signature. :::flow ### Fickle candle flow::: St. Aurelia’s doesn’t care for new ideas. Paint peels where the council voted down fresh colours, and the draft wandering the nave could recite Scripture. The Paschal candle is meant to burn like doctrine: steady, unquestioning. Last Tuesday, its flame began to stammer, throwing jittery silhouettes across plaster saints. Parishioners shifted on the pews, whispers slid beneath the vaulted hush. Father O’Neill—eighty-three and on a first-name basis with wax—rose from the confessional, struck a match, and performed a quiet transplant: trimmed the wick, reset the brass collar, and whispered a plea for cooperation. The flame straightened long enough for the Gospel, then resumed its jittery semaphore. Toward vespers, the wind came up, rattling stained glass like dice in a cup. Storm clouds rolled the daylight clean off the map. Power blinked, failed, took the organ with it. The nave went ink-dark—except for that jumpy candle, suddenly all backbone, throwing a cone of gold wide enough for every face. People exhaled as one; the priest stared as if he’d been handed proof that doubt and duty can share a wick. When the lights lurched back, he tapped the brass stand and pronounced, “Not every miracle stands still.” Parishioners filed out into the rain, carrying bits of that unsteady courage home in cupped hands. :::flow ### Chatty candle flow::: Out on this straight-line prairie, the only traffic is wind and the swipe of highway headlights. Each pass throws a wink through the kitchen window, flirting with the single candle she’s coaxed to life. The flame guides her from the large-bowl wash basin to the hand-hewn bed, where the quilt smells of must despite the dry heat, and outweighs all the birds coerced of their down. Pillow quills crackle under her ear, which she pictures as spiders, taking comfort in having another living thing on her planet. One last look at the empty room, and she blows out the chatty light. Silence settles like dust beneath the mountain of broken promises. :::flow ### Smart box flow::: Your smartphone didn’t ding; you aren’t checking messages when you pick it up again. What you’re doing is more desperate. You are checking on the self-worth you buried in the box. Your phone sits face down on the coffee table, unlit. You keep an eye on it instead of trusting your heart, entrusting it with the task of reminding you that you exist. That you matter. If the screen glows, you’re wanted. If it stays black, you’re drifting above the city, a ghost in sweatpants. It’s easier to let algorithms decide whether you’re having a good day or should crawl back under the covers. It’s easier than looking in the mirror and asking the hard questions. Because what if your heart doesn’t have the answers you want to hear? You put the phone down, backside up like a turtle, and the room expands—but it’s short-lived. The silence of the room, of your life, presses in on you, and you reach for the device again. Lifeline or leash, same weight wrapped up in a sleek casing. Maybe tomorrow you’ll leave the phone alone. Maybe tomorrow, you’ll look for validation in a friend’s laughter. Or get lost in a story that cannot be scrolled. But tonight the glass is a dark pond, and your face floats on it, waiting for ripples. Tonight, with your silent phone and restless heart, you wonder if you’ll ever learn to trust it again. :::flow ### Old globe flow::: Down steps that groan like a glacier about to calve, past the retired card catalogue, oak still gleaming, the old globe sits alone propped in its lacquered ring. Its oceans, faded to the blue of forgotten ink, press against continents the colour of steeped tea. Siam is still Siam. The Soviet Union is a single pink shadow, and a fissure at the equator splits Brazil. Beneath a pelt of dust, the sphere spins stories in raised relief. Vanished ports, salt-stung caravels, mythical beasts devouring fleets. Treasure glitters where the printed hemispheres meet. My fingertips trek the Himalayas, skim the glued grit of the Sahara. A shaft of winter sun reads with me in braille, lingering on gulfs whose names have changed, though the tales remain. Upstairs, the world updates itself—borders redrawn, flags refreshed. Here, the names stand fast, daring a traveller to learn them by touch. With one nudge, the planet wobbles in slow rotation. Dust motes rise as obedient moons. The old globe creaks its single latitude—adventure lives, even on shelves no one visits. :::flow ### Shelf-ies flow::: Want a date? The app wants a shelf. No selfies, no clever bio either. Just one shot of the books you live with. “Spines don’t lie,” it says. So be it. I stand in front of my crooked bookcase. A cookbook someone gave me out of guilt. A picture book of underwater dogs. Albums that bleed snapshots when you tilt them. I wipe away the worst of the dust with my sleeve. Snap, upload. Instant exposure more intimate than a headshot. Matches arrive as shelves—five libraries, five silent autobiographies. One is all gardening guides. Another looks like a dentist’s waiting room, chrome covers. The last shelf stops me. History books in a tight row. In the middle, a sun-bleached crater, a ghost of a title that once lived there. The app offers its only prompt: “Ask about one book.” I ask about the gap. She types: friend borrowed it, moved away, never sent it back. Her name rings a bell, but I let it pass. She asks about my albums: Photos or just the promise? Both, I type. Depends on the day. No small talk, no zodiac, no “what do you do.” We talk in titles. She likes footnotes; says the tiny print feels like someone whispering. I tell her I stack books flat when I plan to read them soon, like laying out tomorrow’s clothes. A week in, the app unlocks GIFT A TITLE. Pick a book, push send. I send her the slim poetry volume I loved in college, back when words felt cheap. She sends me a file titled “The One That Went Missing.” Its first page carries a note: “If you return this, fill the space. If you keep it, make a new gap.” I read it, then delete the file from my tablet—gone, as I handed it over. I photograph the blank square where the icon sat and post it to the app. Next morning, the mail slot clacks. A padded envelope drops. No return address. It’s my old poetry book, spine cracked where I left it years back. My name, still pencilled inside the cover. She circled a line: “The road doubled back because the traveller didn’t.” I sit on the floor, spine against the Billy frame, thumbing margins she’s filled. The book has travelled, but it hasn’t slept. A business card is taped to the back flap. Dog-Eared Books, Fortieth & Vine. Date and time. The name I pretended not to recognize—she’s the bookshelf girl, the gap, the whispers, all of it. Dog-Eared Books smells like old cedar and cold coffee. She’s at the history section, index finger resting on an empty slot. “I left room for you,” she says, nothing mystical about it. I hand her the slim book, spine still warm from my coat. She slides it home, locking shoulders with the others, then she pulls a thin blank book. “Journal or kindling. Depends on the day.” :::flow ### Wild ride flow::: The rattling chain lift draws the sky closer—the clinking climb and vomit plummet—and I swear I’ve done this a thousand times. Same battered seat, same safety bar smudged with fingerprints of previous bravado. Still, the click-click climbs under my ribs into a grin I can’t outgrow. Crest, pause, stomach mutiny. Then the track drops out from under reason, and wind robs the sentence I was about to shout. Every banking curve ambushes me again, memory erases its warning just long enough for surprise to stay sharp. Life is obliging in that way: same loops, fresh scream. Bills, heartbreaks, Tuesday alarms—each predictable as the steel curve beneath these wheels— yet each return feels like this time the turn will lead somewhere new. The train hurtles into the camera flash as I throw my arms up like a volunteer. The track pounds a rhythm I could drum in my sleep, but awake, riding the python, it still lifts the breath right out of me, proves repetition can be resurrection if you meet it with open palms. Brakes bite, sunlight floods, and we wobble toward the exit. I am already eyeing the queue for another go, convinced—if only for the length of the line—that the next ride will take a new path even if it follows the same old rails. :::flow ### Not grave nor stone flow::: A gravestone resembles a final punctuation mark, a full stop at the end of a rambling sentence. Mine will never be granite grandeur—I want something more porous, more breathing and becoming. Set me in a paper pot mixed with ash and soil; no hard line where the world ends and I begin. Sugar maples know the art of exit: every autumn, they dress in fire, their scarlet impossible even for poets to pin down. Don’t sand me into furniture. A back stiff with duty through all my living days needn’t stiffen through the next. And let no holiday garland wind round me. I was never much for such parades in this life, why take up their tinsel after? It comes down to this: a request not to be boxed in when I’m gone, when being boxed in was all I ever knew. Imagine a gravestone, neither a grave nor a stone, not an end but a beginning, where my final resting place is busy with life. Perhaps, as Emerson suggests, my tree will spawn a thousand forests—unless he means only acorns, not rebels like me. If you wander upon my maple, let the rustle of leaves be my voice, asking who my neighbours were in life—the elm and the spruce. And when autumn flames through maple limbs, it’s not only the season turning—it’s my spirit, laughing in the face of all that’s solemn and expected. :::flow ### Golden silence flow::: Dawn lifts an eyelid. I kill the phone, slide the grey slab into a jam jar, and twist the lid tight. The microwave winks neon seconds; that’s all the clock I need. Honey, my Goldie, sniffs at the jar, sneezes a blessing, and head-butts the door. We step onto a street I once scrolled past. Garbage trucks harrumph—grunting diesel. Mrs. Singh’s sari blazes saffron, bright as brake lights, as she baptizes marigolds. Honey conducts me curb to curb, tail keeping tempo. She slips between Mr. Cho’s fence and a kudzu curtain that smells of warm dill and dust. The breach widens into the abandoned rail spur—a dirt ribbon pocked with paw prints, boot prints, one fat-tire tattoo. The clearing exhales the debris of teenage industry: a busted skateboard, a blistered aerosol can, a drone impaled on mullein like insect art. Honey retrieves the wreck, muzzle high, proud as a marsh dog cradling a duck. A voice vibrates the leaves. Out steps a reed-thin kid, purple buzz cut, phone held high like a divining rod seeking signal. “That yours?” I ask, nodding at the drone. “Was. Thought it went in the reservoir.” We trade wreck for route and walk together. He riffs about building electric longboards, about how the drone’s camera caught a coyote napping on the soccer field. I confess to three decades in logistics, arranging routes I never travelled. He says it sounds like captaining a ship from the dock; I decide I like the kid. Back home, silence does not arrive; it expands. The fridge drones. Honey’s nails tick on tile. Coffee tastes dark on the front of the tongue, citrus on the back. I never knew it had edges. I unfold the acreage of yesterday’s newspaper, skip the market report, and circle a turnip soup recipe. In the margin, I ink CALL LENA TUES, a note that waits instead of pings. Light throws a runway down the hall. Honey trots it end to end, then parks by the breadbox. I scratch her ear; for once, touching fur, not checking feeds. Near dusk, I spin the radio dial. In the dead zones between stations, I hear the house sigh and groan. No notifications tally what I’ve missed. The world I carry has fewer addresses now, but every one of them opens wide when I knock. :::flow ### Napoleon’s bicorne flow::: Napoleon’s bicorne appeared on my stoop—at least the note claimed it was his. It smelled of felt left out in the rain. Props must have sent it by mistake. That night, my comedy set was bombing, the hook stretching for my neck. The hat in the wings, nothing to lose—I plunked it on. The audience ate it up. Next morning my coffee stop was a tea house. Switched—signage, furniture and all. With the hat, every word is comedic gold, paid with history, one routine at a time. “No more,” I say from the harbour where the Statue of Liberty I knew is no longer an eagle but now a lady. I toss the hat into the waters beside her. :::flow ### Duplicate flow::: New apartment here, a broken lock there. A spare they swear to not lose again. The key cutter nods without looking up; copies only the teeth, not woes. I come at lunch, browsing fobs and lanyards, watching the blade shape permission. Today I bring the key—one to a room I haven’t dared enter. He holds it against the original, asks only “Same cut?” The wheel flares, the steel sings. When he hands back its warm twin, I feel already inside. Seventh floor, end of corridor, where the air stinks of solvent. No name on the frosted glass. The motorcade will pass below at 2:03. :::flow ### Cedar disk flow::: It started with a cedar disk, round as a gossip-monger’s eyes, wobbling out of Akkad’s hut. Nabu folded his arms and spat. “Look at Akkad. One wooden pancake and the man thinks he’s divine.” I followed the spin. “The pancake moves, Nabu. We don’t.” Come morning, Nabu cracks a poplar, straps two cedar moons to a plank, and rattles past Akkad’s door. “Two wheels, because one is half a joke.” That lights the fuse. Four-wheel carts shriek like crickets. Then six. Spokes snap, curses spark; the well turns checkpoint. I bend two cedar runners, noses curled like antelope horns, a rope threaded through and drag the sled into the square. Akkad squints. “Nice table. Where’re the circles?” I toss him one rope, Nabu the other. “Pull.” They do. The sled slides like a fish over water. No squeaks, no jams—just forward. Old women stop counting grain; children chase the hush. “It cheats,” Nabu grunts, wiping his forehead. “No wheels, no contest.” “Contest?” I shrug. “Fine. Teams of twelve. Fastest haul to the river and back.” They form crews, coat runners with bitumen, tip the noses with bronze. Lanes clear. The village moves in long, muscular lines, rope over shoulder, voices counting cadence. “Funny,” Akkad mutters. “We spent a season sharpening circles just to learn how to pull in the same direction.” “That’s progress,” I say. “Invent, break, invent again. Get the load there without grinding each other to paste.” Tomorrow they’ll grease the blades with camel fat. Solve a riddle, birth another. :::flow ### Rock the world flow::: My grandson folds his legs beneath him, ready for the talk. Not the one about hormones, but about objects—how, in my world, there were almost none. Back then, a room held nothing but breath. Along each wall waited dispensers—mouths of gray plasticine, a tide of nanobots ready to become whatever we named aloud. “Chair,” you whisper, and a hush takes shape, rises smooth beneath your thighs. “Shirt,” you sigh, and fabric climbs your shoulders, the colour of your mood. “Stethoscope,” and a silver loop coils, remembering just enough anatomy to fake a heartbeat. A touch to the reset pad, one snap of impatient fingers, and everything slumps back into formless obedience. Rooms slept spotless; corners forgot what it meant to cradle dust. Nothing waited on shelves. We called it progress—a world where nothing need be carried longer than desire itself. I was a historian then, chasing twentieth-century ghosts—men in wool suits, old speeches and older wars. True artifacts were rumours: scanned, archived, dissolved into patterns. One afternoon, in a derelict depot where mixer tanks once churned, my boot struck something that answered with wood. A rocking chair stood in a cone of widow-light, grain warm, runners soft from decades of lullabies. When I placed a palm on its spine, it refused to flow, refused even to flinch. Records told me that John F. Kennedy, of the land before ours, favoured such a chair to soothe the shrapnel buried in his back. Perhaps this was his; perhaps not—in an age of replicas, the question itself felt like a luxury. I rocked, once. The joints complained—an honest, arthritic creak—and an idea flared: permanence as promise, not impediment. So I sinned: I shared it. Rented a civic hall, white walls bare as a freshly erased screen. People queued to sit in a seat that refused to contour to their weight. They fidgeted, then settled; remembered the etiquette of meeting an object halfway. The questions grew sharper: “If this chair lasted a century, what would it be like to own something for more than a season?” “If a table doesn’t vanish after dinner, do we eat differently?” The government answered with boots. Agents swept in one morning; no notice. Hands gloved, faces blank. Convenience, they announced, was humanity’s finest triumph; nostalgia, a communicable disease. They took the chair. They took names. They took me. On the broadcasts, leaders stood before shimmering backdrops. Bodies, they said, had enough weight without dragging around stubborn matter. We were meant to evolve, to live in reversible spaces. Yet the plazas filled, not with weapons but with questions. If matter was a hazard, why did leaders sleep in stone mansions and dine off plates older than the network? Then someone leaked the vault: a private repository of paintings with chipped frames, books bound in leather, a piano yellowed at the keys, and chairs, so many chairs, in a room where no one else was allowed to sit. Hypocrisy has a sound when it cracks in public. It’s part snap, part laughter. Laws dissolved, as did my trial. Overnight, owning a wooden spoon became merely domestic again. My grandson’s eyes shine at this part. He lives in the afterwards, where real and simulated trade places so often no one bothers to check their passports. He thinks that is the end, but there is more. After my acquittal, I go back to the warehouse where I tripped over history. The chair waits—silent, whole—until the air around it ripples, its outline losing faith. In slow collapse, it puddles into obedient grey goo. Someone long ago coded the mass to mimic history until the story finished its work. A ghost of a chair, held in obedience by code and intention. So perfect it fooled a roomful of experts, and me most of all. The lesson is not gentle. We did not come back for the wood. We came back for what we believed the wood could hold—the ache of a president’s spine, the insomnia hidden in oval nights, the simple, defiant proof that a thing might stay. Tangibility, I learn, is less about resisting a hand than about persisting in a mind. Whether coaxed from a tree or a trillion servile particles, an object matters only because of the story it lets us touch. “This part,” I say, ruffling my grandson’s hair, “stays between us.” He nods, solemn, as if accepting a password. “You live in a world,” I tell him, “that keeps something we almost lost—the willingness to sit with weight, not just rent it.” Outside, his century prints toys that dissolve by bedtime and inherits tables grooved by ancestors. Museums host rooms of pure data and chambers you must enter barefoot to feel stone’s cold shrug, wood’s splintered memory. “Your world,” I say, “moves forward in both directions now—into the virtual and the solid. Remember the chair that wasn’t a chair, and why we still need to sit in it.” He leans against my knee. Somewhere, a maintenance log records the reformatting of one plasticine unit, no longer a rocker. Somewhere deeper, in him, a new artifact settles. Not wood, not nanobots, but this rocking gently between our hearts. :::flow ### Chemistry kit flow::: Back when the world still had a few secrets, my cousin handed down a Gilbert chemistry set. I didn’t know squat about science—just that vinegar and baking soda could burp a fake volcano onto Mom’s table. I was better at stomping firecrackers, poking air holes in jar lids for fireflies, getting yelled at for both. Those little bottles and powders sat in the kit like they were waiting for a smarter kid. I wasn’t hunting for knowledge. I was bored, and the church ladies wanted me in summer Catechism. So I stayed in the basement, mixing powders together to see if anything hissed, frothed, or blew. Most of it was nothing—a sad bubble, a thin smell, a stain on the newspaper. But once in a while something snapped, a hot fizz that made you step back and grin like you’d robbed a piggy bank. That was the lesson, though nobody called it that: like childhood experiments, life is messy. Now everybody has charts and graphs, success pinned to a screen like a dead moth, counting likes and shares as if the universe is taking attendance. trading fizzing powder and scorched tabletops for neat dashboards that smell like nothing at all. I don’t trust people who think life is a straight line you can plot. Life is a stained workbench, a box of half-used chemicals with the labels peeling, and a lighter you probably shouldn’t flick that close. We’re all just kids with chemistry kits, dumping one thing into another and hoping it doesn’t blow our eyebrows off. Sometimes you get a puddle and a bad smell. Sometimes a spark, a little poof that says: still alive, for now. You don’t really lose—you learn what doesn’t work and try again with whatever’s left. What counts are the fizzles that leave a ring on the table, explosions that make the neighbour bang on the wall— the ordinary alchemy making one more forgettable day something to remember. :::flow ### China platter flow::: My uncle dug a china platter out of the plaster of a ruined church wall. How it stayed whole, no one knows. Even the military masters of shrapnel and shock shrug and call it dumb luck— or maybe something holier. He packed it himself in a wooden crate, etching his name in pencil, and sent it across the Atlantic. It survived that crossing, too—salt air, typhoon, handling by strangers— as if the blast grafted it to faith and faith hardened into porcelain. My grandmother keeps butter soft in a dish because the war gives families of soldiers a little extra. My father calls his brother a mess—but that’s the war speaking through him. It’s anger, not blame. In the kitchen, the stove burns our split kindling. Bread rises under her hands, and when she turns the loaf out onto the blue-rimmed platter, we stare at it— like glass made whole again—and marvel how it survived the blast so well, when our uncle did not. She smiles, says nothing, and the butter melts faster than memory. Years later, my cousin buys bread, the kind with balloons on the wrapper. She says it tastes like Grandma’s too—if you serve it with butter on that dug-out platter. :::flow ## Liminal pauses between life beats ### Green thumb luck flow::: My neighbour wanders over, beer sweating in his hand. “So what’s your secret? How do you get those tomatoes so big?” He waits for wizardry. I hold up my palms—cracked, brown-stained. We stare at each other with man-hug awkwardness. I want to confess: half the time, I’m bewildered that anything grows at all. Instead, I talk compost. His eyes widen, like I’ve handed him keys to Eden. Seeds, soil, sun—suddenly I’m the green-thumb sage. Here is the secret: there isn’t one. I’m only a middleman dealing in dirt and daylight. The seeds are the heroes. I get out of the way and watch ’em become what they’re meant to be. It’s like ideas. People think you need some kind of smart to come up with something original. Mostly, you turn things over in your mind, give them space, and see what grows. So when someone asks for my secret, I shrug. “Luck and a little preparation.” They’re disappointed. But the truth is, gardens—and good ideas—aren’t really ours. They pass through, and all we can do is watch them bloom. :::flow ### Flight of silence flow::: The air rings with traincar squeal. An ad jingles. Someone’s tinny earbuds leak 90s music. Everywhere in the cavern, noise stacks to the ceiling. Then a hush glides in, thin as a gull’s wing, beneath the fluorescent tubes. It isn’t absence. Silence flits like a rare bird, as solid as the static of an unreachable radio station. Voices stall, playlists pause, newspapers lose their rustle. And for three breaths the carriage floats. A woman clutching a grocery tote meets the eyes of a man in paint-spattered boots. Neither knows the other, but both feel the cool draft of that passing wing. Around them, the commuters stand stunned, as if gravity stepped out for a smoke. At College Station, the doors sigh open, and silence slips away. Noise enters, embarrassed at its absence. The shopper and the painter keep the quiet inside— proof that even underground, something can fly. :::flow ### Familiar stranger flow::: I woke—no, became aware inside a dream—that I was a cow with a bovine view of the world, yet a quiet chyron still scrolled behind my eyes. A freckled heifer, I’d wandered from the herd, my imagination sewn together with threads of wonder I meant to tug. The pond lay round as a silver coin, shadowed by branches that scribbled its surface. I bent my neck, hooves sunk in mud, and peered in. A second cow gazed back, nostrils flaring. When I tilted my head, so did she—a mirror-cow poured from moon-water. The moment my tongue touched the surface, strands of hide and sky unravelled, the mirror-cow swallowed by the pond. Perhaps I had drunk my twin, sipped her life, spun of water and light, now a shimmering ghost adrift inside. I dangled my tongue for the pond to return her, but only a droplet plunked, as useless as a comma in the wrong sentence. I stood still as an old barn beam, eyes on the water, willing a new mirror-cow to bloom, but the pond gave back only the slow choreography of clouds. Hours passed. Sunlight flamed, cooled. “I’m sorry,” I whispered to the water—to the self I believed I’d wronged. As the words left me, a raindrop kissed the pond. Then another. Rain rattled, relented, and cleared. A familiar stranger in the water met my gaze. :::flow ### Referred pain flow::: You keep an elastic band on your wrist like other people wear watches. Whenever silence starts tugging at the stitches, snap—stinging proof you’re still rented to this body. You snap the band to feel something, anything, in the void of affection for being another mouth to feed, another dream unfulfilled. Cheaper than therapy, easier than asking why another plate at the table once felt like charity. Quick to quip but not connect—deadly at parties—you grew to bend words into swords. When the inner child taps the aquarium glass of your dreams, you channel your father’s frosty power, reach for the only inheritance that fits, and snap the kid a good one. I would place a dog cone around your head to keep you from licking wounds no one else can see. Inside the plastic funnel, hear the kid out, let the ache bark itself hoarse. Then cut the cone off when your words come back as bridges rather than blades. :::flow ### Beer on bran flow::: B on B, I can tell you it tastes awful. Three weeks on the low-carb wagon, every cupboard looks like a bakery window. And how’s it fair that crunchy peanut butter is low carb, but not low cal? I crack a lager, pour it over the cereal, watch the foam drown the flakes. First spoon: malty hope; second spoon: barnyard misery. I pour a second splash anyway. Bitterness masks shame better than milk ever did. Tomorrow I’ll ride the wagon again—unless you have a better late-night recipe to swear by. :::flow ### Corvid coin flow::: The compost bucket has never seen an orange peel. Four crows—the resident Garbagemen—keep the yard clean: pizza crusts, banana skins, eggshells picked over before dawn. They leave the celery tops, but that’s another mystery. The birds rise over fence rails and road stripes—lines that box us in. I imagine they read us as hostile, penned creatures. Yesterday I dragged the bucket from under the deck. It rattled: bottle caps, crushed pie tins, a single pearl earring—and the missing key to the side door. I showed my neighbour, and the key slid into his side door too. A small fizz of embarrassment and relief ran up my spine. Same with the Poe family on the other side. The builder installed contractor locks designed to be re-keyed after closing. No one ever bothered. For years, our clipped hedges and matching fences were secured by interchangeable keys while we waved from driveways, mistaking routine for privacy. I scheduled a mobile locksmith for a group rate. By dusk, the locks clicked with new, crisp teeth. The Garbagemen still shun the celery. They watch from the phone line, four black punctuation marks on a run-on sentence of wire. :::flow ### Your tomato plant flow::: You handed me the seedling as a gentle nudge toward salad. “Grow this, maybe less bread and butter.” Three weeks on, it’s shot up like a teenager: all elbows and ambition, leaves flirting with the track lighting. No tomatoes yet, just a green vow that one day it will pay rent in fruit. I parked it on the table beside the counter, which I pretend is a sunroom. Afternoon light ricochets off the toaster and convinces us both we live closer to the equator. Today, the ballpark closed its dome against record heat. I followed suit, retreating to the shaded porch with an iPad livestream and the potted prodigy for company. Top of the second, our pitcher’s already sweating through his cap. Bottom of the third, my tomato plant wilted in solidarity —leaves curling like disappointment, stem leaning as though it bet the over. By the seventh-inning stretch, we’re both slumped: me in a deck chair, it in a terracotta corner, each wondering how promise can sag so fast in August air. I gave it a long drink of water, whispered that the season isn’t over. There are still games left. The plant didn’t perk up, but one tendril angled toward the house, remembering where the light was easy and hope never hung on a scoreboard. :::flow ### Last candlemaker flow::: In the amber hours before morning, I stand in the shop with racks of cooling wax, the last man in town still tending flame while everyone talks about lightning in the wires. Wax is under my fingernails, little beads that feel like a prayer for something that’s slipping away. Outside the poles and lines hum like they’re already in charge. They talk about Edison like he’s some kind of magician who stole the sun, say the nights will shine like noon and shadows will be out of work. I keep dipping the wicks anyway, white sticks in and out of the pot, small interruptions in all this talk about progress. The postman raps my door, hands me a sigil-sealed envelope, and the letter inside asks me to come watch the start of a world, one that never goes dark. The future is polite about it, but it’s still a blade. I send back a short answer in ink dark as cooled tar: Not today, sir, not ever. The poles go up anyway, metal trees, the glass bulbs opening along them like hard bright fruit, and the night starts losing its memory. My girl Lily comes into the dim shop, made of candlelight and questions, and when she says “let’s go,” there isn’t a lock that can stop her. For her sake, I pack away my pride, like folding an old tarp, and follow toward the loud, thunder-lit city. The streets spill light without even trying; I walk through it wearing midnight’s coat, a ghost whose chains jangle with beeswax beads. At the laboratory—cathedral of spinning copper, Edison walks us under a roof of buzzing stars. He is kind. Luminous. Frightening. In one corner, a single oil flame shivers like a canary that remembers the mine. He nods at it and says, “Everything started with that spark.” I bow my head to that flame; its jitter writes itself behind my eyes. On the way home, the road feels like one long breath held. The shop is waiting: small, loyal, dim. I lift the ladle again. The wax doesn’t argue. The wick is willing, but the work has shifted. Into the moulds I pour not just wax, but experiments of elsewhere: Rain on tin roofs, lilac after a storm, library dust mixed with the breath of machines. The flame is now one verse; the fragrances do the singing. Lily snaps lids on the jars and names them by memory instead of shade: First kiss in cold fog, a quilt from an old house, river stones warming under sun. People drift in from the bright streets, eyes wide, like travellers who’ve been living in noon too long. They don’t want more light. They want a ticket back to dusk. I send a candle to the wizard, one that smells of paper, ink, and faint copper crackle. Later, his reply arrives, his hand on the page thin as a filament: “Your flame lends my study a hush my lamps cannot.” He thanks me for reminding him that light has a heartbeat. So the man of wires and the man of wicks trade sparks and scents across the years. His lines cross the map; my candles walk through people’s rooms and heads. Between us, we teach the dark two tricks: how to blaze, and how to whisper. :::flow ### Aviary oracle flow::: Smoke sighs from factory chimneys, draping London in a widow’s veil. Horses clatter, gas-lamps flicker, and the Thames rolls past like an exhausted engine. In this dim-lit crucible of empire, I lean toward a whisper older than Babel. Inside a cramped antiquary—sugared dust, moth-eaten atlases—I see it: a midnight chip of the Rosetta Stone, letters furred with centuries, symbols feathered like wings. The shopkeeper’s eyes glow ember-orange. “Before tongues were cloven,” he murmurs, “all creatures sang one hymn.” A log pops in the grate; the room inhales fate. Coal ash settles on river reeds; sparrows cough in the eaves. I walk home beneath iron constellations of railway tracks. If words can heal forests, I must learn them. I lock the door, open my life, and pour in paper, ink, and birds. Cages line the parlour like organ pipes. Canaries flare gold against the soot; ravens brood in velvet corners. Every chirp, trill, staccato knock becomes a glyph. Nights I scrawl until dawn bleeds through the fog, letters looping like flight paths, coffee cooling into mud. Friends call; I forget the doorbell exists. Winter. A lilting pattern threads through the din—four notes, then three, then silence pregnant as snowfall. I whistle it back. Cage doors tremble; wings cease their rustle. Air freezes—as if time holds its breath to listen. A raven hops onto the cluttered desk, claws ticking on Latin glossaries. Its beak parts; the voice that emerges is older than oak. “Searcher, the earth is no patient. She sheds skin and grows new.” Sparrows chime in chorus: “You wish to mend a wound that is not hers but yours.” Candles gutter; the house tilts under the weight of revelation. They sing of sky-faring elders, of cities spun from petrichor and starlight, of a covenant between feather and flesh long mislaid in human noise. Not extinction—ascension. “Guardian, I remain,” intones the raven, “until you remember.” Dawn finds me on the floor, maps draped over me like abandoned wings. Madness, say the newspapers; genius cracked by its own echo. I am carried to St. Brigid’s Sanatorium, a white-walled aviary of prayers. Sister Agnes offers laudanum; I trade it for finch songs. In the garden, nuns hear me coo, caw, warble, whistle, writing on linen scraps a script no scholar can parse— three columns: Greek, Demotic, and a melody of marks that look like flight. Locked in a drawer beside my narrow bed rests the stone fragment, black as nightfall, bright as a throat full of dawn. London keeps burning coal; factories cough. Yet some evenings, above the clang of progress, a listener might catch a pattern. Four notes, then three—the promise of a language waiting to grow new wings. :::flow ### Advice to self flow::: Morning sun seeps through the lace curtains, casting doily shadows on the floral wallpaper that’s outlived two paint trends and one marriage. My fingers work the needles—click, click— steady as the pocket watch my husband kept beside his Sunday shoes. Yarn the colour of creek water—blue rinsed with green—unspools across my lap, becoming a blanket that will know my grandson’s name before he can spell it. On the mantel, a photograph of a girl in saddle shoes smiles like she’s still tasting her first stolen kiss under the willow by the school yard. I glare at her as the needles keep their metronome. At her, with the lunch box and white socks. The town was not much bigger than today’s shopping mall. I scold her, my younger self: choose better or end up here, with a shawl of years around our shoulders. “In this town, your son’s heart will beat its first. Your man’s, his last. So move out of town!” Laughter breaks the silence. Too late; the prophecy is already spent. The yarn slips; I catch the loop before it drops, see the half-grown blanket drape over imagined shoulders: a tiny face nestled in stitches that hold both river sorrow and willow shade. Someday that boy will spread this cloth on a dorm-room bed or across the back seat of a first car. Long after I’m dust beneath the old willow, the blanket will speak for me in syllables of soft wool. It will whisper about the grandmother who loved him even before he had a name. :::flow ### Envelope birds flow::: Grandpa writes letters no one reads. Every Sunday, he seals a ghost-weight envelope, scribbles FORWARD PLEASE, and lets the wind lift it from the porch rail. Neighbours find them snagged in hedges, lodged in gutter grates, tucked beneath windshield wipers like pale parking tickets. The mailman once carried one back. Grandpa only smiled and pointed skyward. One October afternoon, I track a drifting envelope to the creek, fish it from the water with a stick. Inside: a single film cell—Grandpa at twenty, helmet askew, grinning beside an airplane so flimsy it could be imagined. On the back of the envelope: DID NOT CRASH. That night I ask about the frame. He pats the rocker’s arm, wood worn smooth as repeated prayers. “Some stories don’t land,” is all he offers, eyes fixed above the ceiling fan. A week later, hospice fits a morphine pump to his vein. The room smells of alcohol swabs. While he sleeps, I sit on the porch, folding paper cranes from blank envelopes, unaddressed, trusting the breeze to lift them. One crane catches a thermal, rises beyond the tulip tree—leaving the question of its landing to the sky. :::flow ### Defiant yellow fist flow::: Morning frost nips through thin socks while I wait on the cracked slab that passes for a shelter. Cars pass in smeared lines; I track none of them, counting minutes instead of models. At my feet, a dandelion has pushed a defiant yellow fist through its asphalt ceiling. It wobbles in the exhaust breeze, stubborn as a teenager with a curfew. I admire its grit, wishing for that kind of fight to bloom within me, to fight the weight of indifference. Number 4 to the waterfront heaves around the corner, diesel cough echoing off shop fronts. The curb shudders. One tire kisses the bloom, folding it flat before I finish blinking. Doors hiss open. Heat and the smell of damp vinyl exhale. I claim a window seat already fogged with other people’s sighs. I press a fingertip to the glass and ask the pane—ask myself—whether pushing through to bloom is still brave if the world rolls over you the moment you do. The bus offers no answer, just the lurch of gears and forward motion. :::flow ### Ugly trees flow::: The walls are a forest painted into being by a woman with a palette full of bruises. She paints trees twisted by time, gnarled by storms. Crooked branches, tattered leaves. Bark charred or burdened by snow. Yet people file into the chapel. They stand, hands clasped behind backs, reading rings and fissures the way you’d read scripture. She paints craggy trunks and knotted roots, struggling against wind and winter. Against fire, blight, and bulldozers. She paints resilience, but that word feels tidy compared to what’s on the canvas. What she’s really done is make armour look tender—inviting us to admire the places where life welded itself back together. She paints character in knots and gnarls so that we may see beauty in survival, not perfection. That we may see in ourselves what is not pretty, not young, but enduring. :::flow ### V-tach flow::: A nurse unhooks my IV and suggests a slow lap of the ward. I manage maybe ten steps before Jupiter drops onto my chest, its gravity driving me against the handrail. My heart doesn’t pound. It flutters, frantic and useless, like a sparrow trapped in a chimney. The monitor shrieks. Jagged peaks tear across the screen. “V-tach,” the nurse says, slamming the code button. A gurney. Another face with a widow’s peak. Older. Snow falling on a widow’s peak, I think and know it’s nonsense even as I say it. The gel pads feel cool on my chest. “Small shock. On three.” A blinding punctuation mark. My vision flares, then clears. The sparrow folds its wings. Jupiter rolls off. While they check leads and log new numbers, I lie still thinking how little that panicked bird understood about its fragile cage. :::flow ### Sax at night flow::: When the moon has gone home and the city’s pulse thins to a neon vein, I crack the battered latches and lift my sax. Just me and the horn and the sprawling silence—three conspirators plotting against the dark. The notes slip out, hushed as a child sneaking past a creaky stair. Then they swell, a silver ribbon uncoiling above the rooftops, skimming fire escapes, brushing the eyelids of sleepers and the headstones of names no one mouths anymore. I lean into the streetlamp’s yellow halo, playing in the hope the song finds you. Not to batter your window or rattle the panes. No, these tones slide through the keyhole and tiptoe across the carpet. They rummage the dresser drawers of your dreams, slipping into a memory you’ll wake up wearing without knowing why. My witnesses are shadows flat against brick, echoes that fold in on themselves. Sometimes I swear the city has its ears stitched shut, that a melody evaporates the instant it leaves the bell of the horn— but maybe that’s never been the point. The horn and I are architects of bridges made of breath—waiting for the echo of soles. Even if no one crosses, the span shines in the dark, proof that a soul once tried. So I keep playing, pouring sound into a night that may never write back, because the truest thing I know how to do is give the silence shape—to trust that, even for the length of a single blue note, it matters. :::flow ### Unprotected flow::: Bob handed me a card shaped like a fig leaf. Next week, he and Shirley are tying the knot at the Sunrise Nature Nudist Lodge. I pictured fog and hungry mosquitoes. My wife laughed herself silly. Does a veil count as clothing or décor? A blender, sure, but linens seem sarcastic. Will the photographer charge for strategic angles? We’re fine with nudity. It’s having nothing left to hide behind—fabric as camouflage—that scares us. Then Shirley’s note arrived: “We want everyone as unprotected as we feel saying yes.” That punched me in the buttons still fastened on casual Fridays. So I will stand in nothing but sunscreen and the scent of citronella, feeling the sting of the sun on my skin and the honesty shining back from theirs. :::flow ### Between greens flow::: I raise my scrap of cardboard like a flag of truce. Wash your windscreen? —I’ll squeegee the bug guts into rainbow stripes. Joke? —I have three clean and one that costs extra. Juggle rocks? —Watch ’em orbit in the rush-hour roar, three bruised stones pretending they’re free. Most eyes slide over me, curbside static on their radio. Part of “over there” they’d rather not know is there. Still, every red light stitches us together, a driver’s perfume drifting out the window, the coin sweating in her palm before it clinks into my cup. For one held breath, we share the same exhaust-salted air. Silence, too, has a way of speaking. Occasionally, there is a brief exchange, even a smile, tying us at a busy intersection. When someone notices me, they lift the shame that wears me like a heavy coat. That note, thin as wire, keeps me upright. Then the light flips green, and I lift the flag again. :::flow