Category: Writing

Six minutes before the dog gets fed, a jay screams from a bush in the front yard. A touch of pink lights the horizon out back – another arrival of sorts. Gray clouds drift like continents, archipelagos in tow. Soon the world will yellow and wake. Watch and wait – there goes Madagascar.

Four long-sleeve, button-down dress shirts hang like the shell of a man over the back of a dining room chair: white with blue pattern, blue and silky, blue herringbone, darker blue. Here is where some part of me, that other me, shorn and disassembled waits stacked at the end of each day.

Through a break in the clouds – the pale blue light of morning. The sky moves slowly from left to right – rearranges itself. In this half-light, the white trim on the neighbor’s red shed seems almost phosphorescent. I can smell a clementine souring in the stoneware bowl on the table. Everything is changing.

Uniform and flat, the sky is an empty planetarium screen, primer gray and vinyl smooth. Someone forgot to roll the film – the one where the wisps of clouds mix and drift and starlings streak at improbable angles. It’s as if we’re in a made-up town waiting for someone to yell action.

A soft rain mutes the morning. No warbles or tweets, no traffic, just patters and burbles as if the gutters were talkative rainforest brooks. I can’t write today’s date without saying it in my head – where the two numbers hang slow and heavy. I wonder if it’s quiet and raining in Shanksville.

The marching band warms up at seven-fifteen. This is the first home football game of the year. The morning air is crisp and the sky is a swirl of gray-white wispy clouds. This is fall in a university town. I hear the horns. I hear the drums. Mostly, I hear the drums.

Night lifts. The trees and roof-lines are shrouded in fog. The world feels far through this cotton glass. The lattice pattern on the black, faux wrought iron table, shines glazed in dew. Traffic hums but only when I listen. A single chirp counts the slow beat of time – maybe it’s a chickadee. 

Gutted from a dream about a person I once loved, I couldn’t tell if I was hungry or the opposite of hungry. I ate. I wrote. We were trying again with less effort – same conflict. I woke hurt, disappointed. No details, just feelings – slippery like minnows, and me with clumsy hands.

The coffee maker is a heavy breather. It huffs, it percolates. Its black plastic lid hat bubbles and taps before it lets out a final sigh. The dog rests his heavy head on the top of my foot. He’s bored – waiting to be fed. His breath is warm. He sighs too.

Tree black silhouettes haunt the morning fog. Day arrives slowly and I feel too hurried to see – my own fog, my own morning. A plane leaves the small airport just outside of town ripping the air, up and to my right. I don’t play chess, but I know when I’m in zugzwang.