News

I have cancer.

The diagnosis is somewhat recent. I do not mean this as a ploy of sympathy for why I have not written, lately — I mean it as a way of explaining why I may not write here much, for now.

I am working on a novel, and between preparations, family time, and that, I find less time for blogging. As things become more clear, and/or I get into a better routine, I hope to put more into this blog.

I certainly can’t quit it — all the voices in my head won’t get any quieter just because I don’t make the time for them.

I can’t ask for your patience, but if you do stick around, I imagine you’ll find something entertaining here again, sooner or later. Of course, I might just write about the trials and tribulations of all this ridiculous nonsense regarding my malfunctioning body. Not sure yet.

For all of you who have walked this path before me, I apologize on behalf of the body that betrayed you. Isn’t it a little bit funny that even the flesh that contains us is not completely our own?

For all of you who will walk it after me, forgive yourself — whatever you could have done to prevent this (eat better, exercise more, go to the doctor, listen to the doctor, take CARE of yourself!), that chance is over and done. Pick up your feet and keep walking. You may yet find more chances, and the strength to continue.

As for me, I am not walking alone; my family, my friends, my beautiful wife — they all walk beside me, and I am more grateful to them than I can explain right now.

Return 3

It was the captain who noticed the significance of the feathers first — the children were simply busy playing with them, while some of the followers gathered up the downy ones and stuffed them into sacks. It walked with us, and as its feet grew callused on the stone-grass, its wings shed continuously, as though they renewed themselves every so often.

The captain picked one up, and stared at it for a long time, booted feet plodding along with the rest of us, until suddenly the grey sky was full of shouts and  laughter.  He held up the slim feather, and his fingers touched the rachis, and there was music, silver light and fire all at once, and it lit up his face from within.

Return 2

The creature was a fascination; the captain hadn’t come back in hours and no one had thought to call out. When our band crested the ridge, the few children left to us ran down the muddied, rocky slope, heedless of the exhausted, wordless bleat of warning that came from an over-protective few. The fallen thing fell silent and reached for them as they came close, and they crowded round, grubby fingers eager to touch it, their mudstained hands leaving redgrey fingerprints and smears. Our captain stood and carefully watched them explore, watching, too, the skything, as it struggled to respond to each querying touch. At last, overwhelmed, it lifted its voice in song, and the astonished crowd drew back, holding its collective breath. That is how we found them, surrounding and surrounded by it. It sang as though that were the only way it knew to speak. It sang as though its voice were Music itself. It sang, and we listened, with no thought to the lengthening shadows, or the coming chill.

For Trent (And Bill, and the people who read the refrigerator note but don’t understand it…)

Maybe because
it is spring
I am naked
and whitegreen,
newly formed
and forming.
Maybe because
I want the wind
on my face
and at my back.
Maybe because
I am burned
by the sun
but need it
to blind me.
Or maybe
the taste of ashes
means I am
a phoenix, rising,
and now
it is time
to fly
again.

Return

In the aftermath, there were those who uncovered the dead, and those who buried them. There were no services, no names, and no mark-stones. No one would look upon the fields sown with blood and ash. We were wide-eyed under the stars,  squinting under the sun. We staggered and tumbled, blown in every direction, fallen leaves in an unexpected storm. At times, there was little enough to say that we would go for weeks without speaking, without a sigh or shout or sound. Perhaps that is how, when it came from the heavens, cloudstained and broken-winged, the captain’s heart was caught — he was the only one who remembered what it was like to hear music. He stopped covering the faces of those who would never see again, and he followed the ghost of a memory as it drifted on the wind, to the spot where it lay in the stone-grass, shattered and scattered and still singing, staring up at the hole in the sky where it had fallen through.

Kneel

Listen, listen. Ear to the door and you can hear the heavy bass and slow, nearly-non-existant drums of something Top 40 Generic; she plays it while she lays on the floor and looks for galaxies in the texture of the ceiling tiles. When she’s high, she lets the white of everything melt down and puddle on the floor — later when she’s coming down, she’ll clean it up while she listens to the soundtracks to anime that she’s never had translated, a springing beat to the Japanese lyrics she can sing, but can’t understand.

Except today, while she’s staring up at the ceiling, her eyes will glass over, and she’s never going to breathe again — those nearly-non-existant drums are more like the nearly-non-existant heartbeat, slowing and slowing in her chest.

Listen, listen, and you’ll be able to hear it stutter.

She doesn’t feel it; she’s finally found her stars.

* * *

Kneeling down over the body, he rested his fingertips on the cheek, still warm, and kept his eyes shut. This was not the first body he’d seen, not the first death of someone too young, not the first death of someone who ‘didn’t deserve it’. Not the first time it was senseless, pointless, horrific, depressing, full of despair.

This was not the first time he’d fallen in love with a corpse for the way she finally looked peaceful.

This was not the first time he lit a cigarette in the midst of a crime scene and walked away.

This was not the first time it hurt — perhaps that’s why it hurt so strongly, so that he couldn’t get used to it, couldn’t be blinded by it, couldn’t be dulled to the fact that failure was not an option, that human lives are worth more than paper, money, drugs, sex, booze, contracts.

That every time he squeezed the trigger, someone else would find themselves kneeling.

I was dreaming…

And within the barren fields of Winter, there was, among the grass gone brown from the cold, from the dying sun, a line of trees that stood against the horizon. Tall and thick-limbed, overgrown with gnarls and twists, and they blocked the way to the beyond. We stood in a line, the hills to our back and the hills to the future, and we could not tell the time, for the sun was obscured by the dull grey dome that is the sky in perpetual lateness. Hard ground beneath our feet, and the line of trees was not forboding but forbidding.

No way forward, and the way we had come was only mountains threatening taller and taller.

Through the branches, I could see the white. I could see the delicate. I could see the lace of sycamores, silver and singing, and I was not sure of my place anymore. Something ephemeral danced there, something beyond the branches, where, across a line I could not see but knew existed, there was a field, low and fresh, that still hung sweet with spring.

We stood there, in a line, and looked through the trees while the grey sky fell slowly, threatening blankets of snow, ice that would keep us from ever advancing. We stood there, and looked to the white lace of branches beyond branches, and thought of spring beneath hills we had not yet seen. We thought of a sky that rained sunlight in blue-golden, and where we would not hear the rustle of frozen leaves and cold-cawing crows. Where the silver-white of sycamore was not the color of the frost on the ground, but the white of snowdrops come early, knowing nothing of midwinter’s meaning.

We stood there and knew that there was dancing, beyond that line, and that above all, it was not for us.