The Sinkhole

I felt the chilly wind as I stepped out of the taxi. The hotel my boss booked for me was in the northern district of the city. I stood next to the car gazing at the dark red building while the driver took my suitcase out of the trunk. The building was wide rather than

Birth of the Blue Heron

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.    My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,    Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I? A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.    The mind enters itself, and God the mind,    And one is One, free in the tearing wind. “In a Dark Time”  By

I Checked and It Was Still There

“But as they burned, disappearing irrevocably one after the other, you stopped believing that there was any purpose in a book’s existence. Or perhaps the only one to have worked out their purpose was the Sarajevan author and bibliophile who, instead of using expensive firewood, warmed his fingers last winter on the flames of Dostoevsky,

Choice Words

We are at Boots, Etc., exit 149 when driving South in Georgia towards New Orleans. We watch as a man hammers hand-wrought silver tips onto Henry’s new red leather boots. The man uses shining little nails, he squints, he moves his hands as delicately as a pianist, as a mother braiding hair. As he works behind

Metal Birds

Far behind the house’s rear, among moss and dead leaves was a spring. Connected to the spring by a small staircase of large rocks lie a stream that flowed as a river when it rained and ran dry through summer and winter. Insects–gnats, mosquitos, flies–danced above puddled water in the day, the light giving shape

The Bench

A cold Monday night, I was sitting on ‘the bench’. If I told you that I had seen two cats and three hedgehogs as of that point, you could probably tell how long I had been there. My body was cold to the bones and it never stopped shivering as the night got late… but

The Last Forest

Except for the light breeze everything is different from all she had ever known. The temperature, the humidity, that she cannot see the horizon, the colors and the way the light dances over the ground. She has never smelled anything like this before, but it is not unpleasant. It comes closest to a combination of heavy wet mud and the youngest grasses. Behind her she could still have seen the familiar blue sky, green water and yellow sand through the trees, in case she had looked back.