24: If You’re Going to Do It

If you’re going to leave him, your child, your baby, the son you made from your own bone and infused with life through your own blood- if you’re going to leave him, here’s how you do it.  You take him to a colorful place, one with bright aisles of candy, with machines turning icy colored slush and plump hot dogs.  You wait until he’s looking away, until the clerk is distracted, and you turn your back, and you hope he doesn’t say the word, Mama, and you walk through the door.

23: Syrius

They met in the dark hall, under the guise of midnight.  Knowing each other by scent was not enough, and so each one wove a mask for the others out of light.  Once illuminated, they could speak, but found they had nothing to say.

22: The Most Magically Potent Object

Not a ring, not a crystal, not a bleached raven’s bone.  Not a tooth, not a newt’s eye, not a hair from the head of the fairy queen.  A pamphlet, for Al’s Squat and Gobble in Broken Axel, Nebraska.

21: Nova Scotia

I’m going to write a book on matchbook covers.  It will take me forty-two years to complete.  I’m going to put the matchbook covers in a basket and then tie the basket to a balloon filled with helium.  When the balloon fails, the book will fall out of the sky.  I hope it falls on a small island, someplace in Nova Scotia.  I hope that a small child finds it, and that it changes her life.

20: The Ordained Sequence of Orderly Events

I. Exposition —>> II.  What is necessary and probable –>> III.  Ups, downs and again –>> IV.  Until…  –>> V.  Something astonishing happens.

Rinse and repeat.

19: Six Carried One Other

Their faces were hidden by sackcloth hoods.  Uniforms.  They climbed the hill under the dark illumination of the sky, the city not far off but many worlds away.  Chanting came from a distance.  Hymns.

“I’d like to leave him on the steps of that palace,” said one at last, his voice muffled.  “I’d like to bathe him in the light of the sky.”

18: Ladders, Steps, and Staircases

Have you ever noticed that some things spontaneously generate?  As an example, no one in the history of time has ever purchased a can of Libby’s Pumpkin Pie mix, and yet there is always one in the cupboard, shoved into some dark recess.  If you don’t believe me go to your kitchen right now and look in your cupboards.  There, you see?

The universe is filled with places of connection that we miss, because our eyes can only be in one place at once.  If we had compound eyes, like flies, we might see all the ladders, steps and staircases that allow things to get around.

The secret truth is that there is only one can of Libby’s Pumpkin Pie mix in existence, but it has the map and it knows the locations of all the exits and entrances.

17: Necessary Logic

The house did its job, protected them like a shell, made it seem, once again, like everything would be okay.  “It’s not the house itself that feels strange,” he told her.  “It’s the impending sense that one day, like it or not, you’re going to leave it, and other people will be living here.”

16: Plateau

I arrived before myself, and so of course the tracks that I found were my own.  The place itself had once been named after me, but it had no name now.  Only the name of the wind, keeping the sky company.

15: Cataract Canyon

My body is trying to help me forget what my mind cannot forget.  Every time I approach water, any water, I break out in hives, speak in tongues, have fits.  I cannot bare myself over the toilet’s open bowl.  I cannot wash my dishes, my hair, my hands.  Slowly, the earth is overtaking me, willing a forgetfulness that the river, or water itself, exists.