In Parades, Pt. 2

This morning was the same as any other morning. The sky was the same bluish grey color of illness, and still unnoticed by everyone walking underneath it. Alan walked in an unconscious rhythm that mirrored the walks of everyone around him. His fingers clutched impulsively at buttons on his jacket, pushing them through their holes and them removing them just as swiftly. There was something in the way that the wool of his jacket slid abrasively over each plastic button that comforted Alan's hands, and starting from there, it comforted the rest of his body as well.

When Alan walked into the square it seemed for a moment that he was the last person on Earth. There were no other pedestrians to be seen and the silence was coal black and heavy. The air seemed thick and cold, and Alan gasped once, his exhalation an exclamation point towards the heavens. He looked up and looked at the sky for the first time in what seemed like eternity, and the lack of sound began to close its many fingers around him. He looked desperately around him, the cobblestones slithering, scales on the back of the world serpent, whose teeth bite into its tail with the savagery of lust, of the instinct to rut with flesh against flesh. Alan's feet stopped for a moment, next to each other, and his eyes closed momentarily. he could still see everything around him. He could still feel the square folding its corners together like an origami crane, ready to flap into the center of the sky.

Alan began to run. The ground became a blur and his vision wavered with tears - of joy or fear or sorrow, he did not know. He ran, holding his leather briefcase aloft with one hand, the shoulder strap biting into his bicep, straining to pull himself forwards. The door to his office building loomed in front of him and he wondered if perhaps he would make it, if the world would stay solvent long enough for his fingers to find the door. His hand grasped the handles and for a moment he was shocked by the cold, before he wrenched the door open, stumbled through, and turned to close the door with all of his remaining strength.

His breathing, which had been ragged and blood red upon entering, began to slow. His shoulders straightened. His hands came up, still in their gloves and smoothed the hair which now seemed in a spray of disarray. Alan turned, his face a collection of tightly held muscle, and began to walk to the elevator. His heels tapped echoes on the floor, tap, tap, tap. Nobody noticed the deep stain of his eyes, until the elevator doors closed, and Alan stared with mournful intensity at his own reflection.

-Rich
the summer if we were deathly ill

In Parades, Pt. 1

While walking through the city square, Alan felt that something was different, something had changed. He stopped and looked around but could not tell what made him feel uncomfortable. The air was cold, and he shivered slightly even under a thick winter coat which was ostensibly filled with duck down. Alan curled his hands into balls and screwed them further into his pockets before he continued walking.

Later, when standing in line to purchase a cup of coffee, Alan realized what was different with his daily walk. For the past few months there had been heavy construction on a few buildings that were undergoing renovation. While in the process of being renovated, the buildings had become steel skeletons, their innards in plain view of the world. Alan never looked at them while passing. He felt a sense of shame, a slight connection to the voyeur for whom nakedness means ownership. Instead, as he walked along the same route every morning on his way to work, he would read the signs proclaiming low rates per square foot, the signs claiming with forceful agression that the restaurant soon to be on the ground floor of this particular building would satisfy all of the diner's desires. The buildings themselves were not seen, the people that worked on them disappeared into a fog of apathy as soon as they began to work. Alan was not interested in any of it.

The only thing which Alan had come to recognize was the cacaphony of birdcalls that echoed through those steel ribs. Hundreds of birds had come to roost in the upper, unfinished floors where steel spars hung bone dry. Every morning when Alan walked to work he would hear that song - at first it was faint, a mild sound that reminded him of playing with other children, fighting over a ball. The closer he walked to the square, the louder the sound became until it was an orchestra playing in his ear, it was a dog laughing in the night outside of his window. Alan hated the sound of animals and his steps quickened without fail through the square until he was safely ensconced in the lobby of his workplace, glass doors a mirror through which that grating sound found only reflection.

The next morning, Alan woke with a start from a dream only half remembered, where a blank moon had pulled him across the sky as if he were chained to her. He dressed with the prim perfection of absentmindedness, and turned once to look at his apartment before leaving. With the lights off(for he always turned off the lights before leaving to save money on his energy bill) the room looked like a landscape painting, all hard curves and edges hidden under the blanket of nightfall. He closed the door and locked it, and made his way outside, still thinking with some confusion about his dream from the night before.

-Rich

something is in the air

The burning mount.

Strange things have been happening in the past few weeks. I was in Milano, where I was also subsequently mugged while enjoying(some would say enduring) a wonderfully ancient city. I am now spending half the week or more in Huntsville Alabama, where my job responsibilities has very swiftly evolved from the sort of laconic turgidity I enjoy, to a more dynamic presence. I wonder whether it is something worth being happy about, or something worth being sad about.

At the moment I am sitting in a room with a variety of papers to read, my phone ringing as if Dire Straits are playing a two set show at the Orpheus and I have tickets, and I am wondering if perhaps somewhere along the way I have been letting go of the parts of me I actually enjoyed most. I still write but without the urgency of vanity. I still read but without the hunger of superiority. I still do everything I am accustomed to doing, but I have become accustomed to doing them.

There is a point in our lives when we have to deal with death, and there is no greater death than the ones we experience day after day, night after night, in the cool bosom of violent blue morning. I will continue the short story I was beginning earlier and it will progress according to the speed at which I let the words grow. The goal of that story was to capture a bit of the Russian/French ideology, that aging veneer of class that turns a sneer into a smile, that raises glances, always they are raised. There is something in that quiet moral solitude that I have recently been very enamoured of...perhaps it is the way it mirrors my own developments. A writer, even an amateur writer, has only the palette of his own experiences with which to explain an idea or establish a causal relationship. That is what we do, really. We create relationships with words, between words, outside of words - those relationships means something to us and the theory is that they mean something to you.

What then, is the point? If this is true, if we can turn our own experience into something the reader knows with salt stained conviction is true, then we have proven, in some measure, that humanity exists. We have proven that we are not alone, that even if the Earth is the last mourning son of the father, we are not alone. We can not be, we must stand for something, in the end. I think that is an amazing thing. I think it is an impossible feat. Yet there are those writers who have done so with an ease that is "tres terrible" and yet so full of despair that one wonders whether impossible should remain in the language of men and women at all. I am rambling. I hope you enjoy my thoughts. I will return shortly.

-Rich
though we weren't last in line