ft ground

[pdf]

enjoy this first full draft of the short fiction piece i have been working on [pdf]

Far away again in autumn. The sunlight through a flat cloud as you stood on the sidewalk outside a door without a handle flat into the glazed bricks was quiet. The one week of the year had come across trees that had enough leaves on them to blot out the southern sun and the shade was warm enough to sit out in. You spent the long afternoon in a plaza downtown sitting on the swept bricks. In the absence of those faces you couldn’t retain your eyes filled with the white sky. You worked your way back through the mosaic, around cavernous voids that you could feel between your eyes and your skull where whole weeks had been handed over to some black vessel willfully, intentionally. You rock back and forth in the gathered up twine of time hanging down from Atlanta. In some phrases you are there, like now, under a sparse pear tree in the plaza, or slipping back down, not as a journey into that empty Valley, but a plummet, or a twinkling transmigration into a moment. When you began at the end, as a human destination with a trail let out behind it, there was nothing concrete enough to withdraw from but the euphoria of the continuing tides of the hotel, to step backwards from your death and gaze upon it from life. You knew the debris that ended every story. The same things with different connotations. You felt like a bronze cast. (more…)

In the autumn you got an efficiency apartment, found the ditched car, and unpacked all of the contents, including a large, wise-eyed brown cat asleep on its roof. You hadn’t noticed how much had been left in the car. It seemed to be everything. Everything was just barely enough, for a long time. (more…)

This is another artifact. I can feel when one gets caught up in me, physically, in a layer of my skin that feels sore in a continuous dull sheath around my body. I have thought, at the onset of the feeling, in the past, that I could not physically soothe it without clawing through myself, and I didn’t know what I would find. I shivered like there was an old man in me, right below the surface. If I bled myself he would seep out and dry onto paper his real voice, when, every so often, I feel him struggling to whisper through my skin. An ink wash of some time out of sorts. (more…)