Issue 44 May 2017 Flash Fiction Online May 2017

The two women are sitting in their beach chairs in the shallow water, low waves and foam lapping at their bare calves. They are both wearing striped, old-fashioned bathing suits, complete with goggles and swimming caps; the tall, thin one is wearing black and white stripes, the other one is striped red. They look to the west, from where the wave will come. There are lots of people standing ashore, or sitting, or lying on the beach, waiting for the flood.

The two women are talking. The red-striped one is counting something with the fingers of her left hand. They look happy, as if they’re not even noticing all the people around them, as if they’re not even waiting for the end of their world. Sometimes they laugh, looking at each other; other times they talk while looking in front of them, eyes wide and staring. They take turns speaking, and each time the red-striped woman adds a finger to her count.

Number three earns the black-and-white woman a soft, tender touch on the shoulder.

Number four has the red-striped one waving her arms around, excited.

Number five takes a while, but when they find it, it makes the black-and-white woman laugh so hard her chair almost falls backward into the rising water—it’s up to their knees now, wetting their thighs and their crotches nestled in the deep beach chairs.

At number six, they bring their chairs closer together, making it easier to touch each other. The red-striped woman rests her head on the shoulder of the other, who turns and kisses her forehead. The red-striped woman starts sobbing at this, and so her companion takes over the counting. They are up to seven now; it takes both hands, but it’s worth it, isn’t it? The black-and-white woman holds up her palms, one open wide, the other with two fingers making a V and she talks calmly, her gaze fixed on the horizon. She stirs the water with her right leg and then glances at the beach, the people holding helium balloons scribbled with messages for the skies:

* * *

MAKE ROOM FOR US

WE LOVE YOU

WE WANT YOU

WE ARE SO ALONE

* * *

Number eight, number nine, these are easy, they go fast, but then the women pause. They both hold their palms in front of them, all fingers extended but one. As if to say, what are we forgetting? As if to say, is that all we have?

The red-striped woman stands up and plods to the shore; there are so many people there now it is difficult to walk without elbowing her way through, taking care not to step on any of the lying ones, the sleeping ones, sprawled like broken mannequins on the beach–how can they be asleep?

She makes her way to the mango trees lining the beach. She reaches with her arm raised up up up as far as she can, balancing on the tips of her toes. She picks a green mango and carries it back into the sea. She hands it to the black-and-white woman, and she breaks its firm skin with her teeth, then peels the skin back and bites into its flesh, orange juice running down her chin. She offers it back to the red-striped woman, who does the same. They take turns until they finish the fruit, then toss the skin and the gnawed stone in the water and watch the stone sink and the skin float away from them–the water now up to their belly buttons, the beach slowly being swallowed and the sleepers drifting into the sea.

The black-and-white woman wipes her chin with the back of her right hand and then uncurls her last finger. Ten good things make a life well spent, no?

Ten, they count, and happy the bathers sail away.

Previously published in Litro, August 2015. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

When Sara asks me if I wanted to go doom-spotting, I say yes. Of course I say yes. The Edge Lookout is dark and rocky and romantic, and I usually say yes to anything Sara suggests. And I’ve been addicted to doom-hunting ever since I was nine and got my first telescope.

“Why do you need to see it? You know it’s up there,” Ibu says, as I lug my viewing gear out to the car. All of my aunt’s once-dark hair is gray now.

“It’s meant to be lucky, if you find it,” I tell her.

“Mmpffh, lucky,” she says in her dry voice. Ibu does not believe in luck, only unluck.

* * *

Everyone has a doom. They orbit the planet, some of them moving quickly so that you can track their movement across the sky, some of them geostationary, always above you, hovering, even in bright sunshine. Even if you never see it.

* * *

“Don’t you drink,” Ibu says as I leave, “don’t you speed.” Don’t you bring your doom down upon you, is what she means, but she doesn’t say it.

“I won’t,” I promise her.

* * *

I break that promise, a little guiltily, when Sara opens champagne.

“Your telescope is great,” she says, sitting so that her arm brushes up against mine. “Mine is ancient, and it doesn’t track well. It’s hard to make out the names sometimes.”

It’s dark, but the sun hasn’t been long set. It’s one of the best times for spotting dooms. Moving stars everywhere trace paths of light in the sky.

“Phoon Si Hao,” Sara reads on a doom arcing from the south-west.

“Pooja Lavali,” I find. It’s a small doom, traveling west-east quickly, but my telescope is very good.

* * *

I’ve never found it, the doom that has my name on it. Despite countless nights searching. Maybe it has a low albedo. Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough. It could be wobbling, its orbit degrading. It could be hurtling towards me right now, one specific streak of light burning through the dark.

* * *

“Have you ever seen a doom?” Sara asks me. “One that landed? Not on the news I mean?”

“Just once,” I say. It’s only half a lie.

I tell her about the man I saw a year ago. He was standing in the taxi queue and I was at the end of the street. A flash of light in the corner of my eye made me look. I saw it slam into him, obliterating him, but leaving everyone around him untouched and shocked. His name was Amza Yusuf. I know that because afterward, I looked at the rock, boulder-sized, just slightly smoking, and saw his name inscribed upon it, clear for anyone to see. For some reason the part I remembered the most was that just before it hit, he turned his face upwards, just a little, to see his doom, falling from the sky.

* * *

Sara tells me about her Grandfather’s doom, and her aunt’s, although she didn’t see that one until afterward. I think about the doom I can’t talk to anyone about, not even Sara.

Last summer my sister had her first child. A little girl, she was five days old only, only that. Her doom left a discrete circular hole in the roof of my sister’s house, smaller than my fist, and my hands are not big. The crib was marked and scorched with heat, but it was structurally intact.

My niece was completely gone.

It sat in the palm of my sister’s hand when she showed me. My niece’s tiny doom. It was shiny and smooth, not pocked and jagged like Amza Yusuf’s. And on it, her perfect, very brand new name in incredibly small letters.

* * *

Sara yawns and her head rests lightly against my shoulder. We watch the shower of doom, bright streaks against the sky, so many, so very many, falling to find the people they belong to. It shouldn’t be beautiful.

It is late when I find it. It is very far up. It must be, to still be reflecting any sun at all.

My name. And not just my name, but names upon names almost overlapping, hard to read.

“What do you see?” Sara asks, feeling me tense, but I can’t answer her.

Names I don’t recognize, and names I do. My name. Ibu is there. My sister. The family next door. My cousins. Old school teachers. And Sara.

What I see is doom.

There, hanging in the sky, so large that through my scope I cannot see the edges of it.

It might stay up there, five years, ten perhaps. There is no way to tell. It feels like it has all the names in the world, but maybe it is just our country, maybe just our city.

It has always been there. This doesn’t change anything. And it does.

It’s meant to be lucky, I told Ibu. Lucky.

I turn to Sara. I cannot tell her what I see, not yet. I tell her something else instead. “I love you,” I say. And it is like the words have always been true and also like they become true right at this moment.

And I feel like I, too, was waiting, waiting to fall.

I look only at her, and not up, where far, far above us waits the doom with all of our names on it.

This is what it was like, in the beginning.

You come home from school one day, and a wall in your house is missing.

It might be the front wall, leaving your door suspended in space and the neighbors too able to see in. And seeing, comment. It might be in the kitchen, where dinner is late, and drafts wend their way around suspended cabinets to chill now tasteless lasagna.

Or it might be in your bedroom, where you now sleep with a light (too dim to hold back the night), where you keep your first edition comics (exposed to the weather) and the posters of things you used to love hang (tattered by sharp winds). Your home is colder than it should be. Broken. And monsters are no longer relegated to the darkness under the bed.

* * *

This is what it is like, in the middle.

Focusing on the missing wall is difficult. Memory brings it back to full glory but only in dreams. Waking reveals its true nature, which is absence. Torn plaster bristles with sprigs of horsehair (it is an old house, but nothing like this has happened to it before) and the wound grows more ragged as the days pass. So do you.

You cling to what remains.

Your plastic horse collection, the palomino missing one delicate hoof but still beloved. Your library, paperbacks pilfered one by one from the house shelves, as if they could shore up the empty space in your room. Sometimes it even works.

The missing wall is not discussed. You build a castle of blankets at the edge of your bed, between you and the hole where the wall used to be. You raise an army of animals to defend the tattered fortress while you sleep. Frost rimes their polyester fur, but they are true soldiers, strong and tireless at their watch. Afternoon tea parties are not enough to repay such loyalty, but they are all you have to offer.

You learn to navigate the drafty rooms, to cook and clean and care for, and you decide to rebuild.

The work is hard at first. You have never used plaster. The rusty metal trowel hangs heavy in your tiny hand. You start small, working from the bottom left corner so that rain will no longer soak the pressed cardboard backing of your dresser. The angles are wrong, the texture lumpy and the result is nothing like what you lost. You remember the red plastic scoop buried in a cardboard box in the basement, waiting to make snow blocks for a winter igloo. You find it, try to use it to shape something permanent, but the bulky rectangles are too thick to dry. The half-formed shapes melt into puddles of childish pink goo.

You collapse into a puddle of your own. Later, you do not remember the wracking sobs, but the aching pain and hollowed-out chest are harder to forget.

It is the bees who save you. You are curled in a hopeless arc when you notice the low drone of a bee at work. Then another, followed by a floating network of coordinated effort, all focused on one task: converting the shattered plaster into a nest. Their persistence motivates, their geometry inspires. Delve, partition, restore. You cock your head to one side and watch, and think, and then emulate.

From that point on the work gathers speed.

Some time later you are halfway through. Your dresser is no longer in danger of falling out, but the window still hangs in empty space. With a sudden inversion of perception, you realize that the missing wall is also a door. If you shift the piles of books aside, you can sneak out into the night to explore worlds both dangerous and seductive. You stop patching.

Perhaps you revel in this new-found freedom. You spend time in activities other than practical. That lasts long enough to build character, teach valuable life lessons, etc., etc., before you realize that walls are there for a reason. You reject less constructive pursuits and consult a guidance counselor about getaway plans. You rejoin the bees in their peculiar dance.

Eventually, the wall is complete.

* * *

This is what it will be, in the end.

One day you may stand outside your old address on a summer day, bathed in a corona of light. The field where you played hide and seek has sprouted a cluster of townhouses. The yellow brick of your childhood home still glows, although perhaps not as brightly as it once did. There is no sign of the missing wall.

You walk around the building, picking your way past a child’s bike (long tassels and a banana seat but not yours) and the remnants of a garden gone to seed. Carpenter bees still grace the air, tunneling into the old wooden balcony in the effort to build anew.

You might look up and wonder. You see no sign of it, the breach where your wall once was and is again. From the outside, the house appears intact. You gaze up at that second-floor window and, almost, see a face peering back.

Perhaps you spare a moment’s thought for the grueling hours you spent as a child, spackling over the yawning space with nothing more than hope and imagination. Or for what you may have walled up inside.

* * *

The new wall still stands. Not as solid, perhaps, as the original, not as sturdy in the face of wind and rain, but it is whole. The house sits, squat with memory, and you hope that you left it stout enough to shelter its new occupants. Your time there left scars, yes, but not ghosts. That old willow still drapes drowsy and cool above the murmuring creek in which you learned to swim. Red-berried bushes surround the porch where you flapped your wings. The tranquil air fills with the drone of bees as they build, tear down, and build again.

And then there is nothing left to do but turn and fly away.

Last month I noted the key milestone moments that convinced yours truly that he was stupid, how this belief rolled through my brain like a mixtape with auto-reverse, and how punk rock gave me the attitude to say “Fuck you, I’m going to learn how to write.”

Now, if this was a TED talk that’s where I’d end my well-practiced diction, considered pacing, and friendly arm movement. Perhaps I’d sum it all up with accolades so that you’d think there was a direct causal link between screaming “Fuck You” and “Success!” Then you’d leave and buy my self-help book “FUCK YOU! THE GUIDE TO GETTING ALL THE SEX, CASH, AND PRESTIGE EVERYONE DESERVES, ESPECIALLY YOU, FUCKO!”

But that’s not my story. Saying “Fuck you” also had a hellish price tag. Because the only person I actually said “fuck you” to was me. And that’s where things get weird.

At York University in 1995, where I was flunking out of my history major, I came across some bit of wisdom from an academic.

“The only way to become a better writer is to read a lot and write a lot.”

That sentiment is sprinkled in a lot of writing advice, but I can’t attribute it to any single author. Still, those two activities became my mantra. The first step, improve my reading life.

Until I started working at a bookstore in 1994, I was exceptionally ill-read (music was my god until the band broke up).  So, I filled my course load with reading-intensive classes on comparative literatures and histories of North America, Russian and German cultural classes with large reading lists, classes on fantasy literature (I wrote a paper on the nature of evil in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion), and, most infamously, a course called “On Love” (where I read Stendhal and Goethe and discovered the rarity of a zipless fuck). These were paired with the reading-insane worlds of my history degree: Fringes of the Medieval West, a class so hard and so compelling that I was happy to survive with a B, thanks to a tough essay I wrote on the Crusades against Latvian pagans!; Spectacle and Society, featuring gladiators and chariot races, where I read about Commodus, the crazy Roman emperor who fought in rigged gladiator matches; Modern Europe (where I learned about Jan Hus and why you should avoid invitations from the Pope), and two of the remaining military and diplomatic classes at a school that cared little for such forms of history (spent a whole year writing about the diplomatic fiasco that led to the Crimean War, a war that “no one wanted,” which seems very timely). And all of them demanded essays and research papers. So, I read a lot, and I wrote a lot.

But here’s what I didn’t do:

I didn’t study grammar, punctuation, composition, or syntax.

I hoped that the most necessary elements of language would enter my brain through repeated and relentless badgering, instead of, you know, starting with “subject + verb = sentence!” But I had some definite holes. What caused them? Frankly, I do not recall being taught the basics of writing during high school. Sounds awful, but I have some evidence.

My eldest sister also went to Earl Haig High School in Toronto. And she talked about how these rules were hammered into her head in English, French, and Latin, of the horror of sentence diagrams, and the power with which these rules became the foundations of her command of language (she worked in closed captioning for years, where you have to know this stuff cold). While terrified, I secretly hungered for that kind of educational ass-whooping. Maybe, just maybe, this was the kind of education that would make me smart!

But it never happened while I was at Haig. Not that I recall. I read Shakespeare, wrote essays, made videos, did book reports, took some Myers-Brigg styled employment and personality test, goofed off, and hadn’t learned a gerund from a groundhog. By my final year, the Ontario government issued a province-wide language and writing test to see how bad the damage was. I took the tests, but the benefits from this Royal Commission were a day late and a dollar short for me. Why didn’t I start simple and learn the basics? See below.

I never sought advice or analysis on whether or not I had a learning disability.

My mom was worried I had some learning challenges with writing. Some ticks that didn’t look right on paper. But our family had bigger problems during my childhood than to worry about me, and the last thing I ever did was express needs or desires because my job was to make people smile, laugh, or otherwise be happy during an awful time.  Later, many of my professors rated my verbal skills much higher than written work and said verbal language was a better representation of my actual intelligence (which I assumed was the ol’ Ridler charm working its magic and distorting their perceptions of just how raw-dumb I actually was). And folks who have edited my stuff have noted my perpetual problem with homonyms (See “The Case of the Sizzling Friars!”). I don’t know if I have a specific challenge, and I cannot afford to do the tests available to me. If I’d spoken up and got tested for dyslexia and its kin when I was a kid, I think it might have helped, if only to kill the divided thinking (do I actually have a problem or am I just an idiot?). Instead, I punished myself by studying writing and chastised myself for not being perfect in my execution. Why? See below.

I never asked for help from anyone.

Even though there were deficits in my education and a possible learning challenge, and even though the world offered it, I chose to go it alone. Teachers offered tutorials. I never went. TA’s offered office hours to help with essays. I never went. Even Dr. Kanya-Forstner advised me of resources like the Writing Center that offered help on research and writing. I never went.

Why?

It’s a tricky answer. Some of it’s the punk rock attitude of being an unacknowledged depressed shit in their twenties: “Fuck you! I don’t need ‘nuthin but old books and essay collections, Narc! I’m going to bend the academic world to my will!” Self-reliance is a good thing, of course, but I felt that if I didn’t go it alone, I was as weak, stupid, and hopeless as the evidence seemed to suggest. Asking for help meant I admitted to the world I had a problem . . . And that, I could not do. It was like an elaborate con or sting operation. If I could hide my stupidity until I could fix it, I’d have a fait accompli, and no one would be the wiser. If I was found out, The Talented Mr. Ridler would be caught and killed, probably from shame.

Which is, of course, stupid, though shame is a far more powerful motivator than we often suspect.

But when you choose silence over feedback from others, stupid grows wild. And in trying to defeat a weakness, I created a different kind of monster. During those dark days at York University, I spoke maybe six-thousand words in four years, made no lasting friendships, and ignored a growing depression at a campus that looked mock-imperial Roman and Orwellian in the desolate fringes of a metropolitan city (for fucksakes, the region is called Downsview!) You wouldn’t have known it, but behind my silent grin, there a monster seethed with the exhaustion of fighting alone against the stupid for so many years.  Instead of corpses, imagine my Frankensteinian creation was made out of the steroid-strained muscles of the Ultimate Warrior, but inside his mighty tanned chest was not a heart, but a perpetual motion machine called “WORK.”  From his raging maw, he’d spew a boot camp’s worth of disdain to motivate me at maximum decibels.

“Take the heaviest course load, or they’ll know you are weak!”

“Live on four hours of sleep and instant coffee to get all the reading done, which one professor said was physically impossible! Prove him wrong!!!”

“Never let up! Not for a second! Don’t reveal the truth!! Fraud! Moron! IDIOT!”

Yes, I stayed in school. Yes, I eventually got A‘s. Yes, I went to grad school and got an MA, a doctorate, and learned to write fiction and more.  So, yes, my punk rock attitude never let me down. It gave me a work ethic that was scary and a non-conformist attitude that helped me thrive against the odds …

… But it also never shut the fuck up. The con of being smart just got bigger, the stakes got higher, and I had more to lose. And instead of it targeting an external enemy, it attacked me where I was most vulnerable and screwed up a lot of my thinking. It soon infected other aspects of my life (after all, if you go through existence investing monumental efforts to prove you’re not a fraud, imagine the wonders this does for evaluating yourself in hobbies, love, and bad romances!).

When I first tried my hand at fiction, I was terrified. My monster had gone from a punk rock cheerleader (fuck what they say, do it anyway) to screaming like a gunnery sergeant (who the hell do you think you are, maggot?). I remember actually being scared to write a short story. And all of that fear was self-generated by my Anabolic Warrior Monster. No one in the world cared what the fuck I was doing in that basement apartment when I should have been finishing my paper on civil/military relations in the Franco/Prussian War (and yes, I got an A).

I had to learn how to say “fuck you” to the monster.

Punk rock for the win, yet again.

And I did. And it worked until it didn’t. Eventually, the dam broke. I needed to tell someone I had a problem.  And that was more terrifying than almost anything else I did. And again, I said fuck you to the monster and grabbed the phone to reach out.

I got help.

It was painful. But I was able to pluck out my monster’s eyes and have it go howling into the wilderness, replaced with a much better operating system for who I was. It took years. And no, I don’t want to talk about it. But I will say that getting help took guts, and I wish I’d done it sooner. But that’s just me.

Now, I can’t kill that monster completely. Nor is it all bad. Hell, it came back with much clearer eyes to save my ass when my life collapsed in 2013. It’s part of me, and like Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow self, I had to “integrate” it into the pantheon of my psyche. But holy hell, it makes a better friend than an enemy.

But suffering in silence was stupid.

Not getting help until my life was agony was stupid. Believing in all the tough-guy bullshit of going it alone was stupid. It compounded the problem it was meant to solve by creating a bigger one. These days, I try my hardest to work smart, not hard. That there is a wonderful world of just being, as well as doing. But twenty-five years of pushing myself is hard to push back against some days. And, again, punk rock helped. Sometimes I need to laugh, and tell the monster:

Fuck you, I need a break.

Fuck you, I need a hand,

Fuck you, I have done enough.

Fuck you, I’m not stupid.

Fuck you, it’s Saturday, and all that I have built with relentless effort will not collapse if I enjoy “being” as much as doing

So, that’s how Jay Wrestles Imposter Syndrome: A Cautionary Tale.

Next time, back to The Gutters! I SWEAR!

JSR

Jacob is searching for the word he lost: for the sound of it, the feel of syllables and consonants and vowels in his mouth, for the noise and tremble it made in his throat and inner ear as he spoke it long ago. The sparrow is watching him. It’s perched on the barbed wire fence, silent, clawed feet clutching rust and metal, black eye peering down, its small body a tousle of feathers and watchfulness. Jacob himself is only skin and bones, so much like the dead that he is no longer sure if he is alive or not.

Above, the morning sky is blue and thin and fragile like tissue paper, its sun-bleached vault high enough to fly beneath, but without the word, Jacob cannot reach it.

He is free, so he’s been told, but he knows it’s a lie.

Once, he was free. He could speak the word and shed his skin, tawny feathers riffling in the breeze, beak and talons cleaving air and sunlight. And if he still had his word, if he still had the voice to speak it, he could leave all this behind: the bones lurking in the mud, the glint of teeth beneath the dirt, the taint of fumes and ash. But he’s lost his word and his voice. All he has is a number written on his arm. It won’t go away no matter how he rubs and washes. Sometimes he wonders if the ink and pain etched into his skin are what fetters him to the ground.

There is a path in front of Jacob. It leads away from the chimneys and the smoke and the ever-burning furnaces of the factory, the vats and hooks of the slaughterhouse. The path is gouged deep into the mire by booted feet and heavy tires, puddles glistening with reflected sky and remembered light. There is an open gate, too, but a man is standing in his way. Jacob can’t say when or how the man appeared, but he did. The world was empty, and then it wasn’t.

Jacob sees the man, sees the wheels and shafts moving behind his eyes. He’s seen these cogs and gears before, has seen them turning inside other men, other women, each one a part of the machine that has chewed up his world: devouring his mother, his father, and himself. Devouring his voice, too: grinding it into dust and silence.

“It’s Liberation Day, and look at you,” the man says. “Nowhere to go. Nothing to say. Just standing there, still dressed in your rags.”

Jacob looks down at himself. The threadbare fabric of his outfit barely covers his skin, just like his threadbare skin barely covers his bones.

When the man opens his mouth, Jacob can see the feeders and levers, the belts and rollers in his gullet, the cylinders and pistons in his gut, steel and iron always hungry, ready to consume and obliterate.

“You’re nothing, boy. Voiceless. Brainless. Guileless. Helpless.”

Jacob does not want to listen. He wants to remember his word. Wants to speak it. Wants to feel it unfold, feather-light, in his mouth, rustling softly as it escapes his lips.

Mother and father gave him the word, and no matter how weak and lacking his limbs might have been, no matter how slow and wandering his mind was, the word always set him free.

But mother and father are gone. Gutted and stripped of bodies and souls, voices and words. Their cleaned remains were fed to the machine: turned into ink on paper, ideology and graphs, bait and fertilizer, soap and lamp-shades.

His sister left so easily. Mina held her word close, never letting go, and spoke it right here, inside the barbed wire, beneath the chimneys. There was no room for wings or beaks, so he thought, but Mina stripped off her hair and face and bones and shook her wings out. No longer a hawk like she once had been, but grey-speckled, small, a sparrow slipping through the crumpled gray pulp of clouds and rain, leaving no flesh or blood for anyone to find.

He misses Mina. The way she helped him with his buttons and his shoelaces. The way she understood what he said, even when his words got tangled on tongue and teeth and second thoughts. The way she spoke his name to illuminate the dark.

The man’s fingers are sharp and angled like the teeth of cogs and gears. They reach out, snagging Jacob’s sleeve and wrist, grasping hold of his soul; dragging, ripping, tearing. Jacob’s soul is bared and stretched into the sunlight: a translucent scrap of doubt and grief and pain and joy and memory. To be devoured, to be remade, to be destroyed, to be turned into fuel, into grist, into grease to lubricate the machine: to keep it working, consuming the living and the dead alike, consuming every word, whether spoken or unspoken, chewing and digesting, spitting and shitting them out, until all that’s left is bones lurking in the mud, teeth glinting in the dirt.

On the fence, the sparrow’s grey-speckled wings flutter, but it still holds on to the wire.

There is a path, there is an open gate, but Jacob’s seen the truth of it, same as Mina did: the world is the machine, and the machine is the world.

The man tugs harder. Jacob’s soul is stretched to breaking, a filament of light, a fading glimmer of neurons and photons and plasma, and in this moment of agony and horror, Jacob screams. The scream is raw and clear, bright and sharp. It is not a scream of pain or fear. Rather: rejection, resistance, defiance. It is reverberating, revealing, releasing. Illuminating.

There is no word.

There is nothing but the word.

It is all there is.

It is all he is.

Clawed feet let go of rust and metal, and two birds take flight: beaks and talons cleaving sunlight. The sky’s vault is high enough to fly beneath: blue, thin, fragile, distant.