Looking back now on all those times Dad died, I’d have to say the first one remains my favourite.
When he was twenty-nine, Dad was working as an in-house solicitor for a now defunct telecommunications firm. He lived alone in Peckham, and clocked in long, unsociable hours. One hot July evening, a little past nine o’clock, he got home and found a dead man lying at the foot of his stairs.
Shane picks his mysteries by their covers. Trench coats, fedoras, shadowy back alleys, that sort of thing. One Sunday afternoon, at a restaurant called Chester’s, Shane was caught up in a mystery involving a stolen antique spoon when a dark-haired young lady leaned across her table to say, “Any guesses?”
Shane blank-faced her over top of his paperback.
“Who stole the spoon?” she said. Her voice was low, syrupy, and her smile said she was about to give away the answer.
Monica sees her dead son in mirrors. He’s always standing somewhere in the room behind her, staring, silent, sullen. Sometimes in the mirror her son is younger, just five or six, playing with his trucks or trains. But most of the time he is his 10-year-old self. He watches her brush her teeth, put on makeup, straighten her clothes. He glares, resentful.
“… the lucky ones will be those who die more quickly.” — Noam Chomsky
She’s driving away, one of the unlucky ones. The sky, brown-gold. She’s never seen it look that way—colorized, like a movie from the Forties. The Martians Return. That kind of color.
Then the sky’s dark, umbral. They drive with their lights on. An artist and writer, she thinks of ways to describe the color: Postal orange, dark tangerine, Indian yellow, gamboge, cadmium orange.
Durham, 16th August, 2020
We arrive in late summer.
This small city, once ours, appears
like the scene of a battle, long over.
The students have gone home,
the streets are empty, the gardens overgrown.
Down by the river, the trees reach
a little closer. They remember.
Eschewing breakfast, I hadJust a cup of coffee and a newspaper.I got in the car then and droveThe fifteen miles from my houseTo where my ex-wife keeps my children.When I got thereI rang the doorbell.No […]
I considered the possibility
That the trees may be carnivores.
Because I could have sworn
I watched someone climb one
And never again touch the floor.
And when I spied on the trees
Through the thorns,
They did not mourn.
I could have sworn
They jeered and cheered.
We are sitting at the kitchen table, eating breakfast. My wife Linda is saying something about a dream she had last night. Here is what she says.
“I was sitting in my seat at the cinema when these two guys came in. They were dressed in black and wore masks that covered their entire faces. I couldn’t even see their eyes. They had guns and said they would kill someone if they didn’t get what they wanted. They followed through with that threat and shot me right in the head.”
An old friend of mine could sense storms by smell. When I asked, she said they smell like water. I must have smelled water a million times, but never like this, she claimed. When a storm’s coming, water smells like soil and metal, as though the earth is cut open and the storm is its blood, pouring out into the world.
It had been months since I’d spoken to her.
“Smells like a storm,” I said one day over break. Nobody listened to me – they had more important mysteries to solve. I hadn’t really been talking to them, anyway. The fog made the sun a pink and hazy fingertip, smearing its oils over the sky. Conversation carried on as though I hadn’t said anything:
Idle Ink 