This town’s a stage where dust remembers lines, And all who tread its boards are cast by need: They enter, speak, forget, then take their leave— While offstage bells give cues: now once, now twice. First comes the Field, the prologue sown in grit: A great-sire, soot-browed, tempers star
Every step taken in a circle is prologue. This isn’t the kind of story that fits neatly in a ledger. It begins in a room above a ribbon and pill shop with a window left unlatched for air, with a girl who kept a book her mother told her
Again? “For dust you are, and unto dust you shall return.” That’s what they say over bodies. It sounds official, like a ledger slammed shut. I’ve heard it so many times that the word again has become my doorway. I use it the way you use a key
If you’re a student of gun-smithing, this will likely confuse you. What follows isn’t a schematic; it’s a family secret finally speaking. Grandfather was a gunslinger—no one in the house knew it. And the gun in his cedar box was older than his silence. It was
They said the man was born with a copper taste on his tongue and a fence staple in his pocket. That was later, after it all went wrong. In the beginning he was only a man with a small patch of earth and a friend who shared the last loaf
They still called it a town in those days, though it was mostly a street with ideas. The water tower hadn’t learned to sing yet, and the bell in the church hung new and bright and true. The boy who would grow up to be the gunslinger slept under
Tom woke to the telephone. It rang hard through the house, a metal bell in the soft Saturday quiet. The sound tore straight through his dream, scattering the cartoon colors still clinging to his eyes. The night before, they’d gone to DiSalvo’s, the little Italian place everyone in
He was seventeen when the wind changed taste. It happened the week the heat came early and stayed, the week his mother kept a basin by the door because people walked in dizzy, asking for water and a place to sit while their hearts remembered how. The air turned sharp,
Hope left before the first freight rolled and before the wires woke fully. The air tasted like iron filings and lemon rind, but there was no weight on her chest—no rain in her lungs, no old drowning. The woman with the paper voice had pulled the fever out of
I keep a rag behind the bar. Habit more than hygiene. If I rub the same knot on the counter long enough maybe the world will smooth there too. Years wear names off things. The street sign out front used to say WIRE AVE. Somewhere between summers the I slipped,
The first thing she learned to move was wind. She climbed the water tower at dawn, skirt clutched in one hand, a spool of copper wire in the other, and listened while the telephone lines hummed to each other across the flats. The insulators were green glass, bubbled like old
The leaf studies its shadow, thinking how even shadows fall before they fit the shape that casts them. In rings and veins they whisper: perhaps all becoming begins with a small descent— rain to river, seed to root, names to whispers, plans to breath. in letting go—an unbuttoning of