Like Faulkner’s child, I watch as life can turn on a dime. A lightless flash that lingers in the mind just long enough to catch a sight of tunnels taking off in rays from some such sun that God Himself would never have created.
A phone call from a dear, dear friend; the tests were negative, he tells me. What tests? Prostate cancer. I didn’t know. Perhaps the man knew I wouldn’t handle waiting. Good news though, good news.
Absolutely positively smoked my very lastest cigarette ever ever. Because I have two dollars sixty-three cents is all. That’s all I have. But a customer walks in, kneecap torn and twisted hobbling from one glittering quick slick skiing down a hill. She picks up a piece that’s been here since the Fall and pays me twenty-seven dollars. She writes. She writes fiction; short stories. I tell her I need one for otto no. 3 by next week. She laughs; says she’ll be bedbound for at least a couple. But maybe, maybe…
Money burning smoking holes in my pocket. I dig through ashtrays. There’s nothing left at all. I punish myself and wait and wait some more. I deserve this; I am weak. I deserve this; it will build character. I deserve this; maybe now I’ll write about the agony of desire with some real story.
But I remember in that flash of light, the fanning out of paths.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology