Dear Friends,

An experiment, a short fiction.

What story to tell?
Earth in disarray, spilt sand,
each grain a reason.

This was the late eighties. I was in a basement room, surprisingly bright, particles of light washing through the high windows at ground level. The whitewashed masonry was cool and powdery. There were soaring gray metal bookshelves with tattered, sun-bleached copies of phonebooks and datebooks and high school yearbooks. Piled high and jumbled together, smelling of boiled paper and rancid ink, the names in these books fell together, their own occupied continent. I stood in the middle of the room for an hour, then left empty-handed.

Outside and above ground, I saw a tree – this maple tree that was a sapling in my memory, yet now was enormous, old and gnarled – and thought to carry on as though little had changed. A person I knew caught my sleeve while walking by, asked me about my great grand children. Abruptly, I stopped talking to myself, and wondered at… an unspecified disturbance I could not articulate. “I know you,” I whispered, as the person walked away, carefully picking their steps over the icy sidewalk. I crossed the street, begging the driverless auto-v’s to let me pass undisturbed.

I sat down in the only cafe I could find, put my phone and burnt artificial coffee on the table, and pulled out a black notebook and cheap fountain pen. Wood-grained wallpaper surrounded the small room like those dusty cabins people used to vacation in decades ago. I felt a sudden lump in the back of my throat, and glanced sideways towards another patron. They were breaking biscuits into a cup, smiling.

Putting pen to paper, I started rewriting the first lines of a well-loved novel from my youth. I have nearly filled this notebook with fragments like these, the words of others repeated over and over. As it stands, this manuscript is an exercise; it is many short lines. It does not contain any names that I recognize, because I’m afraid what might happen if I conjured the dead among us. We Americans – those of us who remain – are like that when mourning, terrified by immersive perspectives, decision junctures, and forking paths. I decided that, if I could, I would go back to one of the beginning points, to a place before the names fell apart like sand spreading through fingers.

Thanks for indulging me in this apparition.

Lost in space,

Jeremy