HAWES ESCAPES

You’d never know we grew up in that place. It took us a half hour just to find where the house had stood. Everything was changed, from the road name–we grew up on Route 217, now known as Adelaide Lane–to the placement of the creek, to the very trees themselves.

It was Jay who figured it out, pointing at the short brick staircase that once had led to the back porch, now nearly hidden by nettles.

“This was the kitchen,” he said, gesturing at the towering clumps of chokeweed and bracken. “And that was the living room.”

I walked to the corner that had been her bedroom. Along the edge was a thick hedge of gorse and thistle, the tendrils twisted into an impenetrable tangle. But beneath the knots of spine-covered vine and jagged leaves I could make out a rectangle of rusted iron and splintered wood.

“Jay,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. “I think I may have found it.”

 

Sunday Photo Fiction

 

The old man scratched his privates as he made his way across beshitted carpet to his trash-strewn kitchen, the charnel reek of feral urine and rotting meat, the dozens of nameless cats crying and howling and winding about his legs. He picked among the heap of cans piled atop the grease-crusted counter seeking those yet unopened.

He was amazed by the knocking at the front door. The old man had had no visitor since his son had left five years hence, roared his truck out of the long driveway with such speed that his curses hung in the air with the dust kicked aloft by the bald tires. He parted the curtain and peered through the window, tilting his face to better see through the film of grime and bird droppings. A cat jumped on the counter, purring as it ran its back beneath the old man’s bony arm.

She stood on the porch, well dressed and clean. A pretty woman, which is why he came to the door and why he stopped to tuck his stained undershirt into the frayed waistband of his filthy pajamas, why he ran fingers through his touse of thick white hair.  As he turned the deadbolt he remembered he had not put his teeth in, but it was too late for that.

The cats continued their shrill complaining as he swung open the door on the young, serious face.

 

Sunday Photo Fiction

I never could stand the daylight.

The harsh glare, the endless vista.

The exposure.

Being outside in the sun underscores the insect-like nature of human existence, these pathetically insignificant creatures crawling around on the skin of a stone ball  hurdling through space on a pointless trajectory.

Daytime is so unspeakably depressing that I can’t bear to be out in it.

The night is a different story.

Intimate.

Close.

All-enveloping.

The night  is populated by a separate order of being altogether.

Whereas day dwellers swagger blindly about with delusional self-importance, the superior night creatures are more cautious, more circumspect.

There is far less talking, and then only in whispers.

Movements are deliberate, conservative.

The sky is closer and more intimate, the colors of the world more subtle.

At night the Old World comes into itself.

It is not gone.

It is only waiting.

 

Sunday Photo Fiction