15 Fairly Fractured Tales

When my children were portable and saw me as a funnel for the world, my favorite duty was telling bedtime stories. I’m not a brilliant storyteller, but credulity inspires improvisation. I painted myself into corners to see how I might get out.

Rather than write a full post, I’m exercising those atrophied muscles in 15 single sentences from stories—beginnings, middles, and ends. Only a few are really suitable for children, but I aimed to find fanciful and promising ideas ripe for plot, not sleep:

1. The other alchemists thought it silly to try to turn gold into food.

2. What you’ve heard is true—dogs are humans’ best friends—but there was one dog whose only friends were cats.

3. At first just household objects reappeared as papier-mâché but soon whole buildings, the town, and finally its citizens became immobile and lumpy from someone’s bungled construction.

4. He dreamed the sun was a plow and so did she—when they kissed for the first time, they decided to make the dream so.

5. The soothsayer kept the bear caged but told everyone the bars marked the limits of their world and not the bear’s.

6. The tools, unwilling to touch anyone who might use their talents poorly, fled from the people who meant to wield them.

7. “Be careful,” her grandmother told her, “or you’ll end up like your father, lost in his own bedroom.”

8. Once a king decided to possess everything and soon owned all of the planet except himself.

9. Before, she had visited the priest, but that morning she decided to write her confessions on cards and hand them to strangers in the town square in front of the cathedral.

10. Another day, another habit, and soon the animals were very different from the humans, who never learned the knack of making one day echo another.

11. All his life he worked on his map—drawing landmarks guiding him out of his house, through streets, into countryside, over mountains, and into another house with another map just like the first, only dark.

12. Most people don’t know that sleep’s twin is jealous of his sister’s influence.

13. A tree shot straight out from the face of the cliff, and every year or so a villager came along to build a house in it, but the tree and the wind knew what to do and shook them off like flies.

14. “This seat,” he said, “is the judgment seat, and, if you want to know what to think about anything at all, you just need to sit down and close your eyes.”

15. Each of the library’s books contained a song, and opening their covers released the music forever.

 

Thursday Haibun (Episode Last)

It’s no longer April. Still I’m offering the last of my haiku and prose in haibun. I’ve been writing one (or so) a day as part of NaPoWriMo (Poem a Day Writing Month). The entries below are the last attempts I made in this exercise.

lxxvi.

koi curve

beneath the surface

flirting

If I bear down, I remember watching my children draw and the way concentration collected in their faces, especially heads and brows lowered as if more shade might make paper more visible. Maybe I’m inventing, but a scent returns. It’s tempera mixed with dried sweat and the day’s weather clinging to their clothes.

My son once loved volcanoes and drew countless versions of truncated triangles spewing fire and dripping red that divided over and over like tree roots to the mountain’s base. My daughter sketched birds flattened by her conception to resemble the warning shapes affixed to windows. Past their form, they became an excuse for elaborate coloring.

she sees

dimensions in blank planes

and fills

Somewhere is a box containing my children’s art, ages 2-11, and I evoke it sometimes when I can’t sleep and begin mentally cataloging memory. This box doesn’t close as most cardboard boxes do. Its top is like a tray with walls and lifts on and off. When you remove it, you hear a faint but audible suction as air rushes to fill the new space created. The white surface, yellowed by age, shows signs of tape added and removed, scuffed to brown where previous seals lifted the surface layer off. Written on top, in sharpy, in handwriting I’d recognize as my own, is “Kids Art.” As far as I know, no one has looked inside it in ten years. I remember the box better than its contents. I can’t say exactly where we’ve put it.

Containers move with my family, so that—gathering things again—I encounter boxes that once held copier paper from my first job or bottles of a spirit now evaporated from the marketplace. The sides and top display three names, two crossed out: bedroom, closet, storage.

three a.m.—apartments

stacked in towers beam

rest or worry

lxxvii.

My dreams often intrude on sleep, scratching night’s table like an absent-minded vandal who doesn’t want to spell and doesn’t want to speak. The meal never arrives.

that blood is

your artery’s extremity

diverting once more

lxxviii.

a neglected play,

this classroom map—plot and

characters swimming

My ninth grade history teacher taught me geographical terms I tried to inject in conversation—never in the way they were meant to be used. Few arose naturally in my flat gulf coastal hometown of La Marque, Texas anyway. Instead, I’d toss them into remarks just to see if anyone might call me on them. “That’s an especially veldt shirt,” I’d say, or “I’m pretty sure question seven was the most escarpment one on the quiz.” Or “Isthmus watch Star Trek tonight.”

after a storm

earthworms litter the street

like relaxed numbers

Of course the kids in my history class called me out, but everyone else did too. People might ask, “Excuse me?” or “What did you say?” but they might also say, “You’re using that word wrong.” If I asked how I should use it, many said, “I don’t know… but not that way.”

My best friend did me one better by inventing an alternate means of describing teachers in geographical terms. My English teacher, for instance, sometimes combed his butte before class or exposed his heath by leaving one too few shirt buttons buttoned, our science teacher, who was fond of wearing gaucho pants, always drew her mohair cardigan closed in front to guard her too ample pampas, and our gym teacher wore gray coaches shorts barely long enough for his eastern peninsula.

whispering—

a hissing broadcast

losing air

When the history curriculum left geography for actual events, my friend’s experiments with metaphor and innuendo sought other terms, but I’m sure I learned something.

drunken spider,

your wheel won’t roll

or window close

lxxix.

You had cats, plural, but I only met the one you proffered the time we sat together on your couch. I think you might have said more to the cat than me and all of it in a cartoon voice I didn’t recognize. But sitting there, I wasn’t someone I recognized either, and you recognized that.

statues’ shadowed eyes,

noses hooked to block light—

sundials

lxxx.

My younger brother did most of the manly acts in our family household. A Boy Scout, he paddled Canadian lakes and at home he road his bike to the levies trying day after day to catch a 50 lb. alligator gar on 25 lb. test. When he succeeded he gave the gar away and rode home again. He played baseball. He watched hunting shows on Sunday morning.

And I wished to be so manly, but each expedition found me trailing along, imitating the acts of others, and making transparently small talk.

a puffed cloud,

its strut behind a mountain

pretense

If my mind were a house, I’d stand in the doorway, most of my thoughts turned inside, and longing turned out.

lxxxi.

sewing machine

pecking— its engine clearing

its throat—attacking

No one ever convinces anyone else to stay for long. The loops including two people bound by pleas are threads. The fiber cuts, strains, and snaps. The bed divides. The night tugs.

Thursday Haibun (Episode Four)

Once again, as part of NaPoWriMo (Poem a Day Writing Month) I’m offering haiku and prose in haibun. I have one more  Thursday in April. The entries below are attempts from the last few days. The numbers communicate how far I’ve traveled in this exercise.

lxxi.

folding a sheet

under a half-moon—a sail

and light put away

As probably everyone does, I turn my pillow to find its cool side. My new posture—collecting the compressed mass under my head and resting on my ribs—discovers my heartbeat, pounding like a wake to a shore.

you maybe said

time was near—I heard bells

clashing

Getting up never seems easy. Slow or fast or delayed or denied, it ruins two states. Dreams end in cataclysm and consciousness starts in shock. I suppose in some past the transition was gentle, dawning birds and light and warmth, but I don’t know that.

already someone’s

steps echo from the corner—

begin again

the day’s first words

skid in my throat—I collect

sound to speak

lxxii.

You told me not to say it, not in words but in your expression—a starched smile, eyes barely alive—and still I went ahead. Light dimmed. The sun seemed hooded through blinds, and shadows strained to reach across the carpet.

in profile,

a crow shows one eye—looking

or not, who knows?

lxxiii.

Nanette Wagoner couldn’t like me, and I knew that, should have known that. Something set her on, and, in three days, she sent me note after note filled with words. I only knew her face and didn’t read the messages really, just weighed their length and followed the loops of letters to the end. One day, she’d be taller than I would, I saw that. We shared no classes, but when she laughed just inside my hearing, the sound buzzed in my chest.

If she liked me, I would like her.

what a wonder

day falls—the sun drowning

over and over

Of course she lost interest, but the notes anchored a drawer for years, proof of appeal, a place.

lxxiv.

I stole a large canvas laundry bin from my dorm and rolled it, full of my possessions, from 123^th to 113^th where friends lived. My classmate and his fiancé may not both have wanted me but felt sorry enough to let me stay for a time. My year—not even a year—in New York ended, and I wouldn’t return to school. I thought of working while I found a job, pictured bearing satchels while bicycling through traffic. Without prospects though, who could believe something so hard?

green peach,

what sign told you

to drop?

This trip started with my telling my girlfriend goodbye. She’d asked for one more night and cried, still we’d agreed to no more. She’d never left her other boyfriend, the weekends I pretended not to know her were sad, and another year of schooling awaited her and not me. Time expired.

The wheels, barely bigger than casters, danced under the load, and no effort I made to guide my craft by pushing the correct corner kept it from fishtailing, sometimes into a current of pedestrians flowing the opposite direction. I said, “I’m sorry” one hundred times. Early summer heat already rose in the first hours of sun, and by the time I reached my friends’ buzzer, I was soaked, shirt and pants clinging. He laughed to see me exhausted by such a silly journey, but helped with my load, soon to be a pile in the corner of his living room.

beneath the surface,

beneath its skin, beasts move—

the sea still

In another two weeks my brother would drive up from home, and I’d leave for good. My possessions never left their boxes. I watched my friend study at what I’d abandoned and plan his next steps over terrain that slid under my feet.

steady thump

of highway seams, dawn slanted

just wrong

lxxv.

Doing the dishes, I occasionally splash water on my shirtfront and spend the next hour flapping the fabric to dry it. Something about the act reminds me of childhood, restless winging, the tug to what’s next.

I blink

between scenes and still

never move

Thursday Haibun (Episode Two)

As I wrote last Thursday, I’m celebrating NaPoWriMo (Poem a Day Writing Month) by writing haiku and prose in haibun. The entries below are yesterday’s attempts. The numbers communicate how many I’ve written so far.

xli.

Many days I pass the same man begging. I know his name now—Jimmy—and he often asks for money by saying, “Make Jimmy happy.” Though I’m sure I can’t, I give him a dollar, easy enough for me to spare, a greater source of relief for him than for me. When he shakes my hand, I feel the leather of his palm—winter, summer, a life outside I don’t know. When I smile, he recognizes the sign and smiles back.

His eyes never smile.

this hour

sun takes cover—buildings

won’t hold light back

One day, walking to work, having just given Jimmy his dollar, another pedestrian doubled back from just ahead of me.

“You shouldn’t be giving him money!” he said.

I said nothing.

“He spends it on crack! He’s a crack-head. I know. I was on it too, and he said, ‘Give me some money, I’ll bust your ass!’”

Anger streamed from him. His expression stretched, neither smile, nor snarl, nor surprise. He touched me on the upper arm.

“Sure,” I said, “I hear you.”

at intersections

waiting for clearance—the street

slick with weeping

 xlii.

I suppose it’s nothing special that after some runs—during the time I was really running—steam rose from my shoulders and chest as it does from horses. I felt like an animal.

What must I do to have that moment happen again?

sun glances

from the lake’s horizon and

stops ascending

 xliii.

too early,

your voice blunders into quiet—

we both know now

I wonder if you sensed us stepping around you. The evening creeping from the sliding glass door drew the ornate shadow of the la-z-boy’s reach. Your neck, vulnerable, rolled like a snake to the side. You snored.

“let statues lie,”

she said, as if choice lay

with them

xliv.

In another life as a sleeper, I run from words. They seem too plain to evoke. They define and refine until they speak exactly. Say what you will of abstraction, it eludes reality and the relentless chore of logic.

from the window,

a rectangle of light, marking

a far wall

In a recent dream, I spoke to the freshly departed. They entered the room one at a time and greeted me as old friends even when we’d barely spoken. I tried to be polite, offering what I had, which, in this dream, was a pair of mittens and a broken wine glass—the base, the stem, and half the blossom.

wind ruffles

open books, smiling pages

touched

Finally I settled with someone I didn’t know, exchanging phrases and listening enough to pick up the twisted thread of precedents.

you read loss,

lines of levels dropping—

eyelids half-fallen

Closing time arrived. I rose to leave. I shook a hand I wasn’t certain I knew. I left a card on a table, sure it wasn’t mine.

Thursday Haibun (Episode One)

I learned this week that I missed NaHaiWriMo (Haiku a Day Writing Month), which was March. But, no matter, I write a haiku a day anyway, and I’m celebrating NaPoWriMo (Poem a Day Writing Month) with extra vigor, writing haiku and prose in haibun. I also cheated by starting early—I’m on spring break right now and won’t be next week—and so I’m writing more than one haibun a day.

As promised, I’m posting them on Thursdays during April. These are today’s output. I’ve kept the numbers assigned to them.

xx.

Some rains keep the world dark all day, and some people appreciate steady half-light, steady pelting, steady captivity. I enjoy rain too if life waits. On days I’m happy to rest, I stand at my window, watch the lake form at a nearby intersection, and study people leaping it as if in a steeplechase or, like ants blocked by a finger, weave left and right seeking the proper place to ford the more-than-puddle before them. It’s just a puddle to me… or will be until the clock demands departure, need calls, or some summons insists. Then I learn all this time my study has been practical, teaching me how to enter the unwanted, to bear it instead of looking from afar.

sitting in a bath

I listen to the faucet’s

persistent tears

 xxi.

In fourth grade, when I returned from Christmas vacation, Molly’s desk sat empty. I wasn’t surprised because she missed so much school, and, when she was there, she skipped music and art and recess to fill worksheets she hadn’t seen yet. Molly’s skin was as near translucent as I could imagine, blue networks visible just beneath the surface—every visible surface—and her blonde hair grew thin like grass in poisoned soil. She didn’t look at me much, and we hardly ever spoke, but I knew her eyes even when I closed mine. They said surrender. Their pale and weary blue slid from the sky, too tired to stay aloft.

chalk dust

on the blackboard’s edges,

ghosts on the border

I was sitting in my desk as Mrs. Mitchell gathered Molly’s things—a few books, some supplies, but nothing that said Molly really, nothing like the eccentric mess under everyone else’s desktop. When Mrs. Mitchell told the class Molly died before New Year’s Eve, some people already knew and a few cried or fought tears. I must not have believed it. The whole day seemed temporary to me, every worksheet another Molly would have to do.

beyond curtains,

outside the window, you see

air stirring

 xxii.

 last night, a cheer rose

from many neighbors’ houses—

I don’t know why

In any alphabetical list I’m almost always the middle. I like to count how many precede and follow me, happy when it’s even.

xxiii.

On the first day of a Shakespeare class I asked the students why they were there. One of them answered, “Because he’s famous.” I’d heard that response before, of course, but never so baldly put.

My daughter was in kindergarten that year, and, on the drive home, I asked her, “Honey, do you know who Shakespeare is?”

“He wears pumpkin pants,” she said.

unbound,

the newspaper still holds

its curl

xxxiv.

When I can’t sleep, I look for morning’s signs—the first defined shadows, a car sweeping by, a word uttered on the sidewalk in front of our house. The alarm often comes first.

in skyscrapers

half a mile away, checkered lights

of company

Another Attempt

One of the nicest reviews of my book was in Haibun Today. I sent it there thinking it was a haibun, but the reviewer, who I trust entirely, said no. Since then, I’ve been reading more haibun both in Haibun Today and elsewhere.

I’ve learned haibun present minutely descriptive moments, scenes, or statements. According to Wikipedia, they may “occupy a wholly fictional or dream-like space.” All haibun, however, need haiku that communicate, overtly or covertly, an essence of the account.

The four haibun below are new tries. I’m hoping to solicit my reviewer’s opinion on what I have and haven’t accomplished. I’ve included some of my art.

i.

Sometimes memories of crabbing return. The morning sun raised the scent of creosote from the ties of the railroad bridge, and I squatted, tugging—as slowly as I could—the package string. Either the loose skin of the chicken neck wavered like a ghost into view, or the broad green back of my prey materialized from dark. Everyone said they felt crabs chewing, but I guessed. Often, circular rainbows of fat surfaced when just meat arrived. Any hope, and I’d call my sister over with the net. She was swifter, decisive at the right instant. In the wide-bottom bucket nearby, the already captured edged along the walls, claws half-raised against their fellows.

from deep night,

lapping waves, echoes

of passing barges

ii.

A recent dream happened in many rooms, each weighted with complicated Persian rugs, ornate burgundy upholstery, blocky tables, and mahogany paneled walls. The lamps offered barely enough light to dislodge shadows. Each room, roughly the same, still seemed different, as if only this stage were suitable for this conversation. We moved from place to place, recalling what we never quite said.

sandalwood and smoke

she whispered another name

to call dawn

iii.

My anger comes out in hints, never visible enough to define. I like thinking it’s veiled by smiles.

a twist of wind

spinning and dropped, flattened,

wheels of dust

When people are mad, it feels like the moment just after someone shoves me. Their faces say distance, the stretch of a landscape moving away, but nothing happened. No one budged, though the room seems changed.

Once my mother spoke to me through a door she wouldn’t open for an apology. I heard half her words but understood I’d gone too far, said too much. Time would never settle our struggle entirely.

a blackbird chooses

now to cry—his brown notes

a song for dusk

iv.

shattered beer bottle,

afternoon sun, sparks of blindness

salting sight

When sleep eludes me, I think of it as madness I want to charm and trap. Odd but welcome associations of amber and shoes, or rust and old horses, or a gardenia blossom in a bowl and waning tides—any irrationality creeping closer—and I say, “Stay.” If I’m unlucky, sanity reasserts itself, another list unreeling or a new bulb of worry blinking to life. Around the room, points of reflection map depth and dimension. The heater breathes. On a good night, I may hear a voice as if it’s outside my mind and believe it. Then I know sleep summons. I let it. I close my eyes to join.

past midnight

buildings blend into sky,

piles of lost objects

On Watch

Another odd fiction….

The watch he carries keeps another time, but as long as its gold cover stays firmly closed, little escapes. It can’t all stay any more than air or water will rest where you leave it. On a busy day, when his attention lapses, he may notice tiny changes telling him something amiss—he seems taller and his pants a less perfect length or an acquaintance who should recognize him professes they’re strangers.

Sometimes, the sun takes the wrong path for the season, or the moon, which last night seemed full to burst, is suddenly a sliver, the barest edge of a boot heel. Leaves change without warning. He wakes to a white world of snow, the pale green sheen of spring, or the drunk sway of trees in summer dawn.

Because of the watch, he’s lost four loves, four women who might have shared life with him and instead left, their absence suddenly as complete as if he’d never met them. Houses left too. He returned to find doors locked and keys useless.

At first, he tired of jumping from one set of rails to another. He longed to rest squarely between two perfect parallels advancing past the horizon. Yet he grew. He learned not to expect such an easy journey, and he tries to accept sliding.

His grandfather gave him the watch and told him how to care for it. “Wind the stem,” he said, “whether you want to or not.” He heard the second statement as a warning—it’d do no good to ignore this gift. And he hasn’t. He can’t. Once he decided to leave the watch in a drawer, to abandon it altogether, and his life changed like flickering flame, adjusting to currents invisible and insensible. Events happened, he perceived, elsewhere.

The watch returned to his pocket. Some control is better than none.

He rarely forgets he carries the watch now. Its gravity grows. It weighs more every day and hefting it presents perverse reassurance—he can’t help holding it any more than you might locate a familiar sign near home or tongue a gap between your teeth. If nothing is exactly steady, at least uncertainty doesn’t change. Doubt is a better companion than none, and sometimes he gets a chill thinking that, by holding the watch, he may be holding hands with God.

Or perhaps he’s God. Often, the only truth he believes is in his head. Time seems his creation, the watch unreal to anyone but him, unreal except as he thinks of it.

Once he woke from a dream where the watch was lost. The night stilled. Beside him was a body he knew, and her breath fell in steady rhythms like breakers at the beach. The geometry of shadows, the dim glimmer of sleep, made the room real and not a cell for once. It was new space, boundless and fresh. He thought he might be free if he could forget.

The next morning the watch waited on his bedside table. “Better to hold it,” he thought. He put it in his pocket again.

He’s carrying it now, never neglecting it, never entirely resting.

20 Sentences on Order (Out of Order)

Today’s post is really an exercise or experiment. I wrote 20 sentences and then rearranged them using a random sequence generator. I did it three times but decided on this progression because it seemed least sensible. If you want to read the sentences in the order they were first written, they’re labelled with their original numbers.

2. Stars won’t care.

4. The romance people assign is secondary.

10. Somewhere, amid the lines and dead ends, among parts and their whole, between truth and almost that, lies space.

7. So much of what we think known isn’t.

18. It might speak its own scheme but would take me to interpret it.

9. Blocks of words stretch each of the cardinal directions and their combinations, spreading like spills.

13. We make the image by reshaping our mouths into rooms.

17. I might take a photograph.

15. But we live in our own rooms, our own libraries.

5. Place comes first, and, though we like supremacy, reading chaos as sense isn’t our best trait.

1. You can say what you wish.

11. Maybe wisdom lurks in gaps.

3. Stars wheel through the night as they always have, indifferent and mathematical.

16. Today snow crosses in the air, making instantaneous constellations impossible to read.

12. I see a child standing before a painting, forming her mouth to the shapes of words.

8. Every library contains volumes of madness, shelves of proud misapprehension.

20. What if we embraced the illusion we see?

14. These rooms aren’t anywhere anyone else might live.

6. Stars have order apart from the reason we give them.

19. And that’s after it passes.

Anticipation

Another very short story… I try to hold myself to 20 minutes on these but sometimes cheat. It’s so hard not to move phrases around, to replace one word with another. It’s never right.

Walking home, he felt certain he’d find a present, propped against his door, a box wrapped in brightly colored paper and beribboned inside another box. The postman would leave it for him to find—perhaps half-concealed by the welcome mat—and he’d pick it up with disguised but real delight. If neighbors were watching, they’d see the unmistakable silent signs of “For me?”

What was inside the two boxes, he didn’t know, but he was sure it was there. He pictured it.

This season he passed many boxes on his way home from work. He imagined their origins—a single aunt who still sent gifts to her adult nieces and nephews, the stepmother, the boss looking to ingratiate himself in some inexpensive way with employees, the student, the client, the childhood friend. His gift, he figured, would come from someone he didn’t know—it seemed the broadest category in his life—and, to be a complete surprise, the box must bear an unfamiliar return address. Hefting it had to yield no clue to its contents. It needed to be heavy. It needed not to rattle.

When he was young, his parents had no money for gifts but always found something to give him in place of what he wanted. “Something for you,” they’d say, their faces frozen just at anticipation, fearing expecting. He was always grateful or pretended he was. They pretended pleasure they’d found just the right thing. The fiction they created together still glowed warm after all these years. The gifts were gone, and so he clung to nostalgia, nursing its consolation still.

At the end of his block a sudden weariness possessed him. This day, and all his days, seemed hard, the routine of hours a prelude to rest. His parents were dead. He had no wife and only work friends. No one would be waiting for him, but he’d try to believe in domestic peace, the comfort he’d created, made of himself for himself. He sensed the vague pull of place, the contentment supposed to possess you when put aside your public self for a personal, relaxed, familiar, and relieving space. The gift would help.

He didn’t dare look yet at his stoop from so far away. Everyone taught him not to be disappointed, to lower his expectations so gratitude came inevitably. Most of the time that stance seemed natural, but something about this time of year tested him. He mustn’t compare himself to others, but they had more. He sometimes had trouble ignoring.

Involuntarily his eyes swept before him, and, though he saw a package or two waiting, none sat at his door. Elation rose and fell in the same instant. He tried to say, “Okay” without hoping the next day would be different. He liked to believe sometimes that the gift had been taken, that someone who needed it more than he did now possessed it. In the end, his disappointment ought to be immaterial, a perception he knew worth transcending.

As he bounded up the steps he thought of the mail waiting, a card perhaps or a magazine to read that would help him pass the evening quickly. The dark hours were hardest.

What He Was

Okay, so this is an strange little story. I found an odd entry on Wikipedia and decided to crawl inside it…

Like any delusion, it was borderless and stretched from a single moment to subsume reality. He couldn’t say when he became glass, only when he discovered he’d always been.

Glass has different, sharper angles, and he’d always felt them. Only recently, however, had he begun to fear, worrying a bone might erupt from his thigh at sitting or standing too quickly. He didn’t picture his glass skeleton as you might think, like sticks of pure ice or crystal. Instead he felt gray inside, every piece jagged, poured or shaped with tongs instead of blown and stretched from fiery blobs. His parts would never refract light but absorb it, mixed as they were with ash and air. Their dull translucence came closer to brittle metal than prisms.

They might splinter at turning or lifting his hand to eat, and he sometimes wished they would. He wanted proof. Every time he tried to explain the truth only he knew, his father’s impatience glowed a little whiter. He threatened his son with beatings fit to remind him how different flesh and glass are. His father said he meant one day to cure him of pillows, of clockwork caution, of resignation, of paralysis. If his father’s blow came without warning, he’d be happier, as the surprise would save him from shattering when he braced himself.

His mother preferred reason, cooing reassurance. He couldn’t be glass, she said, because she’d carried him and would’ve sensed it. She told him how he’d slipped from inside her, more rubber than glass, and how, bathing him, she’d wondered at his rounded knees and elbows, his head like an unpicked gourd. He couldn’t convince himself nearly as easily as she could convince herself and wouldn’t bear her trying to touch him or come near him.

The doctor blamed his schooling, pressures he couldn’t bear and so made real and physical. The priest said he needed to place God before himself, that his illness arose from self regard replacing faith he’d abandoned. His friends stopped thinking of him, and there was no woman to love a glass man.

The days spent in bed stretched forward and backward, and he dreamt of a stream that might run harmlessly around him, washing away clay that wasn’t glass and revealing him as only he saw he truly was. He wanted to be seen. He wanted to be known at last.