January

Trees scaffold emptiness. It’s freezing and there’s nothing good on TV. I’ve decided that I’ll write a letter to someone I admire. Or to someone who possesses qualities I admire. They are different things, the person and the qualities. A person may freeze to death in a northern house and be forgotten soon after, but qualities survive in symbolic acts — the noble decision, the solemn oath — passed on through intangibly human media. Neither temperature nor time nor truth inhibits their passage. I wish to be a person worthy of producing such transmissions. The afternoon dwindles as I lay half-conscious across my bed thinking of timelessly admirable qualities. One after another they fail to apply to my specific genetic and psychological make-up. I must change, or else accept a lifetime of days like this one. The wind batters everything around me and eventually I will have to replace most of it.

October

                                    
Notice how night refuses to wait. No sooner do commuters find their cars than wraiths and changelings fan gauzy shadows over sidewalks and driveways. Each claims relatives in this life, people like us, consumers of snacks and gravity, uncostumed, suspended in shallow thought as electronic news of political inconsequence scrolls by unremarked. Imagine if the doorbell rang and there, before you, was a man in alpine cap and lederhosen, torch in hand, exhorting you to join him in a hunt. The monster is afoot and crashing through the brittle woods at suburb's edge. It's neither man nor beast, but a haunter of that gulf between the you softening in sweats and flip-flops and the you who ruts and runs along the game trails, leaving clumps of matted fur on broken twigs, foaming at the sound of human voices. Small points of light waver against the hillside, cries of encouragement rise from the unmapped swamp. The cursed thing could be lurking anywhere — behind, ahead, crouched in a tree. Moonlight affords some perspective on the landscape, but nothing you could trust. It is a theory half believed-in, a way to see how far you could be carried off if left alone at exactly the right moment.