femme.

Charly Huston had the lofty and faintly antiquated air of a woman who was used to getting what she wanted with a glance.

The storm washed her into my office on a Wednesday afternoon: a vision in a long, vintage, ermine-lined trench-coat speckled dark at the edges beyond the wingspan of her incongruously cheap nylon parasol. Outside, the clouds beat a tattoo, shifting relentlessly as they exorcised a deluge of summertime ennui onto the winking pavements.

She wasted no time. By the time I'd stood and offered to take her coat, it was already draped across the chair, as if the royal-blue Stella Gardot gown and jewels beneath it had been itching for hours to emerge from their heavy poplin cocoon. The color worked nicely with her eyes; above them, deftly-coiffured auburn waves rippled with intentionality, barely brushing her shoulders at the slightest movement of her head.

Her ripe-strawberry lips hung in the kind of half-pout that must have got results every time.

"Mr. Dodge," she said. The words pirouetted elegantly upward, trembled, and vanished like cigarette smoke. "I've heard you were the best in town." Her body and voice moved with impeccable synchronization. "And I need the best."

She looked like money and determination - things I liked in a dame.

gold.

For years, every morning
you rose before dawn to the urgent alarm
of the dreams you refused to defer,
a jaw-clenching race against sunrise you won
with a groggy insistence, to swallow again
the bittersweet pill of the grueling routine,
routine,
routine,
routine.

Time's shown that focus and fear are not foes,
but cooperate, honing your will
with the iron-soft skill of a potter,
to take and embrace
every step of this painful endeavor.

The prize was a journey of thousands of moments
of miniscule milestones, rote repetitions,
the hanging of hopes
and the failures of fantasies,
meets that meant missing the movies,
the gut-churning trials of trials.

—The camera's turned toward you now,
the way that your subconscious sometimes imagined it:
those fleeting moments when scenes lingered lucid
before the unkind interruptions that jolted
your sixteen-ton eyelids apart
with the wrench of an unyielding schedule.

The sounds, too, are new.
It's more than the quiet approval
you're used to,
the echoing claps from the half-empty stands,
the back pats and high fives,
the wet-eyed exuberance
glowing from coaches and parents
and teammates back home
in some galaxy long, long ago, far away—

They're here, still, but now
every sound has been drowned
by the crowd.

They've read out the numbers and everything's bright.
The whole world's a dancing mosaic of light.

And you think to yourself, as you think on the past
while the smile on your face holds unshakably fast,
as the breathing returns and the aches dissipate
and they're playing a song that your heart resonates,
as you think of the agony, anger, and fear,
the bleak disappointments and frustrated tears,
the social diversions you couldn't afford,
the practices void of apparent reward—
you visit unglamorous chapters untold
as nations, transfixed, watch your story unfold:
deterred but determined, beleaguered and broken
but bold—

You've mined through the minutes
and sifted the hours
and struck gold.

fate.

I'm just trying to figure out
what I'm supposed to do,
assuming destiny.

It drums a soft cadence
with the drip-dripping echoes
of passions, persuasions, and fleeting ambitions,
puddling somewhere in the cavernous black,
lapping at my toes like tremulous waves
as I walk into the darkness.

rush.

She runs, though the flames, enormous as they are, seem to merely amble.

From time to time, they release a violent yawn-roar, as though freshly awakened from a lengthy winter’s hibernation – followed often by the crashing surrender of another building unfortunate enough to lie in the fire’s indiscriminate path.

The fear is cold despite the heat of the vibrating air. Sweat fogs her vision as she grapples with her hair, pulling it back and frantically twisting a strip of fabric to hold it there. Her normally deft fingers shake as she fights to tie the simplest knot – fails, curses – starts again.

All the while she still runs, every pounding step jolting out of sync with her frantic heartbeat.

She knows she is bleeding, but doesn’t feel the pain where it comes from.

The streets are filled with loud noises – cries, screams, shouts, shots, and sirens – but she is focused on avoiding the debris: wood, glass, bodies, metal, more metal. 

This was once a street lamp; this, a restaurant sign; this, perhaps a car door—distinctions grow increasingly unimportant. Categories of identification are subconsciously reduced. Everything is an obstruction, measured by levels of manageability in a fleeting haze.

She wipes her eyes and lowers her gaze toward feet whipping back and forth. She realizes after a moment that they belong to her.

Against the conflagration, the stark silhouettes of structural remnants become twisting, oppressive cast iron shards, a leering grin illuminated.

She dodges something that is ablaze and moving, and then remembers to breathe – instantly regrets it, as she inhales a lungful of smoke. She coughs violently, tastes the faintest flavor of warm blood.

Like the black engulfing the city, her mind chokes on ambiguity: nothing is quite certain, nothing is quite reliable, nothing is quite true.

Except that she must run.

narcissus.

Decay is chapters we can't skip,
dense, unpleasant, tedious:

I doodle in the margins
of the brighter pages.

enchanted.

The camping lantern sitting on my pickup indicates a broad circle of light, combating the dimmer shadows cast by the moon's insistent white glow. The trees are sparse here. The sun had sunk earlier into the furthest end of this field, which is now an impressionist sketch in dark blues and greens and flickering luminescent shades.

Her hands fly up to swat, meander through the humid August air, and come to rest in the grass next to mine.

"Mosquitoes are the worst," she says passionately. "It's not even funny. I get these huge welts, see." She points with a grimace to a sizable redness on her calf. "It's so gross. I hate bug spray, though. I should have brought one of those, like, candles."

"You could wear pants," I suggest.

Her laugh is quick, almost reflexive; her smile, wide and infectious. Especially right now, with a strand of hair falling in front of it that she doesn't bother to brush away just yet. ("Right? Let me just go grab the extra pair I keep in my purse.") One easy toss of her head in the other direction and it's all good.

I reach up into a plastic bag sprawled in the back of the pickup. "This is the best thing ever for itching. No lie," I say as I toss her a bottle of aloe vera gel, half-used from treating sunburned shoulders over the past week out here.

She wrinkles her nose in bemused caution, then looks up at stars that twinkle back in the dark pools of her eyes. "I'll take your word for it." She flips open the cap.

The fireflies sparkle in tempo with her breathing. Around us, the evening trembles with a gentle warmth, undercutting the heavy summer heat.

monument.

--but by God! What a miracle! What a colossal testament to the might and the mightiness of mankind, he thought excitedly, his neck strained as far backward as it could go, in a futile attempt to scale the thing with his eyes. The union of scientific majesty and man's infinite creative instinct, the pinnacle of man's potential--

He breathed in sharply, tasting the brightness of a crisp dew-flecked morning.

A thousand rays of light glinted off the metallic walls that wound through the clouds, winking eyes that burned with pride and a heady promise. They had spoken once, at its inception, of piercing the foundations of heaven itself. Who need concern themselves now with the dim, archaic pettiness of allegory?

His head spun with an intoxicating gilded euphoria, while the continuous belt of solemn-eyed slaves, laden with woven baskets of bitumen, rolled ever onward and upward in a dwindling spiral.

This, indeed, was glory, if ever glory could be seen: to harness the monolithic force of man united, invincible, exercising unstoppable dominion over the very universe.