Barbara Martin Dig Deeper Inspiration Piece

Afternoon at the Place de la Concorde

By Denise Marois-Wolf

By the time the tour group reaches the Place de la Concorde, Laura feels as tired as if she’d climbed the Eiffel Tower and polished all the frames in the Louvre. She settles onto a bench while the tour guide, Gustave, talks about the obelisk, a gift from the Egyptian government, scaled in 2000 by an urban climber using nothing but his hands and some basic tools. She thinks, that sounds easy compared to trotting around Paris with a group of strangers all day while Gustave offers his inaccurate, white-washed version of French history.

She glances up at the Paris sky, a starched Sunday afternoon blue. All around her, children are running and laughing, startling pigeons from their fountain perches, scattering them in whirls of feathers and droppings.

“And the obelisk is one of a pair that stood outside of Luxor, but because of their weight, only one was brought back to France.” Gustave’s voice rises above the clatter of strollers and children. “Francois Mitterrand gave the other back to the Egyptians.” He tips his hat in salute to the former President’s generosity in returning to a people that which was always theirs. A dog trots by and lifts it leg on the obelisk, and Laura blows the dog a kiss.

It’s warm for this early spring, yet people rush through the square bundled in winter coats, scarves wrapped tight to their throats. She thinks, perhaps they are too frail to face the world without their cocoons, perhaps they fear that even a gentle breeze will reduce them to dust.

The breeze caresses the back of her neck, and she is suddenly lonely. She looks at the ring on her left hand, holds it up to the light and thinks, I should take it off and toss it into the fountain, but dismisses it as too final.

Gustave is explaining about the hieroglyphics on the obelisk. She wishes she could read them, to unravel their mysteries. She would like to climb the obelisk. She would like to remove herself in time and space, and perhaps, looking down, gain a clear perspective. She wonders, there on the bench, her handbag resting in her lap, whether there’s a road she missed, a sign she ignored, and where she should go from here. She watches the water cascade in a rainbow arc from the nearby fountain. She has an impulse to jump in. She thinks she would emerged cleansed. But the fountain’s ornate design makes her feel unworthy.

Her knuckles have turned white from clutching the bag. She eases her grip and brushes it with her fingers. It’s leather, a designer knock-off. The handles are plastic and starting to show wear. Her husband, Michael, gave it to her for their tenth anniversary. She doesn’t know why she brought it along, except it’s small and will hold all the important, portable things she needs at this moment in her life.

“Laura.” A fellow tourist named Rachel interrupts her thoughts. She flicks the brim of Laura’s hat in a way she finds intrusive. “Come on, we need to keep up.” Rachel’s voice has a nasal quality that makes her want to block her ears.

“You go,” she says, pulling the brim lower over her brow.

As Rachel walks off, Laura thinks, back at home in Boston, Michael is probably staring out the window, enjoying his vantage on the top floor of their building, looking down at the cars that move like insects along Storrow Drive. When she left, he stood at the window with his back to her, and refused to say goodbye. “You never loved me,” he said as she opened the door. “You never did.”  She closed the door behind her, wondering if she’d ever open it again.

She pictures him in his office at the university, flirting with some dewy-eyed co-ed whose youth fills him with renewed hope, someone blinded by his beauty, so extraordinary that everything about him seems elevated.

She asks herself, is it true, did I ever really love him?

All around, she hears the children, the excited voices of the tourists, the whoosh of cars circling the Place, the splash of the fountains. They are a symphony drifting in and out of her senses. She closes her eyes and sees herself again returning home early, turning the key, hears again the muffled laughter coming from the apartment, and feels the dread pounding at her temples. She sees herself in the elevator mirror as she fled, sees a woman with startled eyes and a knife for a mouth.

If I never loved you, would it hurt so much?

Her watch clicks off the time, a sound translucent under the veil of the moving day. How long has she been sitting here? Is it minutes, an hour, more? Time has lost its value. She wipes her palms against her cheek and finds it damp.

The rumbling in the streets grows louder. She senses a shift in its quality, and a feeling that she’s been wrapped in cotton and gone missing in its depths. When she opens her eyes, the obelisk and fountains are gone, and instead there is a platform, its bulk taking up half the square. It holds a wooden structure made of rough wood, standing like legs holding up a slanted blade suspended in air. It blots out the day, its shadow fingers creep along the cobblestones. The air is chilled. Snow dusts the ground. The cold fills her and the shadow of this thing of death takes her breath away.

A fruit cart is on its side at the edge of the square, the bruised fruit spills onto the cobblestones, a heart broken apart, a feast for flies. She clutches her bag to her chest and lets out a cry.

People are coming into the square, people in strange clothing, some with red caps, some carrying sticks, some waving pistols or knives. They go by without seeing her, like she is vapor, as they wave their arms and talk in loud holiday voices. But there’s hardness in them, a set to their shoulders. They walk with stiff, determined strides. Laura pulls her feet up on the bench and curls up like a frightened child.

The rumble grows louder, and three horse-drawn carts roll into the square, filled with standing people, pressed up against each other, looking about as though they don’t recognize where they are. Some are crying. Others are stoic. Their faces seem to say, this is inevitable. Some look as though they would collapse if there was room. In front of the first cart is a child, no more than six or seven. She looks through the slats, straight at Laura. She has pale skin and wide blue eyes filled with questions. Her hair is bound up under a white cap. Her hands clutch the front of the cart. A man of startling beauty grips the child’s hand. Laura struggles to get up from the bench, but she is immobile. They take him first, wrenching his grip from the child’s. He mounts the steps and, he turns to Laura with sad eyes and nods. She believes his beautify will save him. She watches with dread pounding at her temples. His image wavers, and as they lay him down, he turns to vapor. The air- suspended blade drops with a whoosh, and the crowd cheers.

Laura calls out. She tries to pry herself from the bench as they bring the child up the steps, but her legs will not move. Her ghost hands grasp air. She squeezes her eyes shut and presses her hands to her face. She does not remember that she has ever wept like this, so hard she thinks she will break apart. A hand presses against her shoulder, and she freezes. If they are executing the guiltless, what is she? She is next.

“Madame.” It’s Gustave’s voice. She opens her eyes. His face is close to hers, his brows drawn together and his mouth turned down. “Madame,” are you all right? We thought we’d lost you in the crowd.” He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and hands it to her.

She is trembling and taking air in gasps. She doesn’t know how to answer. She accepts the handkerchief and wipes the tears with a brusque motion. After a moment she nods. She thinks of the little girl and the man clutching her hand, the beauty that in the end was worth nothing.

The sun has started going down. There is a chill in the air that makes her shiver. Gustave drapes his jacket over her shoulders. “Madame,” he says, “I will escort you back to your hotel.”

She nods. “Yes.” She feels grateful for the gesture. She does not need to ask him about the truth. It is behind her, there, in the Place de la Concorde.

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Linda M. Rinehart Neas
“Early Spring”
Inspiration Piece

The Outing
By Denise Marois-Wolf
Response

March at the beach.  Shoe prints where other families have come in this off-season to enjoy what perhaps they cannot afford to enjoy in the summer. Behind the beach-front condos with their balconies and turrets, are the cottages off-season families rent cheap, crowded into one or two unheated rooms. The cottages have no insulation, no protection from the wind that comes off the ocean, but at night they can hear the sound of waves and it lulls them to sleep.

“I want to get up early, to walk on the beach,” my sister says as we snuggle into sleeping bags on the cabin floor. The floor is raised off the ground, which is no defense against cold. Our breath rises like smoke. Her back is to me, an arm’s length away, but it is too cold to reach out of the bag and touch her. Her hair is spread across the pillow, parts of her scalp visible in the dim light. The street light cuts through the dark of the cabin, lends the room an eerie feel, as though we have one foot in day and one in night.

Tomorrow, I sigh. It is cold on the beach.  Too cold to swim.  The water is mind-numbing, freezing, and you could drown with the ease of a trapeze artist slipping off the rope. Drowning in the cold is, I hear, better because your limbs go numb so quickly, and you’re too tired to feel the life drain out of you.

It’s too cold this time of year. The wind is too strong. When she called and said, “Can we meet at the beach,” I knew what she meant. I knew the beach, the cabin, the memory, time like a wheel.

We came here as children, but that was more than 40 years ago. We came one weekend in early spring, because, we thought, my father could not afford to rent this cabin in summer. He wanted us to see the beach, this beach, where he vacationed as a child. It was different in spring, he said. His family came in summer, but back then his family had a business, dined on china and poured tea from real silver pots. We were poor, not hand-me-down shoes and clothing poor, not shop at the thrift store poor, but we could not afford a beach-front condo. We protested the beach in early spring, but my father brought us anyway.

He guided us along the sand, a wide stretch of white. A wooden fence separated the beach from the expensive year-round condos that overlooked the ocean. He wore his blue woolen overcoat, the one with a pocket hidden inside the lining; my mother wrapped herself in a fur coat with holes in the lining and a tag that read “G Fox” sewn in the side.

We plodded along beside them, complaining of the wind, pulled our jackets close, buried our noses in the warm fleece of our sweatshirts. But as the day wore on, the sun came out bright, strong, the temperature rose, as did our hopes for the swim that did not materialize. We took off our jackets, tossed them on the sand. My father removed his coat and draped it over his arm, my mother lay her fur, lining side down, near his coat. We gathered shells, and I found one pink rock barely larger than a pebble, with tiny veins the color of a baby’s cheek running throughout. I tucked it into my father’s secret pocket, and he kissed the top of my head and said, “Merci, Marie-Louise.”

We stood at the water’s edge and watched the waves come in. There were tears on my mother’s face, and I was suddenly afraid. I gripped her hand, but it felt cold and limp in mine. My father looked out over the ocean, his jaw clenched. And in the summer, he was gone. Later, I retrieved the stone from his pocket and kept it in a drawer until one day, in anger, I threw it into the river.

My sister wanted to come in March, “just like when we were kids,” she said over the phone from her house in Miami.

She wants to experience her childhood once more, but she has forgotten the piles of blankets, walking the beach in thick socks and heavy boots, noses tucked into fleece, the tears on my mother’s face. She does not remember the faces looking at us from the bay windows, the sympathetic smiles that said, we’d offer you a room, if we could. If we weren’t afraid of you, with your wind-chapped cheeks and your hunger, your longing for the warmth of a fire.

In the morning, we go to the beach, our footprints lead to the to the water’s edge. Our toes point toward the ocean. My sister does not look at me, does not speak. “It’s too damn cold out here. I want to go inside,” I say. “Come on, Jeanine. Let’s go get coffee.” My sister doesn’t seem to hear. She stares out at the skyline, the dark blue ocean where the wind churns up white caps.

Finally, she looks at me from the corner of her eye, and smiles. I have that fear again, and it’s as though my mother has slipped her hand into mine, cold and limp. But we do not talk about that time, about our father, do not mention it out loud. It is a taboo subject, she has said as much. I hate that word, taboo. It shuts me out, leaves me on the edge of the water, waiting, afraid. My sister is not a brave person, but today she wears her brave face, her brave, pleading face, and she breaths deeply of the ocean air, as though it carries some mystical healing properties and if she can only take in enough, this will all go away.

They come running along the sand, a family with children, dressed in sneakers, hooded sweatshirts pulled up to cover their hair, their ears, jackets zipped to their chins. There is a woman in a thick sweater and ear muffs carrying a basket, a man in a ski parka carrying a blanket, and three children. They smile at us and the man spreads a blanket while the woman pulls sandwiches and fruit from the basket, cans of Pepsi, a hunk of cheese in cellophane. The children set to work building a sand castle, laughing and giggling, taunting. The children are snuggled in their cold spring clothes. One of them, a teenager, races to the edge of the water, a younger child close behind. “I dare you,” the girl says, laughs, points to the whitecaps. “I dare you to swim. I dare you to stick your toe in.”

The younger child, a boy, shakes his head. “You’re crazy,” he frowns. “You’ll die in there. Pop says it’s too cold.”

The girl takes off her shoe, her sock, and sticks one toe in the water. She screams, jumps back, laughs as she hops on one foot back to her family. “Told you,” the little boy chases after her, waves his arms. “Told you, dummy.”

My sister watches from the edge of the water while the children build a sand fortress, as though to ward off the ocean.

“Beautiful,” she whispers.

The cold seeps through my jacket. My thin gloves do not stop the wind. I want to go where it’s warm, someplace safe, away from the water. But my sister does not feel the wind, just watches, her face sand and tear-stained, her jaw clenched. I see how her cheeks sink under the bones, the taut, parchment skin, the tiny lines around her mouth. I grab her image and hold it tight, so it will not slip away, so I won’t forget, though I know I will. The most familiar face fades with time.

I am alone, and cold with the ocean raging at my feet.

“I know a place where we can get breakfast. It’s warm there,” I say, pulling her from the edge with my words. They sound hollow, fall upon the wind, useless.

She contemplates the ocean, and after a while, she says, “Yes, that would be nice.”

We move away from the water’s edge, our toes pointing toward higher ground, and I wonder if the family building their sand fortress will take note of our passing.

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Ghost Prophet
by Denise Marois

Response

Lilly thinks the old woman has nodded off. She’s been sitting still for almost an hour, only the slightest rise and fall of her shoulders says she’s even alive. The woman, Mapiya Lapahe, is hunched over the table in the corner by the fireplace, her hands pressed to her forehead. Although the heat is oppressive inside the small room, the fireplace is going and smoke scented with sage and cedar fills the air.

Suddenly, Mapiya Lapahe looks up at Lilly, smiles exposing jagged teeth. Her hair is the color of slate and stone, pulled back in with pink elastic. Stray wisps fall across her forehead.

It is full noon and the sun is directly over the house. The heat presses against the walls, leaving Lilly lightheaded, her fair, freckled skin scorched, her throat dry from the long walk up the ragged dirt path to this slat-sided, crooked place where Mapiya Lapahe, lives. She has come here against her father’s warning that the New Mexico desert this time of year is too hot, come for answers that have yet to be forthcoming.

“Don’t ask questions,” Troy Tsosie cautioned as they set out that morning. “Grandmother Mapiya doesn’t like questions. She says the bones will tell the story.”

“Where does she get the bones?” Lilly is nervous at the thought of seeing human bones. She doesn’t want to look at the evidence of death, the detritus of a person who lived, walked perhaps where she walks now, reduced to a pile, no better than dead tree branches, for telling fortunes and talking to ghosts. She doesn’t really believe that Mapiya Lapahe can talk to ghosts. She thinks it’s a story shelled out to white tourists, the B grade movie shaman who lives in the middle of nowhere and communes with the dead. She can hardly believe she’s agreed to come here at all.

“They’re cow bones, actually” Troy says. He is taller than Lilly, and she struggles to keep up. After a while, he slows, matches his pace hers. Troy is 17, a year older than Lilly, with black hair that sweeps over his ears. He has a scar that runs from his ear, down along his neck to his shoulder. His father put it there, an accident, but Jim Tsosie is serving time anyway. When he cut his son, he was trying to murder his wife.

Lilly thinks Troy, with his black old soul eyes and crooked grin, is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. She even finds his scar fascinating. The boys she knew at school in Fairfax, Virginia, are shadows against a gray backdrop.

Lilly is slight, with dark auburn hair and pale green eyes flecked with gold. She wears thin sneakers without laces that flop on her feet, and cut-off jeans that ride high up on her thighs, exposing the white vulnerability of her flesh.

She has defied her father’s orders to stay home on this day, one of the hottest of the summer. But Troy claims Mapiya Lapahe is the real thing, and she has never agreed to help a white person. She does not share her gift with tourists. But Troy has asked it of her. Mapiya Lapahe is ill. The doctors want to put her in the hospital. She refuses to leave the house from which she has not wandered more than a few hundred yards since her husband died 30 years ago. Troy says she already has one foot in the spirit world.

It’s been almost a year since a drunk driver in a suburb outside of Washington, DC took her mother’s life. Lilly’s father, Sam McCallister, took the sheriff’s job in a small New Mexico town when the offer came from an old friend, because he thought the change would help Lilly cope. But she’s still inundated with waves of grief. At night, Lilly lies in bed, willing her mother to come into her room, to feel her breath on her cheek as she kisses her goodnight. In the morning, she thinks she can smell of her mother’s gardenia perfume.

At first, Lilly hated New Mexico, hated the hot days and the freezing nights, the strange tortured animal sounds that haunted the air.  The brilliance of the sky, the flatness of the landscape frightened her. The fiery orange and sun soaked blue of the desert singed her eyes. The air sucked the water from her skin, the wind blistered her lips.

She spent hours drawing faces in the sand with a stick like a child, gave them tear-stained cheeks and downward turned mouths. In the summer, she went to Troy’s mother, Sally Tsosie, while her father worked the day shift, so she would not sit alone in the house and brood.

For the first few weeks, Troy sat on the porch watching Lilly draw her sad sand faces. He drank lemonade, hot air snaking up around his bare feet, his arms turning a deep copper. Then one day he came to sit beside her and, taking the stick, drew a horse and rider, then a coyote with bared fangs, and then a woman with a gardenia in her hair.

“I’ve seen her,” he said, tapping the stick at the woman in the sand. “Walking beside you.”

Lilly stayed in bed for two days after, refusing to go to Sally Tsosie’s house, shivering in the heat under the blankets, terrified to walk out the door. Her father called home every half hour to make sure she was all right. “I can’t keep doing this,” he said. “Sick or not, you have to go to Sally’s.”

But on the third day when she again refused to go, Troy drove up in his mother’s jeep.

He strode into the house like it was his own, bringing electricity on his skin. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves cut off over faded jeans with holes in both knees, and snakeskin cowboy boots.

He sat on the sofa, leaned over and stared at Lilly. That was when she noticed his eyes, how black they were, saw the old soul that looked out of them. Her heart beat in her throat, but it was no longer from fear.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll take you to see my grandmother.”

“Why,” she said. “Why do you want to take me there?”

“She can help you.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in shamans and talking to dead people. My mother is gone. She isn’t coming back.” She brushed tears from her face.

“I know,” he took her hand. “But come anyway.”

With the feel of his palm, dry and smooth, pressing hers, she could not refuse.

It’s taken an hour’s ride in the jeep and another half hour of walking in the heat on a road so narrow and rutted even the Jeep couldn’t navigate, to reach the house that sits crooked under a sagging roof. Scrub brush dots the yard, which is otherwise bare.

Now, Lilly still has no answers, only that that she should have worn boots and not her thin sneakers that are not designed for walking in the desert.

The bones are yellow and silent on the table. Mapiya Lapahe does not move. The fireplace burns high, the smell of sage and cedar settles in her nose like hot ash. Sweat spills down her cheeks. She stands in the open doorway, where a dog sleeps by a pile of scrub. The heat of the fireplace, the parched desert air, make her feel sick. She tries to step outside, but floor moves and her legs give way. As she falls, she feels Troy’s arms around her waist. When she opens her eyes, she is stretched out on the floor.

The old woman is kneeling beside her, smiling her jagged toothed smile. The sun has moved out of the doorway, and gray shadows play across the ochre walls. From somewhere out on the plain, an animal sends up its tortured wail. Troy lifts Lilly’s head, puts a bottle of water to her mouth. She takes long, thirsty gulps, sits up, her head throbbing. In the corner, one shadow seems to separate itself from the others, floats for an instant, then vanishes. Lilly is not certain it was ever there.

Mapiya Lapahe runs a calloused hand over Lilly’s head. She points out to the rutted road that leads to her house. “Love walks beside you,” she says.

“I don’t know what she meant,” Lilly and Troy make their way along the road, toward the jeep, step carefully over the ruts. The cooling night clears her head, the weakness in her legs and throbbing in her head are gone. But she feels empty, let down. Then, a breeze comes out of the stillness and touches her cheek like a kiss.

Troy looks at the ground, smiles in the growing dusk. He takes her hand.

“Give it time,” he says, his fingers intertwine with hers. “Just give it time.”

Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Amy Souza
Old Town
Digitally manipulated photograph
Inspiration piece

The Trust Department
By Denise Marois
Response

We are, after many delays, finally in the lawyer’s office, and from where I stand by the window I can look out at the people hurrying along the sidewalk five floors below. There are men with loafers and women in sneakers carrying briefcases, coats flapping, bodies tilted into the November wind. A woman in a stylish tweed coat and heels rushes up the sidewalk with a baby carriage. She struggles with its wayward wheels as it tries to tip or pull her into the road. Looking down, I see that the carriage is filled with newspapers and shopping bags.

Behind me sits our lawyer, a young, pale man with large hands and thinning hair named Henry. He is seated at the conference table tapping his pen on some papers that are placed in precise stacks before him. He does this tapping, this mathematical arranging of paperwork, when he is nervous, unsure. My husband, Max, is looking over documents, his head in his hands, wrestling with indecision.

Now, soon, I will know. If my husband loves me, he will do this thing, this one thing I need. I am resolved in my superstition. It is all up to the next few minutes.

Henry taps his pen and says, “are you sure you want to go through with this, Mrs. Worth? You’re taking a big risk. This type of adoption sometimes doesn’t work and it can hurt you financially. Domestic is the hardest of all.”

I turn, annoyed, to face Henry. His expression borders on benevolent. He means well, is cautious by nature. My husband remains hunched over the papers and I wonder if he’s going to sign or vomit on them. He’s taking a long time to decide.

We have no children. Our hopes have been grabbed up, rolled into stained towels and tossed at us with a shrug. Month after month I watched Max grow weaker, more disinterested, diminished by effort that yielded nothing but disappointment. I suspected I was being punished, and I sometimes thought there was verification on his face.

When I was a child, my great uncle Fred told me I was bad and did not deserve to go to Heaven. He’d been trying to convince me that devils exist, breathing his whiskey breath on me with stories of shadows reflected in glass where demons hid, waiting for you to step on a crack or toss salt over the wrong shoulder. I called him a liar and he said someday I’d know. I’d be sorry when a devil snatched me. He said, they will make a meal of you, starting with your heart.

Some days I wake up with my hands shaking on the covers, and think I hear them, rustling in my bathroom cabinet. I think they laugh as they toss around my bottle of antidepressants, empty my shampoo in the shower or smear my face cream all over the mirror. I am wound up in failure; my heartbeat flails in my ears.

But on other mornings when my husband has touched my cheek and left the scent of his cologne on the pillow, I wake to cotton stillness. Then my heart is all silence, my insides so quiet I cannot detect even a thrum of a beat. I cannot feel the blood in my temples or sense the rise and fall of my breathing. And I think, divesting of my heart doesn’t seem like such an awful fate.

Some days, I just wait. I do not know for what.

One day not long ago, after Max had once again come home late from work, I was on the phone with my sister, Eloise. I told her how sometimes when I look at my husband, I see my flaws written in bold script across his smile. That this person he claims to love is a shell hiding a dark, selfish, needy woman who will drain the life from him. Someday that woman will force her way out, and that night he will not come home.

Then Max was behind me, his hand on my shoulder. He bent over to kiss me, but the hurt in his eyes left a taste of metal in my mouth.

I watch an airplane glide over the city toward Boston’s Logan Airport, leaving a fine cloud trail across the cerulean sky, a map marking its progress. When I was young I imagined clouds were solid, that I could leap from one to the other across the entire world. Then I grew up and learned that clouds are nothing but mist and stepping on one leads to a long and fatal fall.

It is growing toward dusk. Shadows move across the windows of the building across the street. I am waiting, listening for the scratch of a signature, but the room is silent except for the occasional tap, tap of the lawyer’s pen.

The sign on the building across the street reads Legal Trust Department, a name I find confusing. I did not know there was a single department filled with lawyers working on trust. I imagine them bent over their folders, tapping their pens, reassuring clients who wait with open hands and dry lips. It is a pale building that would be nondescript if not for a string of wrought iron balconies that decorate the second floor windows. Each one has a curlicue design in the center, the way cemetery gates are often decorated. I imagine they are all in line to audition for the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, a row of balcony hopefuls yearning for some brief romantic interlude to interrupt the monotony of their work, decorating second floor windows.

Tap, tap, tap.

A little girl and her mother come up the street by the Trust building. The child tugs at her mother’s arm, points to something in a window. Her mother shakes her head, tries to draw the girl away. The child’s hat flies off. She has no hair. I press my palms to the glass, lay my cheek against its cold surface. I shut my eyes and wait, willing my breaths to come slow, even. When I open my eyes the girl, her mother and the hat are gone.

The truth is, I do believe in devils. I believe in UFOs, alien abductions and things that hide under the bed. I believe demons live inside shadows, watching, that at twilight, especially in autumn when the world is creeping its way toward death, ghosts float up out of the ground in search of some vestige of earthly life. At least I believe those things exist for me, that I am marked, that the faces of darkness are turned toward me, and the moment I stop believing in them, they will become real and manifest themselves in my life. Here in the lawyer’s office, or down on the street, in my bed. Darkness does not discriminate.

Outside the wind is picking up and a paper bag does a salsa up the street. I can hear Max breathing into his hands, blowing on them the way he does when he’s tense. Someone from the Trust Department races out into the street, grabs the dancing paper bag and tosses it into a bin next to the door. Dusk has lowered its head and the sun’s rays bounce with a blinding precision off the upper windows of the Trust building and straight into my eyes.

I turn, rubbing my eyes, and in the corner I see a dark figure crouched on its haunches. It grins. It is ready to spring. And then it is gone. Max looks up at me. I am trying to blink away the dark, my vision trapped between two worlds. He takes up his pen. He holds it over the form. I wait. I wait. Tap. Tap. Tap.