Carefully Avoiding, by Steve Smith
Response Piece

Sandrift Pearl, by Quentin Paquette
Inspiration Piece

Sandrift Pearl
It must have been the most popular color for the Toyota Tercel; I probably see one of them every day. It always draws my immediate attention, a sudden jerk of my vision and focus to it. I need to check to see if it’s got all those stickers on the back. So many stickers, like the person who owns the car is desperate for some kind of identity to confer from the accumulation of place names on their bumper. That may be an unfair judgment. I might be just working backwards from what I already know about this particular person, then over generalizing. Either way, it seems right.
Seeing that color makes me take notice, and seeing those stickers would make me take action. It makes me consider changing direction, putting some distance between myself and wherever that car is going. If I were walking, I might even seek cover, to step into a doorway or change my speed to keep that tree trunk between us or that lamp post. If it’s in my neighborhood, it makes me think about internet searches, and the availability of my new home address, and craziness.
I understand that sounds insensitive, that I’m impugning or belittling people with mental illness. I apologize for coming across like that, it’s not meant as a general statement, only specific to this person. I’d even apologize to her if she’d listen. If. I have these fleeting images of a scene where we run into each other, but just the very beginning of it,: I’m unable to construct how it would play out. It’s a small world, and it’s almost happened before, but I ducked, having no reason to think she’s changed since we last spoke. It’s not really that I can excuse her behavior at all, the feelings, sure, but not how she acted on them. Maybe that’s not truly forgiveness, but I think it’s the best I could ever offer. If she has changed though, if she’s gained any self-awareness, it would be her trying to apologize and me doing the forgiving.
It would be easy to forgive, because things have turned around for me, because, as it turned out, I found that I should expect happiness. If I ever think about that time at all, it’s with a detachment. I don’t recognize myself then as fully me, or that as really a part of my life, as if I remember it from something I read. But still, when that car drives by…

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Cellular, by Steve Smith
Inspiration Piece

Cellular, by Quentin Paquette
Response Piece

I remember clearly stepping out and seeing the two of them crossing the street and heading in. I remember the sense of what the temperature was. The colors as I remember them have a depth close to reality. I can feel the air in my lungs, the gases exchange, the distribution. For the length of the memory, I inhabit my whole self. We pass on the walkway, I step off into the grass to let them by, hand in hand. They’re almost past when she looks over to catch my eye and stop, pulling him up short.
”I really liked that piece of yours at the reading.”
I don’t even know what I said in response, it might be merciful that I’ve forgotten. The rest of the image continues only as ideas and the sensation dissolves. I go back and relive it again.
Always the brief sudden exchanges between us. I never anticipate them, and they’re never about much. The parts of me that I’ve been taught to think of being organized into my important self hasn’t got anything to say about it. There are no words for it, and words are the only way that part of me gets its point across. Maybe I limit myself too much by the lines I draw.
There is something more expansive that I can’t quite fit into words. It speaks in things much smaller than letters, that spell out ideas bigger than books. Hair and nails grow a little faster. Nerves express more receptors for fine touch. Marrow spits out more erythrocytes. Gametes spill from the revolving meiotic doors. Peptides bloom and emit and crowd receptors. Energies marshal, pathways open channels.
All these things would let me know what they individually know, would bring to consciousness what they recognized. Something deeper, more pervasive, more elemental than the things I attend to with the self that I’m aware of. The systems I knowingly appreciate have their own plans, march along on their own orders, ignoring any contradictions, often at the expense of my greater good.
Still, the parts know, and they persevere, and they prepare in case something momentous happens to take me by surprise, to upset the balance, to shatter the mirror and let me see through the frame.
The next time we meet, or perhaps the time after that.

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Aberham Berhanu
Inspiration piece

The Bridge
By Quentin Paquette
Response

The bridge shows up on the hospital campus map only as an unmarked connection between Garage 2 and Admissions. There’s nothing in the key that captures how it is also a walkway between worlds.

I first walked it as a visitor headed for a tour of Labor and Delivery. Everything I saw that day I thought of as an adjunct to the larger world outside. I was a stranger there, and content to be, letting myself become acquainted with the general shape of it, but none of the details. They were merely instrumental in a life that would involve them only for a day, and then leave to join the outside world with me.

The day came seven weeks earlier than expected, and since then I have crossed this bridge each way three or four times a day. I’ve come in the heat of the day, in the cool of a rainy evening, in a muggy midnight, in a bleary early morning as the eastern sky just started to lighten. Each time, I passed into a weatherless place where the clock hands turn with no other indication of time advancing.

There is a terror that hunts me here that I do everything I can to evade. I keep moving in the halls, act cheerful and confident, try not to leave a trail of fear, turn away from looking at it directly. Still, in its own time, it grabs me by the neck and spins me around to stare me down. I haven’t blinked yet, but my sweat rolls and my stomach drops out and my feet become ice. But I haven’t yet blinked.

On the outside, I’m coasting. The things that held my attention before that day still need tending to, and my body goes through the motions they have trained me to perform. I’m stuck in an out-of-body experience, bodily present, having an effect, but not able to fully appear in the moment. Participating physically without will in a physical world without meaning. Lost beyond lost, for in those moments when I manage to possess my body, I find I’m in a ghost world.

The world on this side of the bridge has become the true one. I can walk it in my sleep, sometimes I must have, finding myself arriving without being able to remember what happened between the car and the desk. At the same time, being able to close my eyes and make the walk in my mind, in color. This far across the bridge. Elevator call button at this height. Turn right out of the elevator. The options at the vending machines and how much each costs. Men’s room here on the right, the light inside always flickers three times before finally coming on. The family waiting room, which chair is best to sit in and read, which ones best to pull your knees up to your chest and close your eyes and still be able to hear your name called when it’s time to go in. The routine at the wash sink, the video instruction loop, every word, every inflection. Where to sign in at the desk, where to find a fresh sign-in sheet if the one on the clipboard is full, where the pens are, where the button is that opens the door, just in case they ever thought they could stop me.

Of course, they would never try without reason. Everyone knows my name, and I know theirs, and we all know why we’re here together. All except the one, the one I’m here for. She’s the little one in the box with the leads and the lines tying her to the machines. She doesn’t know my name yet. She hasn’t yet seen me, hasn’t yet pressed into my chest to feel being held like I will hold her. This time she is restless under the bright white lights of the box when I arrive, shifting and kicking quivery little kicks and opening her mouth so wide she projects a far louder cry than what actually sounds. I reach in through the portal and stroke her temple, pat her tiny bottom like I always do, and she calms and waits. I sing into the box for her, the song I always sing when it’s time for her to sleep, and she goes to sleep. I imagine she dreams, with me, of that time we’ll go across that bridge together.

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Kasey Coyle — Ghosts
Inspiration

Quentin Paquette — Visitation
Response

Somehow, being on the road makes it more likely, particularly at night on an otherwise deserted stretch.  Maybe it’s from being in the transition of travel, or the isolation, or the separation of self as I become a body that drives and a mind that ponders.

There’s something fugue-like in the movement.  The dotted lines keep a steady underlying tempo, announcing the exposition.  The poles count off their own interval, as their hanging lines crescendo and diminuendo.  The reflectors and mileage markers highlight particular phrases.  The growth beyond the shoulder approaches and retreats.  The tires click off divisions in the pavement.  All under one constant: the moon keeping pace, shining steadily through the passenger window.  Clair de Lune.

At times, it can be hard not to find your breath syncopating, or your pulse, each to their favorite theme.  I suspect even my eyes must mark time as they jump to focus on each aspect as they appear.

I struggle to maintain my own focus here.  This is not to say focus doesn’t occur, only that I don’t get to decide on the topic.  I can’t make plans, or consider blueprints, or develop a cohesive argument, or place myself in exterior time at all.  And the interior time expands to a critical point, and an inversion, and now I have become internal to it.  And the people I once knew well but have since lost contact with ride in the car with me.  Some I travelled with for a day, a weekend, a season, a phase, a commitment, a job, a kiss, a campaign, a promise, a post, an office, a crisis, an awakening, a secret, a cigarette, a lie, a dare, a drink, a taxi, a bed.  While we ride together now, I relive the moments, the words, the emotions, the contact.

Each shares an understanding with me that is eternal.  I still call it an understanding, though I find it impossible to describe with clarity.  Before I knew anything about their personal history or particular situation, there was an essential part of me that recognized its reciprocal in them.  Before we shared our names we had already intuited our noumena.

It is the regrets I can’t help but dwell on first, how I ran out of time, out of money, out of heart, out of luck, out of imagination, out of help, out of forgiveness, out of sense, and these people passed out of my life.  I bargain, make excuses, rationalize.  On the good nights, I am able to accept; it is the difference between a haunting and a visitation.  Then I am able to celebrate them and what we were able to share.  The ties we discovered that existed before we did, and are unaltered by distance of space or time or emotion.  And I wonder when we might meet again, and in what way, and as whom.

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Caroline A. Evey
Inspiration piece

Cemetery
By Quentin Paquette
Response

I’d gotten up and headed out just like I do every work day.  Which is to say that’s what time it was, and that I’d made coffee to take with me, and shaved, and got my work clothes on. But what it does not account for was that I’d also picked up an extra pad and pen, along with the book I‘d been reading, and tossed them into my messenger bag as I went out.  I didn’t walk the usual direct way to the bus stop either, I turned and took the way that goes by the park.  After all, it was a pleasant enough morning, and I could use a walk, and there was no reason to get in early like I usually do.  In fact there’s hardly ever a reason for me to get there that early other than everyone else has gotten used to my opening the doors and getting everything’s springs wound up for the day.

So, yeah, I went the way by the park.  And then, at the gate, I went in rather than by.  I’m still pretty sure I still expected to just wander through for a bit.  The morning was cool.  Autumn is starting to move in.  A hint of fog hovered over the dewy grass and swirled over the edges of the paths and around the corners of the markers.  The morning sun was still hazy and indirect.  My walking slowed, and I felt a heaviness come over me, an inertia.  When I got to the where this crypt stands, I found it would work perfectly if I sat here on the end, put my coffee down on the upper edge, and leaned on my elbow right here to read my book.

I’ve been reading this book on the bus, in fits in starts.  Wrestling with it more like.  The ideas are very dense, there have been weeks on the bus where I read the same three or four pages, arriving at my stop unable to reconstruct what my vision had passed over.  Here I’m finally finding the clarity to read page after page of this book without having to repeatedly go back to pick up the trail of the ideas again.  But still, after a hundred pages or so there’s too much to think about to move on without reflecting.  I pick my head up to change my perspective from focusing on the words to letting the vista come in without seeking out any particular detail.  Making sure I take a moment to really be here.

Scary almost how a whole morning can pass by like that without hardly noticing.  Going to work is no longer a realistic option.  We’re at a stage in the project where I’ve got my part of it just about done and most of what I’m doing is responding to the ways my colleagues have of leaving their part of the work undone.  In my negative moments I wonder if it’s not just inattention, but calculated, their knowing that I won’t leave it undone.  I won’t be missed if I’m not there today, but it would be a minor scene to show up late, especially since I don’t really have an explanation for why.

I finish the cold remnants of my coffee, realizing I’m going to be spending the day here.  I need to get a few provisions.  I leave my bag and book here and step out of the park to check around.  I come back with another cup of coffee, a pack of cigarettes, and two oranges, and lean up against the tree to light up.  Kind of an extravagance to buy a whole pack only to smoke two, but that’s what I’m going to hold myself to: one now and one later this afternoon to keep from wanting to nap.  I never was a real smoker, and now I smoke maybe 5 times a year, and today is going to be one.

The fog is gone, and the low angle of the sun brings the markers and crypts into greater resolution.  So many of them.  I know from somewhere that there are thousands of graves here, marked and unmarked, and none less than a century old.  It’s the bricks that draw my attention more than anything else.  Something so human about them, deliberate and crafted.  The rows are not perfect, and neither are the edges, the colors are not uniform, the sizes varied.  But someone took those pieces and put these together, one by one.  The thought of the effort brings a response from my hands, and for a few moments I feel the weight of a brick in my hand, the roughness of the surface, the coolness of it.  As my eyes run over the crypts, my arms feel the rhythm of scoop-spread-place-tap-cut, over and over, an uncountable number of times.

Leaning hard against the tree, I exhale and listen, listen to the underground.  Listening for what I can’t quite say.  Any thing of all the things these people had learned or heard or read or felt or saw.  Or dreamt.  What happened to all that?  Is any of it still here?  Will I be able to hear it if I’m quiet enough?  Or maybe it’s not being more quiet that’s needed, but being quiet in the right way.  Maybe today.

Jane Hulstrunk

Inspiration piece

Winter — Quentin Paquette

Response

I’ve been by here before, but didn’t recognize being here and went by.  Then there was so much else to attend to.  The din of the crickets, the ferns, the vines, the trees full of leaves all competing for attention.  Bare arms and calves, lighter shoes, were moving much faster through the woods.  A fuller light displayed an overwhelming variety of colors blending together and blurring the contrasts.  The longer day filled with many more competing moments, each one trying to draw me from the one before.
I’m here now, in this moment reduced to what is always here.  A moment without pretense or misdirection.  The background no longer hiding behind the surface figures.  The perception of moving forwards slowed to a single nearly timeless space.
But, I can’t stay here.  To meet you here is one thing: I can pause briefly here surrounded by the cold, set apart, quiet, whispering with the breeze through the empty branches, every breath visibly countable, noticing each movement, seeing the crystals of each snowflake on my sleeve.
But still, I cannot stay here: shivering, turning blue, losing my footing, unable to see the covered path, melt making its way through my boots and the shoulders of my coat, gloves and pant legs becoming cold and stiff, lips and fingertips drying out and cracking.  I cannot wait out the season in this one moment, waiting for the thaw to start everything moving again.  Carrying each season with me prevents me from long staying still in any one.  The Winter here eventually comes in conflict with the high-nineties summer day I carry inside.
I head back to the cabin, arms full of wood, and burn out the stored heat and light of Summers past to push back Winter present.  I hang up my gloves and socks and coat to dry, and rub the circulation back into my fingertips.  I hang a pot of water to boil.  Then something will make me want to return to the cold, look up into the sky to see not Hercules, but Orion circling above.  I am not bound to live the cycles out one by one, but have them all continuously.  Freed from an imposed order, I search for harmony.
I’ll come back again in Summer.  I might not recognize that point, my foot prints long gone, again overwhelmed by movement and growth.  Too much to perceive all at once: I have been given freedom at the expense of clarity.  While I may not ever again arrive at that point, it never fully departs, within my thoughts of trees, this forest, all forests, the world, my Self.  So I keep going, trying to be aware and growing, pausing to restore and reflect, hoping to accumulate enough meanings to start to understand and to see.

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Lynne Heiser — Fromage Et Vin

Response

Quentin Paquette — Époisses et Marc

Inspiration
 
Tomme
On my table
in Paris.
 
The skin
brushed with moonshine.
Opening
Vieux époisses.
The aroma of earth.
 
A ration
sticks to my finger.
Tasted together
with a swallow.
Terroir de Bourgogne.
 
I close my eyes,
and see
green
rolling
hills.

Lynne Heiser

Inspiration Piece

By the Window — Quentin Paquette

Response

“Where are you coming back from?”
Watching the dawn break.
(Sorry, by the way.  I thought for sure you’d be asleep for at least a couple more hours.  And I tried to be quiet coming back in.
“You were quiet, I just happened to be turning over as the door opened.  I pretended to be asleep to see you in your tumble-down morning-after look.”
What’s that?
“Everything wrinkled, shoes loose, crazy hair,…”
Not that morning, I had a hat on.
“You could still tell it was crazy underneath.”
So, I looked like a wreck?
“Oh, no, not at all.  But you did look like you might’ve stayed in bed.”)
“Aren’t you exhausted?  I don’t know what time we got in, but I know it was late.”
I was up, thought it might be interesting.
“Was it?”
Hmm,… not super.  The walk and the cold air helped my head though. 
I lift the book from the nightstand and collapse in the couch.  I was right, my head does feel better, merely tired.  I read the same paragraph two and a half times, and then we’re both back asleep.

The shower’s running, the steam escaping through the bathroom door.  I work to dislodge the book from under me on the couch and try to casually toss it back on the nightstand.  It lands well short.  The nightstand clock says 8:05.  The big bed is piled high with pillows and a comforter.  The wooden sea-chest at the foot of the bed has our bags on top of it, and your clothes from yesterday.  There’s an overstuffed armchair and ottoman over by the window, and a big carved wardrobe and dresser.  The mirror on top of the dresser rolls its eyes at even the thought of my asking who the fairest might be.  And then in the mirror I see the railing behind me.  It belongs to a spiral staircase up into a loft.  I wonder what this costs in-season, and I can’t believe I actually talked my way into a discount.
(“Yeah, how did that happen?”
I came in to check the rates, and the person ahead of me in line was kind of a self-important jerk, and I made some joke about it when I got up to the clerk.  We chatted for a while before I got around to asking about rooms, and she said they had openings throughout the inn, and I said I could be convinced to help them out with that so long as it didn’t cost too much.
“You did not say that.”
Well, words to that effect.  I meant it as a joke, but then she cut me a deal.
“Oh yeah, I’ll bet she did.”
Oh, come on, it wasn’t like that.)

The knock at the door actually makes me jump.  I open the door to a cart full of rolls and biscuits, and a carafe.  Is it possible I could get another of these?  It’s probably a big coffee morning in this room today. /’Already taken care of.’/  And, reaching under the tablecloth of the cart he produces a second carafe, which I accept thankfully, putting it down on the loft stairs while I get out a tip for him.  A big tip.  With this much coffee, and my brain’s current inability to maintain a distraction, I should probably write something.  I root around in the backpack to get my notebook, and tuck it under my arm to lift the tray and carry it up the stairs.

The loft has a writing desk, the chair has its back turned to an arched window.  I put the tray down on the floor at the top of the stairs, I distribute the first carafe and cup on the desk with the cream, the other set  I’ll bring with me to sit on the carpet under the window.  A couple of maple-y or cinnamon-y things in my mouth (I left the peach Danish for you, and the blackberry one.  “That’s perfect.”) , I crouch down to place the carafe and cup on the carpet.  Don’t spill, don’t spill, don’t spill, and a commanding point of the finger ought to do the trick.  Let myself crumple down to the floor and sit, bent knees pushing my back up against the wall to stretch up tall.  Argh.  Sternum makes a pop.  The patterns on the carpet remind me of gyri, and make me think of memory.  I place the carafe at one junction, the cup at another, whether to stimulate or to inhibit a connection I cannot say.  Uh-oh, left the notebook just out of reach.  Stretch to scratch it close enough to pick up and open up on my knees.  Then I uncap the pen to threaten the page while I take a sip.  The sun has risen high enough that it fills the panes and the light dazzles me and warms my eyelids and loosens the scales on the backs of my eyeballs.  Something tries to occur to me, but it’s only a feeling, without a character or setting to carry it.  I should try to remember how that seemed, and find a story for it.  I turn back inside the front cover and write In the Window at the bottom of the list.  The heading is Don’t Forget and it includes Frick, Work Site Surprise, and Pumpkins, all not yet started, but none of which have been forgotten.  There’s also a Blake?,  which was right to have included a question mark, because when I read it to myself now, my intonation rises at the end.  That could take a while to reconstruct.  I realize I’m only stalling, and I turn back to what I meant to work on, and reread what’s there, and close my eyes again.

“Hey!  Are you up there?”
Yeah.
“And, also importantly, is the coffee up there?”
Well, yeah.  But you know what we haven’t got any of up here?
“What?”
Pillows.  You’d better bring the ones from the bed, and the ones from the couch and chairs.
“Really, just those?  You don’t think I should bring the seat cushions from the chairs?”
Please.  Don’t be ridiculous.  Of course I thought that and omitted it.
“Here are the pillows, where do you want them?”
Just all over the floor here.  I think this could be a good place to work today.  If I can ever get unstuck.
“What are you stuck on?”
I don’t know what it’s about.  I know what happened the day before, and I know what’s happening this day, but I don’t know what it’s about.
“Maybe you should just keep writing it down, and let it show you.”
Well, that’s essentially what I am doing. 
(I thought about asking Ane Brun, but this is the Miles river, not the Fyris.  And she’s not that specific anyway.
“Hey, we ever going to end up in Uppsala?”
You mean Upps, Upps, Uppsala?  Maybe.  August?
“As in Strindberg?”
No, as in the month, but: No matter how far we travel, the memories will always follow in the baggage car.
“Swede-y pie.”)

A couple of cups later, I’m starting to get too warm.  I wonder if,… yeah, it looks like,… yep, the window opens.
“I was just going to ask you if that worked.”
Your every wish…
(“What am I wishing for now?”
A few more lines?
“I don’t think it would hurt, but no, that’s not it.”
That it’s time for a new adventure.
“Every day.”
Let me just look at this day a little longer.)
It’s the first spring-feeling day.  It smells good, like the ground is stirring and damp.  The still-cold air has stopped trying to grasp and chill.  The sun seems a little brighter, and its light is warmer.  I know it won’t last, next week it’ll be freezing again, but I’ll remember this and be confident of the coming change of season.  It’s these days that fool me into getting out the seed catalogues, planning the garden, starting the tomatoes in the basement under fluorescent lights.  Too early, they will be tall and leggy before the last frost, and not many of them will survive the transplant.  Good thing I’m not at home to be suckered by it this year.  As comfortable as it is here, it would be rude to stay in and ignore the day’s invitation.
We should head out for a while, walk through town.
“Aren’t you afraid to run into someone who recognizes us from last night?  Maybe we oughtta get our stories straight first.”
I’m not sure I remember all of them, were we supposed to be friends of the groom?
“We might as well have been, the way you let him beat you at pool.  We hadn’t had the table that long.”
Seemed like the thing to do.  Anyway, anyone we talked to at that reception is going to have a harder time remembering than we do.
“Let me read what you’ve got there first?”
I’ll read it to you…