Category: Uncategorized

“For months I’d watched her deteriorate – maybe I resembled her husband too little these days – and each week she went whiter, her skin tightening, bones throwing longer shadows. The bruises she used to beg me for had started healing more slowly, and then not at all. Her body was a prison now, but…

“I was just wandering, riding subways and buses and kicking around snowy alleyways and icy courtyards, looking for a moment that I’d lost somewhere in the intervening years.”

“So I moved on, my footsteps echoing empty orisons over endless concrete, and all the hope caught up in the dirt turned now to vapor, lost at least for a moment. The windows were aglimmer here, there with light, and whether any love burned beyond I couldn’t know from the street.”

“We moved away from the factory and back into the maze of walk-ups, the network of concrete recursion where each apartment reflected itself a dozen times over in the structure opposite or beside. Only in the soft marbling of soot and water damage was there any variance.”

“Vacant building after vacant building, each brick worn down by time and weather, every metal plane a sheet of rust.”

“A girl in the crowd looked like Mariana somehow, and even though some mornings all girls looked like Mariana, this one could have been her ghost.”

“A few seconds later she disappeared into a warren of alleyways, her gait unsteady from a broken-healed shoe. I stared for a bit, not exactly sure what I’d just seen.”

“Last night I dreamed she’d come back – a passing face in the metro station, on an opposite escalator, an apparition half-glimpsed in the grillsmoke of some backstreet night market.”