A fragment from a story without a working title.

He was swung into The Land of Night by his toes, gently he was flipped right-side-up with his blanket still covering him. It was as dark outside the blanket as his room. The air was cool and pressed close to the ground. The little boy pulled his blanket from him and found that he was standing in the stars. The grass at his feet was cool, and the ground was warm, and the dew soaked his socks. The sky above the stars was black as pitch. Slowly the star lit ground came into focus in the misty light…

The Vertical Man

The vertical man / The vertical man

is a sky scraping syllogism, / is a deep well of light,

bloated with books / dense with understanding

who screams like an animal / who speaks with transcendent artfulness

into a bottomless chasm. / to the fog of time itself.

two cats (not my own though)

From Watt, By Samuel Beckett

Some see the flesh before the bones, and some see the bones before the flesh, and some never see the bones at all, and some never see the flesh at all, never never see the flesh at all.

From The Fourth Notebook, Franz Kafka

"The generations die as do the moments of your life... It's the old joke. We hold the world fast and complain that it is holding us. In a certain sense you deny the existence of this world. You explain life as a state of rest, a state of rest in motion."

A Fragment from Aurora

I can't stand at the threshold any longer. I slump from the weight of my hat. I wait for a word, a word that's late. The stars are beginning to come out so I sit down into the wall next to the door and wait. The house I sit against is my father's, who's in a great excitement right now, he thinks he's dying. Father is not feigning his illness, although his nerves aren't good, but Mother whips into such a frenzy, so infectious that even a fit of coughing warrants the surgeon, who doesn't come so quick anymore. So, thats why I'm here, hands double-fisted crouching against the the wall of my Father's house waiting for a man to come, proscribe a placebo and permit me some peace.

It's dusk and the room above me has hushed with the surgeon's entrance. A festival seems to hang in the quiet still air, the moment feels ripe. I slip round the corner down the street towards the square. A shore of warm light greets me that bathes the stone there, and I move with the tide of night rising from the sleeping houses onto the piazza. No one is here so I set down and wait, a friend is bound to pass by, tonight. There isn't a breeze, and any movement would seem slow, every step would seem as if in a dream, if a friend were to emerge from the night in the streets.

_______________________________

I stroll down the most touristic promenade in one of those rare golden August moments when not a soul is in sight. I turn down a lane to look for compatriots at window sills. At the first corner, Chiara has her chin flat on her window's ledge staring out dead eyed bored, beyond. It takes only a breath, a sigh in the stillness to lift her away from from ennui. She disappears from the sill out onto the street into arm and arm with me, and without so much as a word, we set off. She isn't cold like the approaching night, she holds those last rays of twilight close to me. We are walking to the river and for the elegant parks on the hills.