...and then...

When you start referring to your new protagonist like a colleague you're hoping to connect with for lunch, this is how you know you’ve found your next story. That’s how I know, anyway. For months, I’d been sending lunch invitations to a character I’d met in a short story. He was a young boy then, and I wanted to know what his story might become. How did he recover? What was that thing churning in his chest? Would he be chasing life or evading death? I couldn’t know. From our brief exchange, the only thing I was certain of was that he was quiet, observant, and deeply affected by the scenario I’d written him into.  I was eager to finish his story, but he would not come. He wouldn't even give me his name! I thought, maybe, I needed to speak of him out loud in order to make him Pinocchio-real. I thought, maybe, I should start another story to coax him from my mind’s shadowed alcoves. I thought, maybe, he wanted me to sit patiently at my laptop and wait. Once, I ...

A mournful black sky stretches in dutiful silence Contracted for a millennium to canvas the night To drape an infinite stage To withstand the urgent infernos fastened to its darkness The stars hiss and crackle in their banter Impetuous in their spinning Precocious in their tumble and games of chase A mournful black sky stretches in dutiful silence The stars dance shamelessly, anyway

I'm reordering letters in my head, deciding the optimal combination for describing the sound below me. Thoomp. Thwump. Thmp. I'm in the tub: candles, lavender salt, merlot, ear buds, the whole nine. When the soundtrack plays itself out, I nestle deeper into the warmth, calm and, now, the quiet. Thrump. Almost immediately, I hear the sound of water dripping. Dripping steady and boldly where it shouldn't. Beneath me, beneath the tub, beneath the sub floor, I'm listening to the metered threat of a pipe leaking from my second floor bathroom onto the first floor ceiling. In breaking news fashion, my daughter comes upstairs to report that water is, in fact, leaking onto the floor outside her bedroom. "It's coming through that panel," she said sleepily. "Y'know, where they fixed the pipes before...?" "Yes, Baby," I said. "Thank you." Whhoum. Thomp. Ahmp. The heavy pulse of the water coursed my thoughts into ominou...