Winter stretched from a time before memory into a future he could no longer imagine. Fear seemed like a dream from a happier time — a time when there was still something left to lose — A luxury that had already been spent and borrowed on.
Now, there was just winter…
This version adds a little accompaniment guitar but is fairly similar to the previous AYoS version, from last November 7.
Turn down this street
back down that alley
there is no escape and there is no stalling
The future is here
and it’s more of the past
All I remember
is falling and falling
Leave me alone just let me be with wounds this deep they just have to bleed
Desperation is short supply
I used up my panic in the crises last year
It’s hard to worry, it’s hard to care
when you’re so tired of anger
and you’re so tired of fear
Leave me alone…
No point in crying, laughing or dreaming
no point in love, no % in fear
desperation is in short supply
so tired of anger
2 dazed 2 care
Leave me alone just let me be with wounds this deep they just have to bleed
The puddle had been there so long there were polliwogs in it.
She squatted above it, her muddy hiking boots perched on the cement culvert. She looked directly down into the puddle, where she was gently probing with a long, leafless twig.
The ragged 60 year old full length mink she’d found in a thrift store was muddy on the hem. Her waist length, heavy black hair disappeared under it, but her bare arms poked out the sleeves, rolled back in bulky cuffs to just below her elbows.
Her eyes were narrowed in concentration and for once he respected that, moving quietly down next to her.
The cigar he’d been lighting on and off the whole afternoon, a nastily sweet index finger sized liquor store special, was clamped unlit and soggy in his mouth and he thought compulsively about lighting it. Instead he put it back in the pocket tobacco tin he often carried and followed her gaze into the puddle.
Finally he saw why she was transfixed.
Beneath a large clump of trash and leaves, in a dark and muddy crevice, was what appeared to be a crawfish. It stumbled around a bit and receded into the muddy darkness that was evidently its home.
She pushed the twig tentatively toward the opening but didn’t push it into the hole. She often seemed to him to be cautiously balancing her aggressive scientific curiosity with a self-conscious respect for other entities’ destinies (as he imagined she might say it).
“Did I see a crawfish? In a winter puddle on a city street? That’s weird.”
There’s a bit of late fall in this instrumental guitar improvisation — and maybe the suggestion of late afternoon, the rapid flight of birds, deepening shadows.
