High above the cold morning are cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds, scattered yet together, and the light coming through isn’t direct, nor is it shaded. It’s the same density of light we get in the summer, when the air is so thick with moisture even on a cloudless day the light is diffused and weakened. Not the heat, mind you, from May to September the heat is never weakened, not even by the deadest part of the night.
But today it is cold. The light has been diminished, not enough to really tell, unless you like photography, and you notice the light. Photography, no matter the level or purpose, is a study of light. If one wishes to do well with a lens, there must be an understanding of light, shadows, density, strength, and direction.
I step out of the truck, for the second time today, to take a photo of the sky. Dawn doesn’t demand any sort of greeting, but it’s rude not to stop and say hello, and thanks for the display.
Close to midmorning, there’s more of a mixing of the paint, a stirring of sorts, planning for some mono-colored work, perhaps, something undefined and indefinable, abstract if you will.
When you begin looking for light, looking at the light, in a different light, not for sight, but illumination in a manner of speaking, you can understand why the writers reads. It’s a study of the pattern of letters, for what purpose and method has nothing to do with words, or sentences, but again, of illumination.
The rain began in the deepest part of the morning, somewhere after midnight, and the metal of the roof announced the storm’s arrival. The wind might knock the power out, but it’s cool enough to keep things in the freezer and refrigerator from going bad for many hours, yet warm enough for the heat not to be on. At any rate, the blankets protect me from all things that are not nightmares, and the dogs snore softly.
There’s little lightning, a rumble of thunder in the distance that holds no threat, and I listen to the rain, wind swept rhythm, and hope the compost pile gets a good soaking. It’s another week yet until Solstice, and the heat of the sun will not return until March. Two cold and dark months left before I can start thinking about planting again.
Drifting between sleep and rain, dreams almost appear, nearly form, but do not. Some of the dream is of drowning, but detached, not terrifying, and in this is the realization not being afraid of drowning creates a bypass for survival instinct, but these thoughts are misty and they, too, drift.
Wrex Wyatt dreams. His legs jerk, and there are yips from deep within, so I reach out and place a hand on him, say his name, and the sleep returns to us both, unbothered by visions or memories. The rain pounds the roof and sleep comes and goes as if blown by the storm. It’s one or two, maybe three in the morning, no, not yet two, for time doesn’t exist in true darkness.
Primal and wet, the lack of light is the bottom of the ocean, where nothing is ever seen, but felt, and smelled and the sensation of the world around the skin is everything that light is two miles above the trench. What if your skin, the entirety of it as an organ, naked, and floating, was your sight, and could clearly discern a world that existed above, below, and all around you, all the time? Changes in temperature, pressure, heat, cold, the feel of chemicals released by others of your kind, the pheromones of those you were interested in, and who were interested in you, the smell of prey or predators, the feel of electricity in all things, the sensation of the life leaving an old one, their life finished, their body drifting to the very bottom to decay or be eaten, or to be buried by the currents, all of this, every moment, a full body experience.
Sight is so limited.
Yet even now, when the realization of this comes, I see a patch of sky that is less dark than before. The rain continues, lighter now, and the wind has stopped. The world is returning to light, slowly, easing into it as if she is loath to begin a day so limited by so little sight.
At this point, we have to assume the Griner Trade went deeper than just a prisoner swap. A basketball player busted with a tiny amount of cannabis oil for one of the most legendary arms dealers of all time? Doesn’t seem to add up, does it?
Biden could have sat on this deal as long as he wanted, allowing Putin looking worse and worse for the arrest of someone who came to play ball on his court, but instead, things got weird.
The most pressing issue for both sides at this moment has nothing to do with basketball, but Putin needs weapons, and the Unites States would like Russia to leave Ukraine.
Putin has lost the war in Ukraine, and he knows it, or if he doesn’t know it, he will soon enough. An outright retreat under any circumstances and Putin is going to lose his job. However, if he lets Biden head the peace talks, and everyone sits down and agrees Russia got everything they wanted, but no new territory. The Russians leave with their glorious victory, then suddenly the deal makes much more sense.
Putin gets a win, Ukraine gets rid of Russia, Biden looks like a hero, and the war, for now at least, ends.
If we see a cease fire right around Christmas, we’ll know this is right.
Biden’s critics, and some days I am one of them, are going to say giving in to Putin is a terrible idea. However, the devil you know is much better than the devil you never met. If the war continues to drag on, and the Russian army continues to lose and lose big, and Russia see their military might beginning to drop to a level where a Boy Scout troop with sling shots can invade, Putin might get desperate enough to use nukes. Biden talking Putin down from that ledge with the promise that NATO won’t try to push the borders back might be enough for Russia to leave Ukraine, in and of itself.
In any case that causes a cessation of war, we can call this a win.
Now, Viktor Bout, a world renown arms dealer, spent ten years in an American prison for serious crimes, and you have to wonder if he can get back in the same business with everyone on earth watching him. You also have to wonder who Bout is working for now. A totally amoral character, Bout would sell any weapon to anyone for any amount he could get, and never bat an eye at what happened next. Clearly, the Russian’s stock is tanking, so perhaps Bout will be working to help them? Or not? I can’t really draw a bead on this one yet, but Bout didn’t go free for Brittney, and he isn’t rehabilitated, either.
But the big picture in this is Russia, and Putin, seem to be on the verge of collapse. Griner was a sideshow issue, and Bout could have rotted in prison for all anyone cared. Yet here we are, and I’m interested in how this is going to play out. This is not at all what it seems to be.
I’m in the middle of Ann Rule’s book, “Green River, Running Red” the topic of which is the “Green River Killer” who murdered young women in the 1980’s, in and around Seattle Washington. This is the third book I’ve read on the subject, and there is a lot to be learned about human behavior here.
The first is serial killers cannot be understood by average people. It can be explained how they murdered, where they murdered, and who they murdered, but the why of all this is a complicated and terrible issue not easily understood by even the most highly trained law enforcement people alive.
The next is serial killer do know what they are do is, at a minimum, something they can be jailed for if they get caught, which means they understand the rest of us believe what they are doing is wrong.
However, in killing prostitutes, Gary Ridgeway also understood these were people not valued as highly as other human beings were. He could, and he did, kill with near impunity, until multiple bodies surfaced, and the families of the dead women began to generate noise. Even then, even when there were multiple dead young women, bodies in various locations, even then, when money was being spent to find the killer, and no resolution was found, the task force was scaled back. Even at the cost of young women being murdered.
Ann Rule goes into much more detail of the lives of the murdered women. Most came from lower income families, further reducing their worth in American society, and invariably, most of the quotes from parents shade towards “I couldn’t stop her from doing what she wanted to do” type utterances. Jobs that were available for very young women paid very little, and some of the women preferred the life of prostitution over a minimum wage job that required long hours for little pay. In 1982, minimum wage was $3.35. A young woman working as a cashier could hope to make less than thirty dollars in an eight hour shift, but almost that much in a few minutes as a prostitute. On a good night, a week’s worth of pay could be had, and on a bad night, a woman could end up dead.
Another observation is in the books I’ve read, it’s rare to find a man who had been arrested for paying a woman for sex, and universally, all women who have been paid for sex have been arrested. A suspect early in the case was caught in bed with a sixteen year old prostitute, and he was not arrested. Another suspect admitted to having sex with underage prostitutes and was not arrested. Prostitution is a crime committed by women, not by men, in the eyes of the law, and of society.
One victim was thirteen when she began walking the streets. Another ran away from home at age fourteen, was murdered at age seventeen, but her body wasn’t identified for years because her family never reported her missing.
Finally, early in the book, “The Search for the Green River Killer” by Carlton Smith, the author notes one of the detectives, who had worked homicide for years was “shocked at the level of violence directed at women” once he started taking reports of battered prostitutes, girlfriends, wives, and just random women attacked by strangers. The hope of catching the killer by linking him to violence against women was thwarted by the sheer volume of suspects that would have been compiled.
If there is anything more aggravating, and at the same time more meditative, it’s resetting Word for the way writing should be done when I do it. New Times Roman, font size 12, double spaced between lines, margins at 1.5, and this is the way all new documents ought to look for me. This is how I write. I do not want to discuss it.
There’s a certain amount of time that should be set in preparation, in getting things ready to go, foreplay for creativity, if you will. After all, without realizing it or planning it out, you usually take a lover knowing there will be kissing, touching, the shoes have to come off, the clothes are removed, there’s a method of getting things going, but after that, it’s creativity at its finest. Afterwards, both parties lie panting, sweating, hearts beating hard, and a sense of wonder takes over, as to how those moments in time came to be. It simply is. Chorography can set the dancers in motion but the style in motion is uniquely personal, just like the motions in physical intimacy. Your body knows, mostly, what it wants, but it’s more than just putting the right pieces in the right places, oh my yes, it’s getting the exact timing down, the perfect moment for the perfect place and space.
When I was a teenager trying to get my girlfriend’s bra off her body in the front seat of a car, and back then front seats were bigger, and we were much more limber, it was a direct approach towards nudity, with the ends justifying the means for both of us. Time was scarce when you have thirty minutes before it’s time to take her home, and everything has to be done, and if it happens to be done right, that’s okay, but usually it wasn’t. Neither is writing, when one first begins to write. Both are a process.
Dancing, like sex, without a video or a camera, will be like unrecorded music. There will be the memory held inside the minds of those involved, and oh my yes, those memories will last an entire lifetime, but no more than that. Words written may or may not survive, even with publishing there is no promise of eternity. All is temporary, except in the mind, and the mind will soon begin to fail, far too soon, and all it holds will be lost.
But for now, the cup is not full, the mind still yearns, I yearn, I yearn, and there is more work to be done. The page is set, it is clean and empty, and the twenty-six letters of the alphabet will swirl and be arranged, and rearranged, until something in my mind feels a sense of completeness, and satisfaction.
While trying to change perhaps the last incandescent bulb out of a lamp, I put my thumb through the lampshade. I bought this lamp back in 1996, when I bought my first house. New furniture, that was a must, people told me, and admittedly, the new furniture looked nice back then, and it has aged well, but now it’s all old and stained, and fragile. I didn’t foresee ever needing a lampshade, but the lamp itself is still good.
The thrift is run by a religious cult. They get people to donate stuff, sell it, and claim to save souls, and some of the people who work there seem programed. But it’s early in the morning and as far as I can tell, I’m alone in the giant warehouse. It is huge, and relatively sorted. The lamps are right there in front, a suitable replacement is found easily, and my journey ought to continue. I have shit to do. Odd phrase that, actually, but really. Instead, I wander.
An Italian looking cast iron statue draws my attention. It’s a woman wearing a low cut dress and she’s holding what appears to be grapes in either hand. Where did this come from and who made it? I shall not engage these people in conversation, no. A piano with a sign that reads, “Sold only to a Christian home” and I knew a man named Chester Christian years ago, and I wonder if he needs a piano.
Dozens of headboards, footboards, bedside tables, but no used mattresses, thankfully, that would be a little weird. There’s cheap new ones, still wrapped in plastic, “guaranteed new.” I wonder how they cover that warranty? If someone gets bedbugs do they give them their money back?
I wonder how many of these beds were points of conception for someone. Years ago I bought an old mattress to keep on the back porch for the dogs when I was at work, and when I told the woman at the yard sale what I was going to do with it, she balked. She had conceived her children on that mattress, and her husband had to talk her into selling it. The dogs destroyed it in a day or two.
Racks and racks of clothes, like snake skins shed on hangers, the clothes of mothers, fathers, grandparents, taken out to the retirement home for old clothing, left to go to bed with the dishes and spoons, the cups and glasses.
Can you imagine what it must be like, late at night, when the beds, and clothes, and the silverware start to talk? The beds have the sex stories, the flatware are the foodies, but I think the knickknacks, the dust collectors, and those items that were whimsical are those with the best tales to tell. Oh, and how sad now, for some mantlepiece vase, passed down by five generations, finds herself rubbing elbows with a plastic plant from Wal-Mart, cast aside for free.
The ceiling fan, installed in the bedroom knew about the affair, knew the marriage was doomed, but never knew the wife would get rid of everything, even the fan, to start over again. There’s the rug who was bought rolled up, never used, and is still brand new, but so ugly no one wants it, and there’s the mismatched glasses, who have been together since the 1940’s who know that one day they will part forever. An animated movie about the items in a second hand store who share their stories, and at the end, a fire breaks out and burns the place to the ground, with only the iron statue remaining. The sole survivor now holds all the stories within her.
“How much for the lamp shade,” I ask.
“How much will you give me for it?” The man asks.
“Three cents,” I reply.
“Really?”
“I’m hoping you’ll name a reasonable price and we’ll meet in the middle,” I tell him.
“Three hundred dollars.”
“I have four bucks in my pocket.”
“Okay, four bucks it is then,” the man smiles.
“Got change for a ten?” I say and he stops smiling. We agree on five bucks for the lamp shade.
Two shells in the shotgun, and five rounds for the rifle. How many men would come down the trail, no one knew, and maybe they wouldn’t come this way at all. But we expected the main force to hit us head on, at the camp, and a smaller group to try to sneak around the back. My mission was to guard this path that led to the farm, and I thought they put me here because I was older, less useful in the attack up front, and the only man in the camp not a veteran of at least one firefight. At a minimum, I would make enough noise to let everyone know there was company coming. Yet it was hoped there would be bloodshed, and not all of it mine.
Deer, maybe a racoon. That noise, the sound of leaves being crushed underfoot. Loud in the early morning stillness, the sun now above the horizon, the silence of the day just being violated. A tree branch fell to my left, and distinctly someone whispered, “What the fuck was that?”
I saw a spider crawling up the stem of the bush in front of me. It was a small, tiny, and slow moving thing, and the smell of crushed greenery wafted in. They had come in slow, without a sound; my heart pounded. In front of me, close, and they too, were waiting. I knew they would rush forward as soon as the shooting started. I eased the shotgun barrel forward and became part of the woods. I felt sweat flowing like tears. I felt small, and helpless, and scared.
Twenty feet of light underbrush would mean nothing to the stainless steel ball bearings loaded into the shells. Finger off the trigger, finger off the trigger, wait, wait, wait.
The sound of the rifle fire crackled, two hundred yards behind me, and this was the moment we would live or we would die. The men rushed forward, suddenly, and one of them saw me, too late, he stopped, halting the men behind him, and both barrels of the shotgun erupted in fire and smoke. Screaming, screaming, screaming, falling bodies, wild shots, and smoke.
“Aim low,” Billy told me, “knock’em down, make’em bleed bad, and they’ll be useless in a fight, and somebody’ll have to carry’em, after that, you got five rounds, no more, make it count, Mike, close the backdoor.”
I was the only man between the camp and the raiders coming in from the back. If they got past me, there was nothing.
Two bullets made a frying sound by my left ear, close enough for me to feel the warm breath of the Gods of War. I pulled the rifle up, another bullet whizzed by, but men were down, screaming, screaming, I sighted and there was only one shooting back, wildly now, panic taking over. He saw the rifle and his eyes opened wide.
The man jerked hard as the first round caught up just below his throat, and he threw his hands up, as if he might undo the damaged flesh. A man got up, limping hard, trying to run, and the second round caught him in the back at the waistline. He screamed, screamed, and kept screaming. Other men were yelling, “How many of them? Where are they? Jesus Christ, we’re surrounded!” and for some reason, they thought the sounds of gunfire from the camp, echoing through the woods, were coming from all directions. Another broke and ran, dragging a body behind him. My next shot caught in him in the right eye as he turned to fire, and the top of his head exploded like a fountain. That was enough. Two men threw their weapons down leaving me with the injured and dying. I stood and fired. Pop! Pop! Both men went down hard.
“Don’t get your ass up for nothin’,” Billy told me. “We lose the front, stay down, make a run for it. You go south, move at night, take care of yourself best you can. We hold, if’n we do, and we’ll come get you. There’s be a party after we bury the dead.”
I waited. The screaming stopped. The shooting stopped, but who won? Who would come down the trail to get me. Five feet away a rifle lay on the ground so I inched forward, grabbed it, and checked. Ten rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber. The former owner started at me with the half open eyes of a dead man, the first I had ever killed. He looked past me into the void.
“Mike!” It was Salman, the foreign guy who had moved to America a few years ago. He was good with guns, and I looked over my shoulder at him and grinned.
“Sal, we win?” I asked.
“Yes we win. What you think?” Sal crouched down. “How many get away, Mike? You make a mess in the woods. I tell Billy you messy.”
“None got away, none got past me. We lose anybody?” I asked as Sal handed me a cigarette.
“We lose men, Billy’s brother Hank. And new guy, odd name. Bubbles. Wounded gonna die.”
“Bubba,” and I actually laughed. I looked up and saw a woodpecker fly over, glorious and huge.
“Let’s get the guns, go back and see what happens now, okay?” Sal said and he helped me stand up. “Billy tell me, ‘We put Mike on the back, nobody live, nobody get past.”
“Thanks, Sal.”
Wrex pawed at my face, waking me up. I sat up and smelled blood and gunpowder.
But I held the line before I came out.
The night was locked in clouds, a light mist, no moonlight, no stars, and I could walked to the place on the trail from here, in the darkness and it felt real, as if the bodies would still be there.
Breakfast felt odd, too much light showing, they would see me. The dogs whined, went in and out, as if they sensed the veil had been strained, the dreamworld and this one had gotten too close to being in the same time. I was a vet in that world, and I would miss the party. Billy, Sal, and the guys who I had drank with a few days before the fight. Bubba was dead. His wife, two kids. Billy brother, I can’t remember his name now. Quiet man, reliable, it ran in the family.
It fought me. I went to Yoga class and was dizzy, I stumbled a couple of time, this reality isn’t holding, the other cannot.
This is the explanation of a dream, if that was what it was. What about the other side? Are they used to people just disappearing? Did I? Am I still there, drinking to our fallen, secure in a place I helped defend, or is it gone, all gone, forever?
Talking about writing comes in many forms. You can talk nuts and bolts, sentence structure, where the comma goes or does not, or how to write dialogue which are all needful things. Most of the new writers I meet have this vision their creativity will be enough to captivate the reader so spelling and grammar and structure be damned. This is never the case. The vehicle in which your writing flies will determine how high and how fast and how smoothly the flight.
And, regrettably in some cases, how long the flight lasts.
But there is the discussion on the philosophy of writing, on how writing should be done, and what it takes to tell a story. The person telling the story decides how, and if they are smart, they will already know how before they begin. If they try to wing it, they might be good enough to carry the tale to the end, but mostly, in writing, they must know right from the start.
A friend of mine went through a lot of text on a detective story. He began with first person, switched to third person, then back again to first person, and finally went with third person for the tale. Why? It felt right. It felt better to him as he wrote it. The process of writing, not the rules and regulation of writing, is what this is all about, mind you.
In one scene in the story, he walks into a bar, and the bartender tells him all about the history of the building. It’s a real building and the history is accurate. It isn’t a bar, but an office, but he transported it into another location and reworked it into a drinking establishment where horse racing and horse breeding people come to drink. This is where a murder takes place. The scene is important. How a writer gets that scene into the mind of a reader cannot be taught but it can be borrowed.
Think about Bilbo Baggins and his Hobbit Hole. That was his family home, Bag End, where Bilbo’s history was stored, his belongings, and his comfort. Torn away from this place was part of the opening of the story, and it defined the main character with style.
A bar, elegant and classy, where moneyed people go to talk horses, with photos of horses adorning the plain red brick walls, an antique piano on a small stage, and the massive mahogany bar, so brown it is nearly black, the perfectly clean mirror behind with shelves of bottles, each higher shelf holding a rarer version than the one below, and no prices asked or given.
The work it takes to define a location will stay with a reader. It will give them a place to relax and think about as the story evolves. You have an image of this place, and the people who go there, do you not? And I have not done it any justice.
What I have done, is given you an idea of what you must do to define, or refine, your story. Where? Where is this place? How does your characters feel about being there? That photo, in the corner, near the old corn cracking hand cranked farm tool, why was the victim standing there, staring at the photo? You have no idea, and no one has told you what or who was in the photo, and by the time the detective arrives, the photo is missing.
Is the photo a clue or a red herring?
We talked about the photo, over good beers and a chess board. Horses, of course, but a woman was in the photo, but who was she, and was she connected to the murder?
Don’t connect the dots, lead your reader to a room and allow the human mind to look around, to study the place and feel what it felt there. Your location should give you information about the characters there, and who they really are.
Your character is a woman, self assured and a good judge of character, we know this from her surroundings. We know this because of what she does for a living, where she lives and works, and we know because the other characters treat her with respect. So, does she get into the canoe with the stranger to go to the island in the lake? How big and island, how big a lake, and who is this person? All of this is important information that only you have, and to make your point, you must share it beautifully.
None of this can be found in a rule book. You can read books written by writers and find out what they’ve done, or better yet, you can read good books, lots and lots of good books, and find out how it’s done right. Or not done well at all. But reading is the best tool for learning how to write.
Mark, the man who was writing about the detective, had a problem with present a pause between two people speaking.
“Why would he have that problem?” Mike asked, as he looked around the room, searching for the waitstaff who seemed enthralled by the woman with the baby. It bothered him the child might start wailing and drown out the piano player.
“Because he had never thought about it,” Mark replied.
There you have a pause between Mike’s question and the answer to it. Mark worked it out.
This is the kind of conversations people ought to have more often about writing, instead of worrying about sentence structure, which you can learn from a book. I’ve got Fowler’s and Holt’s handbook, Strunk and White’s, of course, but none of that teaches you how to use words effectively to create a mood, or inflection. You do have to build the airplane with these tools, these rules, but the fuel can only be from your creativity.
Shopping zero early on Sunday morning means fewer people to deal with, so the dead man was a surprise, a shock, and for him to be standing in the meat section seemed oddly appropriate. He was among his own in this, all the dead in one place. I fled to the produce section, trying to sort out what was seen.
Of course, he is not the dead man. The dead man was named Mike, that’s the only part of his name I remember, but he was a deeply religious man at work, and like most of the deeply religious men at work, he had a problem keeping his dick in his pants. He got caught having an affair with his married secretary, he was married, but the deeply religious supervisor he had also had the same problem, so the issue was swept under the rug.
We had one conversation, about my lack of belief, the only conversation we would have, and he said I ought to change my ways and become a better person and I said, “You first.” And we never spoke again.
I had a supervisor that was cut out of the same holy cloth, that look-at-me-I-love-Jesus-but-damn-what-a-set-of-tits-on-that-bitch type of white guy with a little power over people. When he wasn’t hitting on the women under his supervision, he was trying to get people to come to his church.
The dead man died of cancer. Slow and hard, he died over a period of months, and he told people that his god was punishing him for his infidelity to both his wife and faith. I’m pretty sure any deity who would kill a person like this isn’t holy at all, but I was amazed my supervisor bought into it, or claimed to, and worried that his god would come after him one day.
I went to check out, and at zero early hours, there’s one cashier, usually bored to death, but there was the dead man, being checked out before me, and I hesitated, waited a bit, it felt weird to be that close to someone who looked just like the dead man.
“The computer just died,” the cashier said, and she had to reboot it.
The dead man was bagged up, paid, and away he went. I checked out, and left a few minutes later. He was parked beside me, loading his groceries into the trunk of his car.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I replied.
“You looked like someone I knew,” the dead man said, staring.
“Yeah?”
“He died back in, uh,…”
“2010.” I finished for him.
“That’s right,” the dead man says.
“I got to go,” I tell him, loading my stuff quickly and getting into the truck.
I pull away and watch in the rearview for just a few seconds.
I wondered where it came from, and I still do. It’s a massive structure, revisited, my second time here, and it’s breathtaking. The edifice reaches the clouds, maybe two kilometers in the sky, maybe even higher, there’s no way to measure, and birds must fly around it, great flocks trying to gauge if it would be better to skirt around the man-made mountain or go over. It’s when the birds are close is when the scale becomes apparent. Tiny flying insects they become, against the soaring walls. Higher and higher the flock flies, up and up, until I cannot see them anymore.
Why red brick? There’s a reason it’s built out of red brick, and I feel I should know why but no. I stand closer now and have that feeling a person gets when they first visit New York City, and walk among the skyscrapers. But a good portion of New York could fit inside this building, and as far as I can tell, there’s no reason for it to exist, except it does.
Engineering would deny this thing in reality. From space, it would look like an old fashioned water well, simple and round, the walls only thick enough for a small truck to drive upon the open rim, a three meters wide, at most. I’ve been up there once before. I think I fell.
There’s a tiny café to the left of the entrance and people time their visits to avoid the guy mowing the grass here. He pushes a loud, smokey, clunky mower, just like you would find in suburbia in the mid 1900’s and honestly, I have no idea if one person could actually mow the inside area and not have a permanent job. But the men and women working to repair the wall also have a full time job. There are hundreds of them, scaffolding clings to the bricks in various places, and stray bricks fall at random times. But overall, there are vast, immense areas where unbroken fields of bricks stretch into the skies.
But why red brick? The question comes to me, even as I walk in the freshly mowed grass, I can smell it, and I know it’s a dream, but the red brick stage setting intrigues me. Something tiny to give The Well a larger sense of proportion? I have no idea. Then I see her, the woman I was looking for last time, sitting alone, waiting for me. The dream is repeating, the dreamscape and characters are back, and even though I know it is a dream, the smile is involuntary. I’ll ask her why the bricks, why everything, over a drink, and a cigarette, but I wake up instead.
The Hickory Head Hermit 