[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
seen on a human face. I want to know all about it. I want you to tell me everything.
There is not much to tell. I had a bad dream. It was just a dream, but it disturbed me so much, I
moaned so loudly, that I woke myself up. I was in my cabin on the ship, I could see a rim of light around
the partly closed porthole cover. The clock and the sun go their own ways back there, the one lags
behind the other, but both agreed then that it was time for me to get up. But all I could do was lie there
gasping for breath. My body was rigid, my hands were clutching the frame of my bunk. I seemed to relax
one muscle at a time. My fingers were stiff. They ached by the time I'd loosened my grip on the frame.
Tell me about thedream .
I I dreamed I was lost in a maze. I couldn't go back the way I had come. I couldn't even look behind
me, because the thing about this maze was that it closed up behind me as I walked through it. I could
only see directly ahead of me, not even to the sides, and I could only go forward. I kept coming to places
that were like the place I'd started from, but I was never sure, so I kept moving. Hoping I'd come to the
place that looked right. The place thatfelt right.
He nods along in time with the rhythms of your speech. Then: How did it end? Did you finally get out?
I woke up.
And that was it? Just that one little hairline crack in your confidence in a theory?
Why would there have been anything more? It was only a dream. I was safe in my bed. I was able to
assure myself by the evidence of my senses that the material, the natural world, indeed remained material
and natural. It was the same when I returned through the anomaly. You spread your arms, taking in the
room and more than the room. Here is reality. If you'd read my book more carefully, you'd understand
that the infinite replication of universes has nothing to do with spacetime anomalies. The anomaly is just a
path between two universes. How do I know? Here are my books, my home, and here amI, exactly
where we're supposed to be!
And hereI am. Let me finish my drink, and then I'll finish my story. He gulps down the liquor, holds the
glass loosely in one hand, the gun not so loosely in the other. Backthere, I get a love letter from my
wife, and then I get the news that she's dead. And then I get back here and my wife's not onlynot dead,
she'sdivorcing my ass. He raises the pistol and sights carefully along the barrel at your midsection. And
you know what the hell of it is, Cutsinger?
He waits for a response; you can barely get the word out. No.
The hell of it is, I've never even been married.
Copyright © 2001 by Steven Utley.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
[Back to Table of Contents]
Verse
When the Aliens Ask of Art
Odd you should ask me,
inclined as I am to offer
a thousand sorrows humans
visit upon each other, but I see
you've grown tired of random,
dime-a-dozen litanies,
when you've caught the scent
of art. Very well.
Of art:
Here are figure skaters.
A line is left describing
where they've been, a cold
cartography. The patterns?
They mean nothing.
They do not commend
one route over any other.
That would not be art.
I see you understand this.
You see how arms can grace
a circle or make you think
of wind on grass. Note
how the female seems
to push her heart out
through the palms of her hands,
then brings them back empty.
Art is a ladle you offer
to passersby, never asking names.
Amy Miller
[Back to Table of Contents]
Corn Snake
Arcing like live clay,
yellow as pollen,
suave leather against my fingers,
you are not very smart
not smart in my terms
only distantly related to a plesiosaur,
but when you finally found that mouse
with your clever tongue touching the path
then tucking into the twin slits
where you read
ads for meat, small and delicious,
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
you were sufficient to feel
its heat on your cheeks
its fur against your long long belly
you hugged it though your brain lacks lobes for love
and it released its high mammalian grip on the cosmos
to be meat, a wriggly bone ecstasy for you:
down the hatch.
It may be more evolved, but consider:
in the end, all you or I have
is our need.
Mouse loses
you win.
Mary A. Turzillo
[Back to Table of Contents]
LaGrange Point
The law of inverse-square:
old friends
in distant cities
will forget your dog's name
a father's death
will pass unnoticed.
Between our two bodies
solace accretes, tangible
made from forgetfulness
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]