Kay Ryan

Trying to walk the same way to the same store takes high-wire balance: each step not exactly as before risks chasms of flatness. One stumble alone and nothing happens. Few are the willing and fewer the champions.

We say pinhole. A pin hole of light. We can’t imagine how bright more of it could be, the way this much defeats night. It almost isn’t fair, whoever poked this, with such a small act to vanquish blackness.

One could almost wish they wouldn't; they are so far apart, so random. One cannot wait, cannot abandon waiting. The three or four occasions of their landing never fade. Should there be more, there will never be enough to make a pattern that can equal the commanding way they matter.

You are a land I can’t stand leaving and can’t not. My party ship is pulling out. We all have hats. I try to toot some notes you’ll understand but this was not our instrument or plan.

Who, who had only seen wings, could extrapolate the skinny sticks of things birds use for land, the backward way they bend, the silly way they stand? And who, only studying birdtracks in the sand, could think those little forks had decamped on the wind? So many paired things seem odd. Who ever would have dreamed the broad winged raven of despair would quit the air and go bandylegged upon the ground, a common crow?

We knew it would happen, one of the laws. And that it would be this sudden. Words become a chewing action of the jaws and mouth, unheard by the only other citizen there was on earth.

The mind must set itself up wherever it goes and it would be most convenient to impose its old rooms—just tack them up like an interior tent. Oh but the new holes aren’t where the windows went.

Miser time grows profligate near the end: unpinching and unplanning, abandoning the whole idea of savings. It’s hard to understand but time apparently expands with its diminishing. The door thrown wide on sliding hills of high- denomination bills and nothing much to buy.

There are charms that forestall harm. The house bristles with opportunities for stasis: refolding the linens along their creases, keeping the spoons and chairs in their right places. Nobody needs to witness one’s exquisite care with the napkins for the napkins to have been the act that made the fact unhappen.

The worms which had been thick are thin upon the ground now that it's gotten later. They stick against the path, their pink chapped and their inching labored. It's a matter of moisture isn't it? Time, a measure of wet, shrinking, the drier you get.