A-minor

 
by Mark Reep

 
Say the world is a smudged charcoal drawing. Slit from its frame, smuggled out of the Vatican. Don’t say it couldn’t happen. Who would know.

Say the world can’t remember yesterday, or why its four corners curl up. Now, imagine a man who can’t either, sitting at one of the world’s ragged edges, considering that sea we call Night, and Time. From awaterstair he sketches by scraps of moonlight a crumbling wall he will one day call Point of Grace. Mist and dreamdrift beckon and elude.

Say you are he, or someone like: You wonder, fear, hope, all the usual. Mornings you wake clutching a duct-taped duffel; inside, you find a tin box of pencils, a swollen sketchbook, buckled drawings, scribbled warnings: Overstayed here. Don’t go back. Maybe one day they will seem no stranger’s dream.

Is this so hard, really? No, nor should you mourn this moment’s passing, a light already lost. Only offer what thanks you can, turn up your collar, and go on.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Mark Reep is an artist and writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Art Collector, Endicott Journal, Prick of the Spindle, Blue Fifth Review, Metazen, Moon Milk Review, Smash Cake, Gloom Cupboard, Fictionaut Selects, Big City Lit, and Word Riot’s 10th Anniversary Anthology. He is the founding editor of Ramshackle Review and lives and works in New York’s Finger Lakes region. Visit his website and blog