The Narrator

image via NWI Times Go away. Everything needs to go away. The scene in this place. The voices echoing off the tile. Especially the few that call my name. And the guy to my left, and the guy to my right. Go away. There just needs to be me and the fifty meters of chlorine filled blue water that stretch in front of me, seven feet wide, and the tone that I’m waiting for. I just want to do ok. You know? I just want to do ok. There are people watching me. Somewhere up in the balcony they’re there. And if I’m ok, they can get me out of here. There it is, and I’m off clean, and falling into the liquid world, and slipping under and now there’s the perfect time, the long glide and even when I start kicking I’m still in sea mammal mode and I’m way past the third of the pool mark before I need air and start the stroke. Today it just feels right, barely any break between the water below and the air above as I count myself into the first turn, dive, circle, kick an...

In the summer when I turned thirteen I swam across Long Island Sound to the lighthouse on Execution Rocks. At thirteen there are nights when you cannot sleep. Not because of actual reasons for terror in the house, nor because of worries or pressures. And really not even because the hot, humid Gulf Stream air swamping New York is too still and sweat coats your skin. But because there are so many things to hope for, so many wishes, that your brain cannot file them all away fast enough to let the silence come. This was the morning after one of those nights, and perhaps, not just for me. Ten of us, maybe eleven - it is hard to count or even know all the faces now - mostly boys but not all, mostly members of the YMCA's Swim Team but not all, stood in the long gazebo at Hudson Park which overlooked the beach and the Sound. Late July, and the early morning light mixed with the incoming salt of the rising tide, and the seaweed and fish and the plants of the marshes. The flag in the p...

The last of the sun lit the valley in ways that made all the best myths of my childhood seem possible, golden rays falling on green so deep and on a cloudbank the greatest painters of the world could not capture and, yes, on her skin and on her hair, and splashing off the blue of her eyes. We lay next to each other on the warm bonnet of the borrowed Rover, our fingers intertwined, and I said, "thanks for coming with me today," and she said, "I wouldn't have missed it for the world." I wanted to say so much more, but sometimes when I need them most, words elude me. copyright 2006-2012 by Ira David Socol

The rain was whipping up Fourth Avenue, and the air was brittle with salt and impending cold. But here on this third floor it was crazy hot as the radiators sizzled. Everybody was awake, the kind of wound up anticipation to be expected. I was too, certainly, but I was working on staying in character, so I was pretending to sleep, lying face down on one of the beds, wearing nothing but Irish flag colored bikini underwear, my arms stretched out above my head, as I breathed the smell of my own sweat.   When I had found my way here an hour ago after the run through the chill wet streets from the Smith-Ninth Street Station, unexpected routes on both trains and streets, slipping through the narrow alley alongside the Bodega around the corner, climbing the fence and then through the stair window of this place, I'd been soaked to the skin. As I took in the team that would cover me tonight, and make all the collars, I peeled my jeans, my jacket, my shirts, my socks off, ...

Fresh Kills, from the Wellcome Collection on Dirt , 2011 Exhibition, London If I wasn't wrapped in this Tyvek spacesuit and struggling inside the breathing apparatus I'm sure I would be getting cold. The sun is brilliant but the November wind is rolling off the Jersey highlands and there's nothing at all to block it up here at the top of the pile except the remnants of the fire trucks. We stand out here literally between sunrise and sunset. In the morning the slight glow out across the open Atlantic finds us dressing. An eternity later the last light fades behind the mountains of northern New Jersey and we wash ourselves off. We fill that stretch of time sifting through the untold tons of rubble and dust that were once the World Trade Center in this oddest of places, the special re-opening of the world's largest garbage dump. One hundred and eighty feet above the tidal marshes that centuries ago gave this place a Dutch name for clean waters, Fresh K...

On those hot nights when there just was nothing to do but be away from everyone and everything I'd walk in a slow drift down to the park at the water. There were no lights at all except for one in the parking lot just off the road and the glow of the 7-up machine by the padlocked restrooms and thick lines of trees blocked any infiltration from the lamps of the beach clubs that lay east and west. So in pure darkness I'd cross the enormous lawn, flowing down the hill, to the rock shore and strip off my clothes and being relatively careful of position as far as underwater rocks were concerned, would dive into the cold silence of Long Island Sound. If I needed dreams I'd swim to the abandoned fort and climb out and walk the ancient streets. If I needed hope I'd head for a little island with nothing but trees and warm myself in the glow of the stars. If I needed simply to be gone I'd crawl all the way to the lighthouse at Execution Rocks, cutting across the...

The sun has dropped behind the hills to the west and I have stood in the field as the sky has tumbled from a royal to a navy to an ink blue that is almost black and now the moon has risen to straight above, surrounded by an immense ring which fills almost half the heavens. At my feet the grass turns from dry to damp and the chill settles around me, and, though it has now been more than a year since my last cigarette I pull a fresh pack from my pocket, tear off the plastic, open it, the tobacco adding to the smells of the night, and slip the Camel between my lips. Then I pause. I do not want to strike the match. I do not want to, even for a moment, add light into this dark. Terrestrial light seems an insult to that moon and the stars which themselves wait on the edges of the ring, Orion impatient on the southwest. Patrick is not really my saint. Patrick brings the light to Ireland, which surely, is good. But to St. David the lights in the night are harbingers of death - ignis fatu...

photo: Flickr by ionizdat We stop at Saint Dominic’s off Gun Hill Road right after loading the guy with the heart attack on Edenwald into an ambulance. “Please guys,” we beg the paramedics, “sure he’s dead but if he’s dead here it’ll take us over an hour to get this taken care of, and you can just dump him on the E/R.” We kneel before the priest and take communion and are blessed with the ashes. Then, still deeply hungover from Fat Tuesday alcohol consumption, we run to the “shots fired” call where Edson ends at Strang, and find the kid dead in the tall brown grass of what was supposed to be a park. The kid is maybe ten, well later we’ll know he wasn’t even, but at that moment, at the point where Colin says, “oh fuck” and I come over and see the thin body with the blood leaking from a temple, we think “ten,” not knowing that he was tall for his age. A minute later I realize there’s a gun in the grass as well, a silver .22 automatic, and I reach into my pocket and pul...

It’s a very cold Sunday morning and he shivers as he waits for his car to warm up enough to throw hot air on the windshield and melt the ice. He could scrape it off, sure, but the wind is howling and he’s tired and though he should be in a rush he’s not really, so he sits there instead, thinking about how maybe windshields should have those little ice-melting wires like back windows do though he knows that might not be great for seeing. The radio is playing old Chili Peppers and he turns and digs through the junk on the back seat and finds the gloves he thought he lost, but when he tries to put them on the insides are like ice and he pulls his hands back into his sleeves and curses the winter. He revs the engine as small wet spots appear before him. He pulls on the washer switch and shoots the ice melt mixture onto the glass. The wipers create small portholes forward; in the mirror the rear defroster has carved slightly open blinds. He backs out of the driveway. The street is ...

The day had turned stunningly cold, and the salt was rising into the air from Long Island Sound, announcing a coming storm, but we had said Greasy Nick's so I sat there outside, picking a table with a bit of the shelter of the building, and waited. She would come, as she always did, in sadness. I never saw her in happiness. Only between lovers, between jobs, between houses, between dreams. Today, I already knew. A mutual friend, a hospital nurse, had whispered "cancer" to me at Dudley's last night, as we sat on the deck over the water and drank to the Equinox. I watched spots of rain start to spread across the road, coming from the shore. I thought back to our first meeting. In the park. In the rain. Both of us bruised and battered by the fists of men we worshipped. I had held her then. I had promised that it would all get better. Maybe it had. Though not together, as I had desperately wanted in that first moment. Now the rain exploded, waves of water merging s...

The window of the bedroom looked east. Toward the DART tracks and the Strand of Joyce's imagination and the sea and far beyond that to the chaotic Welsh coast. If I had to I could see the whole way in the moments before sleep. But tonight sleep would not come, though Orion slept above. Resting on his left, the celestial archer framed by the thin panels of the upper sash. The glass slumped by age differently in each, creating a quintych - would that be a word? - with a strong sense of doubt about the nature of heaven. Glass, like pain, is unstable. A super-cooled liquid which always flows. Gentle, despite its fragility. The pain which haunts my nights shifts in form as well, though direction is less defined. The woman beside me breathes in soft swells. The beagle snores. The cat watches the great hunter from the window ledge. His tail slicing through the thick of the dark. (c) 2010 by Ira David Socol

The fog rose from the Irish Sea and crawled ashore, chasing me from the Strand. I walked St. John's Road then turned north along Park Avenue and, no longer moving west, was engulfed in the salt mist. (c) Steve Conway - Fog on Dublin Bay The senses shift in the night. And I followed the smells, turf fire on the grate by turf fire on the grate, as I moved toward Sandymount Green. And I followed the vaguest of sounds, an infant's cry, an apology too loud, the sound of water draining through the pipes. All held close to me by the vapours which now soaked my hair and jumper. "You understand," my Ma had told me when I was very young, "that the pattern of the jumper is our family's. It is how we recognized the bodies of the fishermen when they washed ashore." It took me decades for the intricate cabling to not cause nightmares, and for me to ask Ma to knit one more. My mobile told me it was 3.45 when I saw the Green, soft yellow lights glowing in a bla...

Celestial happenings simply didn't interest him. As a schoolboy he had even been unable to locate Orion's Belt in the night. This made him stand out in undesirable ways. So he ignored the event and drove towards work, his visor pulled down against the glare. He tried to watch the transit of Venus. Seven-thirty a.m. with a welding helmet on his head he stood on a table in his back yard trying to get closer to the sky. A cloud blocked his view for a moment and he gave up, went inside, put on his pants and ate Rice Krispies in front of the Today show. With a banana and two percent milk. At seven-twenty-three she rolled over, kissed him, and said, "get up you moron, Venus is crossing." He laughed, pulled her on top of him. They missed the show and were late for work. She parked her car at the "scenic overlook" by the Delaware Water Gap. Pulled the homemade contraption out of her trunk. Her father had made it for an eclipse of the sun twenty-six yea...

Charlie lived on Gillespie Road just past Plimsoll Road, so I walked from Trafalger Square where she and I had gone separate ways, leaning heavily on my cane, and made my way, indirectly, in the direction of the tube stop at Leicester Square. Portuguese university students struggled to film the traffic. A frustrated man chased late leavers from the portico of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and loudly clanged the gates shut and locked them with chains. A gaggle of Irish women, Newry if my accent-tracker was working, rushed past gushing about Judi Dench in the play they had just seen. Outside the Coliseum two French twenty-somethings appeared on the verge of orgasm even if they remained mostly clothed. Near New Row I paused, exhausted, pain spreading from my leg through my body, and I stumbled toward the door of The Angel and Crown, while reaching with my free hand for the small box of meds in my pocket. A barman held the door for me. "Need a pint?" "And perhaps food." ...