The Narrator

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...

I have no idea how many steps lead up to this place from Myrtle Avenue and that old Cathedral, but I've been told that the stone column that towers above me is one hundred and forty-eight feet high, the world's tallest Doric column for those into obscure records. Circling around me, slightly filtered by the haze of July evening humidity, the skyline of New York rises as I struggle to regain my breath. Downtown to my left, accented by the lighted spans and cables of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Midtown to my right, with the Williamsburgh Bridge in the foreground the odd lumpy shape of the 59 th Street Bridge way out there. I am anchored here, after running these massive granite stairs a dozen times down and a dozen times up, at this odd spot where the river bends and New York lies directly north of Brooklyn across the East River. I know my history. I come to this park to rehab the knee that I now feel swelling beneath the huge steel brace, but things that...

For reasons not completely clear even all these years later I rush from somewhere in the far west via Greyhound Bus (yes, Greyhound Bus) toward Chicago where I will meet my father but seventy miles short of Omaha a blizzard begins and an hour later this bus is stuck in the snow on Interstate 80 next to a Coca-Cola truck whose driver offloads huge quantities of his product to us as gifts just before the bottles and even cans start to explode in the vacuum of Midwestern winter cold, we fall into darkness and maybe even sleep wrapped in white flakes rushing past the faint odor of diesel exhaust and the soft pops of thousands of carbonated beverage packagings failing. In the morning a National Guard tank pulls us to a cleared spot on the highway and we proceed in slow parade to the Omaha Bus Station the grimy art deco space we should all have expected which is filled with refugees from the precipitation which is at least four feet deep there is not much to do there but food s...

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 ...

He'd skate backwards and we'd chase. Ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty - eight, nine, and ten-year-olds boys, sometimes leaning on their sticks for extra stability as we tired, following my father around the lake as sisters and mothers played at figure skating in the center and the teenagers played real games along the south shore. The snow clouds had blown away, the sun spread light but not warmth, the air held a mix of ice and salt and the smell of wool soaked with sweat. (copyright 2010) by Ira David Socol

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...

a story crafted from the accounts of friends in New York on that day... ( 1 ) I am looking up. No particular reason. I have long ago discarded the conceit that natives don't stare in wonder at our own tall buildings. I'd no more not take every opportunity to see the Trade Towers, the Chrysler, the Empire State, Citicorp, Woolworth, then a Colorado resident would keep the Rocky Mountains out of his vision. I'm pretty close to work for this time in the morning. Coffee in hand and drifting down Church Street past the Century 21 Store which must have been a bank when it was built. I'm supposed to be at work in those borrowed offices on the 17th Floor of One Liberty Plaza at 8:00 but obviously I'm not. I'm never there on time. I refer to it as a theoretical eight hour day and because of a lot of things assumed about me by my superiors, good and bad, true and not, this is accepted. So my vision is vertical, and I hear the plane before I see it, to...

haimléise The platform was cold. Not freezing. Not winter or anything. But all I had on was a T-shirt and jeans - the day had been one of those autumn days when summer had rushed back in on a Gulf Stream wind but as the evening had set the wind had circled - and a chill night air was dropping from the streets down into the tunnels, and I was shivering, waiting for the train to come. I was working, but, it was hard to really understand that. I wasn't carrying a gun or a shield or even an ID card. I didn't have a bullet-proof vest on. I sure wasn't wearing a uniform. I hadn't been in a police building in almost two weeks. I was young and very thin and dirty and jumpy. There were no displays of confidence dressed with mirrored sunglasses. Just small wads of cash spread here and there among my clothes and six cigarettes and four joints in the Camel box jammed into my left front pocket. If I might have been professionally identified at all it was by a small code stampe...

for Arizona, Israel, and all the other wall builders ... The street is as filthy as it is abandoned. The clouds foretell rain. And the wind bristles, sending shivers along my spine. If you walk the "peace walls" of Belfast you can smell the failure. The failure of community, of leadership, of religion, of humanity. It is all written beneath the grubby graffiti on the cold concrete that long ago replaced the si mpler fences, and then began to climb higher. Because once you build a wall, you quickly discover that it cannot truly be high enough. I have many times walked the seventeenth century's attempt to separate Catholics and Protestants along Protestantism's frontier on the River Foyle. Those walls are massive. Carved stone. Incredibly thick. Powerfully armed. You can walk along the top of these walls today, Europe's last truly walled city, and look down on what was once a Catholic ghetto and what was once a battlefield where the native soldiers of Ir...