/yesod

Tag: glass

  • payroll

    …I find that I have overslept and am in a rush to get a stack of deposits to the University’s bank by noon, otherwise all of the faculty and staff paychecks will bounce.

    The deposit is a stack of checks and slips totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are pink and yellow carbon copies, very slippery to keep in order. I leave the darkened school library — exhausted students sprawl here and there across chairs and couches, utterly done in by finals and the drunken afterglow parties.

    I pass through a maze of corridors and stairwells, time slipping away. Once I get out to the parking lot, I see a few professors heading to their cars. Everyone wants to get to the bank before noon. It closes early on the weekends, of course.

    Running out of time, I try to flag down one of the faculty but they do not see me. I end up running through the surrounding office park, cutting between buildings and scrambling over landscaping.

    Arriving at the bank, I see the tellers inside beginning to pack up for the day. I bang on the door but they wave me off, mouthing “we’re closed.”

    Somehow I manage to climb up to a small skylight and, quite suddenly, burst through to the floor below in a shower of glass.

    But, after all that, I make the deposit in time.

  • flames, new and old

    [This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated June 16th, 1998]

    …and, somehow, in my dreams I hear a huge crash — metal and glass — ignoring it, I dream on…

    …a flickering light from outside — flash of orange through the blinds — send me up to the window, women’s voices, laughing and talking . . . and I see them gathered around a fire, a smashed and twisted wreckage to one side, smoke from the fire rising through the branches above . . . I run out to comfort them but…

    ..I’m awake, my son crying in the next room…

    …dreaming again, this time the Queen of Middle Night puts in an appearance of an old girlfriend from years past — the red haired dancer. Old flame, slowly kindled, surprisingly warm. Her family home, my son and I just passing through . . . she embraces me, a big sister, a past lover — though she was, in reality, neither. Passing through the rooms, everyone sleeping quietly, I see a black puma chained in a dark corner. It blinks once, green eyes blazing, hungry. I walk away. Slowly.

    We move on and, when it is time, I go. Her farewell kiss is surprisingly sweet…

    ..and, in darkness, I am awake once again.