Here Endeth

A man was walking down the sidewalk, swinging his arms and wildly gesticulating. As he walked he spoke in a garbled language, and none who heard him could understand. He walked drunkenly, stupidly, moving
over the earth and into the distance, filling it with his ever-shifting, wildly motioning presence.
The grass was a depth of green that had not been seen before. At the edges where the softest tufts crowded the sidewalk, the sun suffused the thickened blades and they shined like a border of beveled emerald.
The man reached the center of the field, turning and shaking himself, speaking loudly and gratingly in an unintelligible mumble. The syllables poured out onto the grass as letters that littered the deep lawn and shivered there like a mass of impenetrable pain.
The man moved unpredictably, swinging his arms more quickly, moving and aching
until his arms began to blur and beat the air, until they finally became the air around them and he began to dissolve, growing thinner and thinner, becoming first a shadow, then nothing at all. And over the place where he had stood, a smile arched broadly across the sun, and the letters that had strewn themselves on the rolling green lawn rearranged themselves with a shudder to spell "Here Endeth."

D. Hickman

The Shadows

A man who was defeated sat on the steps
and looked down. His head was bright from sorrow
and he leaned out over the depth into which the stairs descended, until they became a tiny ribbon of blue enamel lost in the little squares of darkness below. The man had come from nowhere at all, and, being tired, very tired, he decided to lie down and say a prayer to the elements, the stars and their steel mallets, the trees as they crowed, and the earth as it heaved backwards into the darkness of the town. As he finished his prayer and fell asleep he began to sing, the words forming little angels of insolence and bliss until an entire landscape of angelic hosts burned above him like notes that appended a holy writ. The man slept anyway, oblivious of his song, until he began to burn from within with the light of something brilliant. Then his body began to glow like a darkening ember and he floated up into the morning and became what he had inadvertently meant. And the nothing that had brought him into life and desire made a booth out of shadows for the nothing he had been.

D. Hickman

What is Lost

Once a beautiful woman who had known nothing but pain, slipped into the water of a deep warm spring, and the water felt like carbonation against her body, and the bubbles moved her and she laid down and sighed, knowing that her beauty was the falseness of men. And though she had used it to every advantage she could arouse, neither the women nor the men she had appealed to could turn from their desire or from their grief or their accounts to breathe a single sigh for her there in the water, sparkling like a wafer dipped in champagne. So when the woman began to cry, there were both the tears of a woman in pain, and the tears of a woman who sought beyond her body, and was nowhere reflected back to herself and her desire. And that was when she began to pray, her prayer a simple one, a tiny whisper that she would be changed into something that could never be mistaken for her desires again. As she prayed the blood began to bubble inside her. She felt herself grow lighter, the sunlight combing her body backwards into the bank of the spring, where she began to ripple and move and seethe with elasticity, her arms blooming suddenly into feathered wings, her body folding itself into an egret of light that flew above the city into the darkness between planets, where they who are not known to us until we have given up risk, held her and soothed her and gave her many kisses.

D. Hickman