Photographic Memories

Some people watch the world through a viewfinder as though light and framing can focus them in the right direction, or illuminate a moment worth preserving, a moment to be doctored later for contrast and content, erasing any smudges or unsightly lines, brightening the colors, whitening the smiles, making the backgrounds more pleasurable and interesting.

Pictures lie.

It begins with the image of a memory. Awards day at the office like a picture day at school. Three shots, feet on the green line, turn toward the light, face the camera, adjust your glasses, tilt your head, chin down, a little more to the left, that's it (flash). "You here for Customer Satisfaction?" "No, Development." "Oh, we're into Development now (flash). One more, a bit happier" *Look, buddy, this is as happy as I get* (slight smile) (flash). "Thanks. Next!"

When I leaf through the snapshots of my past, I wonder, was I ever that young? That thin? That happy? Did I really have that much hair? Who are these strangers whose holiday smiles mask the routine hell of day to day. Each forced grin more like a grimace, each picture consuming a little more of my soul leaving it hollow, empty, and easily possessed.

A personal paparazzi pursues me through the pages. Their shutters scissor shut, snick, snick, snick, as they cut away snippets of my life, trimming the pieces to a puzzle where more are lost than found. Each burst of light, each high pitched whine as the flash recharges, each whir of advancing film is like the aftermath of a crime scene that sends me through a flashback.

I stare into a portal to madness like a pool of still water, the original looking glass polished mirror smooth. Behind the lens is a world where black becomes white, up becomes down, sanity insane. If I stare too long, I know I will become unbalanced, but my feet are paralyzed knowing one misstep will send me crashing headlong into the shards that bleed me like a sacrifice. My blood strengthens the demons who howl for my return. Like cats they lick my wounds, feeding instead of cleansing with the agony of their tongues. I am devoured while these dark and hungry godlings mew for more.

Shades tear my clothes, nick my skin, alternately cajoling and threatening, their arguments hooking into my head like finely sharpened, crooked knives. The demons are a legion, united in a single purpose, to return me to the world into which I was born through coercion or deceit. Their voices are a sirens' song calling me home, promising this time I will play Odysseus, revealing glimpses of a glorious return through infectious dreams and visions, neglecting the decadal nature of the journey. Returning to that world would be like re-entering an inferno with no Persephone to rescue and no Virgil to guide me home.

As reality returns, I close the cover on the past, returning dark thoughts to a dark room, sealing the demons within their tomb. The afterimage fades to a still life, memories safely preserved in silver shades of gray, drained of color like the missing portions of my soul.  

 

© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Horizons

Hand in hand on the low, green point, we watch another day, another season, another year pass beyond the water to the west. As we await rebirth, we contemplate the skyline, the transition and the night. Where were we a year ago? Where will we be tomorrow? A tangled web of clouds lies clotted high in the fading light, a reflection of our unspoken thoughts.

Above the lake, a ribbon of crows swirls and flutters from horizon to horizon, mocking the darkness they fly before. A few double back into eddies, vortices of a dozen birds, before rejoining the stream meandering north and west as if defying the gravity of the flat, featureless plain below. Harbingers or prophecies, they will return at daybreak, leaving other birds to divine the night.

Mountains of fog loom against the horizon like a distant, shadowed ridgeline, gray silhouettes dividing a world of darkness from light.

Sunlight glints off a cloud edge like the thin blade of a bronze knife then sets the clouds smoldering like a wildfire sparked on the horizon. Molten gold pours through a skin of clouds cracked and fissured like crazed porcelain revealing the base, white earth beneath.

Behind the bank of broken fog a golden landscape lies half concealed. Soft, lighted hills and twinkling marshes bracket a glowing river winding toward a shining city in the distance with jeweled spires surrounding a central dome. A vision too bright to gaze upon for long, the vision of an afterlife. An instant of crystalline clarity before the vision fades in the afterglow, graying first to charcoal then to black. The afterimage is burned into our minds, returning like the nightingale whose songs will haunt our dreams.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

The Banality of Evil

People often wonder where my characters come from, whether they are based on real people, people that I know. Perhaps I cobble together pieces from individual traits and mannerisms of people I've met, but in general, no. Writing something recognizable about someone you know is a dangerous business.

But traits and mannerisms are easily picked up from observing people, from listening to them, from trying to figure out what makes them tick. Or, equally as important to a writer, filling in the details of what might make them tick. Just as the best dialogue comes from listening people talk when they think no one is listening, the best characters come from observing how people interact when they think no one is watching.

If you think about it, the average person interacts with thousands of people in their life, perhaps even tens of thousands. Most of those interactions are short and likely one-time affairs that you may not remember ten minutes after they have passed. Catching up with This American Life over the break, I was reminded that sometimes we encounter an individual we are unlikely to forget. For me, it is usually someone I think of as merely odd or curious, and then find out later there is another layer to the story. Here's an example.

Several years ago, right before we had the roof replaced, I noticed that some of the fascia around the house had started to rot out and needed to be repaired. So I called around to carpenters in the phonebook to get estimates. As most of you who have contracted for work in your house know, the first trick is getting a contractor to answer the phone or return a call, the second trick is getting them to come out to the house. Of the calls I made, only three carpenters answered the phone and said they did the kind of work I was looking for. Only one showed up for his appointment.

The man at the door was about my age, muscular and slightly weathered like he spent a lot of time in the sun, as you might expect of a carpenter in Florida. He was shorter than I was, much shorter. Had we been in high school, I would have picked him as a wrestler: short, squat and powerful. Now he looked like a guy who enjoyed time out on the water, perhaps on a boat. In college, I had two roommates of very similar size and build, so I knew not to underestimate his intelligence.

When he introduced himself, he seemed personable enough, perhaps even friendly, though business-like which suited me fine. He was courteous and on time. He had a firm handshake. He wore stylish, wraparound sunglasses. He was sharp and quick. He looked slightly familiar, though I couldn't place him. As it turned out, he had done a spot of work on the spa for us six years earlier, though neither of us remembered that at the time.

We started with a tour of the damage outside so he could work up an estimate. He got out a ladder, looked and poked and prodded. He made a few notes. I invited him in to go over the damage.

For those of you who don't know, just opposite the front door in the living room is Karen's telescope, a black 4.5 inch Newtonian mounted on a wooden tripod. As soon as he came in, he said, "Nice telescope. Is it yours?" I told him I had bought it for Karen a number of years back for her birthday. "Does she use it?" he asked. Some, but not as much as either of us first thought, I told him.

He then went into a bit of a diatribe as to how he bought his wife a telescope very much like it. She said she really wanted one, but now that she had it she never used it. He went on about how women were like that. He still seemed actively annoyed and angry both with her and at her. I think he was looking for some commiseration amongst males. I played it neutral but listened. I remember thinking, here's a guy who has some serious issues with his wife. I hope they can work it out.

He drew up and delivered a standard, printed contract, all very professional. He signed and initialed it, as did I. I gave him a down payment for the work. His crew came out the next week and did a competent job. I paid them the remainder. That was July.

A couple months later, in September, we discovered another piece of fascia that needed to be replaced, this one in the corner of the porch. Another contractor had discovered it when we had the roof painted. I called the carpenter again, and he came out to do another estimate. This time Karen was home when he arrived.

Immediately, I saw a difference in his demeanor. This time he was pitching his painting services as well, giving us the whole spiel about what he could do to improve the appearance of the house. We were in the market so we listened. The whole time he was talking, he didn't look at Karen, didn't talk to her directly at all. He seemed uncomfortable with her being there. When she asked him a question, he seemed annoyed and slightly condescending then directed his answer to me. By the time we finished, I had revised my opinion. Here was a man who had serious issues with women in general, not just his wife.

If anyone else had shown up for estimates, we would have given them the work. But no one else had. We wanted the work done before the damage spread, so we signed the contract. The work was completed a week later. Again, a competent job, nothing special. Karen wasn't around when the work was done or the check and receipt exchanged. I mostly forgot about it, though occasionally Karen and I would reflect on how oddly he had behaved toward her. We both knew he had some deep-seeded issues.

By now you may be thinking, dude, you must have lived a sheltered life. This guy isn't much of a character. Misogynists exist in our society. We don't like them but they are not uncommon. Get over it. Move on.

Allow me a Paul Harvey moment while I fill you in on the rest of the story. Page two.

Two months later, in December, I opened the City and State section of the local paper and was surprised to see the carpenter's picture and name associated with the top story. He had been arrested and charged with the murder of his wife over Valentine's Day that same year.

As it turned out, this man had a history of violence against women. His first wife used to show up with bruises and black eyes. He moved to Pinellas County after they separated. She disappeared while they were discussing custody of their children. He was the last person to see her when she jumped out of his car. He made up posters, asking her to get in contact. He said their kids were worried. Nine days later, her body was found in the woods off the highway. She had been bludgeoned to death. There was no physical evidence of his involvement. No charges were filed. That was back in '88.

He married his second wife within a year of the first's death. The relationship turned violent quickly. Within that first year, he had knocked out her front teeth in an argument. There were other incidents involving the police, arguments over an air freshener in the car that ended with broken glass, arguments involving alcohol. All involved violence.

Two years earlier, his second wife had her stomach pumped after a mysterious illness. That January she started saving money so she could leave him. Before she went with him to Universal Studies in Orlando after Valentine's Day, she told her sister she had a headache and, "I don't know if (he) slipped me something or if it is a side effect of our dinner on Valentine's day. Long story, I'll explain when I get you alone." Her last words, recorded on a voicemail to her boss sometime after 2 a.m. from the hotel on her last night alive, were "I don't want to die." She was crying.

It took the police a second autopsy to determine the likely cause of her death. The original finding was an overdose, Xanax and alcohol, supported by her husband's account of the evening. Her family didn't believe it. The second toxicology report showed she might have died of cadmium poisoning, like you would get if someone ground up batteries and slipped them into your food over a period of time.

As I read all this, I was struck that I had met this guy, that I had invited him into my home, into our home, as you might a vampire if you didn't know what he was. As I thought more about my interactions with him, one thing stood out. That July, as he had gone on and on about his wife and the telescope he had given her, he always used the present tense, as though she were still alive and it was an ongoing issue between them. He never gave any indication that she had died five months earlier. His reaction to Karen was equally as eerie in hindsight. Dissociative behavior, if I understand the term right. Like seeing blood in a Rorschach test. Bad news.

The case against him was dropped a few months later. Again, a lack of physical evidence. Again, he moved to a new city, in the Panhandle I think, or maybe out of state. Again, he found another woman who was interested in helping him raise his kids.

Will this man end up as a character in something I write? No, not specifically. But he did teach me a lot about how someone like him might look and act. I have little doubt about his guilt, none of it reasonable. I fully believe I have looked a murderer in the eye and have the receipts to show that I survived. Thinking about the encounters still sends me through an invisible shiver.

The story on This American Life I had been listening to (called "The Super") used a phrase that brought all this back to mind: The banality of evil. The phrase was coined by Hannah Arendt in reference to Otto Adolf Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem for his role in the Holocaust. She used it to describe how normal and commonplace Eichmann looked, how completely ordinary, not sinister or demonic or monstrous as were his acts.

We have all heard a lot about evil over the past few years, though little about its banality. I think evil is like that, if you believe in such things which I'm not sure I do. I tend to believe much as my instructor on the Holocaust did, that to attribute an event to evil denies its underlying humanity. Evil is committed by ordinary men. They are mediocre, they are personable and blend in, they tell jokes, they can be fun at parties. Until they look you in the eye with malice in their hearts. Then they chill your blood. And, likely, then, it's too late.

Some days I wonder whether the phrase should be the ubiquity of evil instead of the banality. Some days, I think it should be both. In my experience, on any given day you never know what kind of person you might meet.

© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Winter Solstice 2007

The day begins with morning sun slanting through a mist reminiscent of a fine, silver snow falling across the neighbor's lawn. The light has drifted south into a notch between the houses before filtering through the oaks which jealously clutch their leaves until spring. The evening promises to be humid, the air thick, penetrating and chill. The sun reflects off a dampened driveway that could be coated with ice, setting fire to a normally shadowed corner of the room.

Behind the house, snowbird starlings perch atop the power lines wing to wing, slowly nudging each other out from the center. First one, then another seeks a more prestigious position that chases down the line like the ripples of a rumor. At the end, the least becomes first as he circles below and sends another murmur of a conversation through his lesser peers. One line down, the final outcast takes wing which startles the flock into flight. They spring to the air as one, wheeling across the sky, their shadows by the hundreds speckling the grass like the shade of a thick-trunked maple on a windy day. After a time they resettle, content for a moment until one covets his neighbor's place and the jostling begins again.

The winter solstice is our high holiday. For us, the day is elemental, composed of fire and water, earth and air, and spirit. Candles throw back the darkness of our troubles. The lake reflects the sunset as we reflect upon the year. The stone out front stands only slightly more weathered like a sentinel and reminder. The wind echoes our transgressions and whispers its forgiveness. We fill our glasses with a measure of each, the mixture reawakening our souls after their long slumber, healing any damage like a balm.

Like the starlings, we observe rituals that onlookers may not always understand as we send forth our desire for a better year ahead. Such wishes are the gifts we sometimes share with others, wisps of parchment fitted into the cracks of a wall, stones thrown at a pillar to beat back temptation, lights floated down a river to wash away our sins, votives flickering in a nave in remembrance of our dead. Symbols and ceremonies that fill the emptiness we sometimes feel, reminding us that we're human. In community or solitude, such prayers populate this longest night. Like the constellations and wandering stars, together they are bright enough to guide us once we let our eyes adjust, like the lone lamp upon our stove burning through the night.

Whatever the light that guides you on your winter celebrations, we hope that it, like your Solstice, remains warm and bright.


© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III

Thank You and Goodbye

By the time I found them again, they no longer had names, only numbers. To the county, each could be represented in five digits, like a concentration camp internee whose identity had been tattooed upon his arm. To me they were living, breathing creatures that deserved a chance to stay alive.

Of course, they never knew they had been named. They were wild animals, feral cats who were part of the colony that lived behind my townhome. Brothers or cousins, one was all black, the other a pale gray tiger that Karen and I had watched play as kittens, watched grow over the previous year. We had watched with disapproval when my neighbor started feeding them, first once a week then once a day. Watched with pity when she stopped, saying, now there were too many. And then with horror when we saw the trap.

Not so much saw it as heard the angry and confused cries of cats testing a cage on my neighbor's porch. When I peered through the screen, I saw the long, metal trap, the two brothers pacing restively within. Every instinct told me to test the screen door and, if it was open, release them. I decided to pursue their freedom through a more legal means that didn't involve the words "breaking" and "entering." Stenciled across the trap in black, blocked letters was "Pinellas County Animal Control." At least I knew where to start.

The next day Karen and I drove to their facility, a series of cinderblock buildings that reminded me of a bunker complex in the somewhat rural center of the county. I thought it would be easy, just claim them, pay the fine and set them free. But the women at the front desk had no record of two cats being picked up from our neighborhood in a trap. We were welcome to look around.

We scanned the adoption center, the neat and clean, brightly painted public area which housed all the kittens and gentle adults. A quick search confirmed that neither of our two was that tame or desirable. So we were escorted behind the counter through the double steel doors with chipped, surplus tan paint into the unfinished working areas of the facility. Looking back, they should have placed a sign above the entry like Dante: "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate."

The strays, normally solitary creatures, were packed eighty or more to each of the five enclosed pens, climbing the chainlink, clawing and biting the metal strands, searching for any escape before a needle and the incinerator transformed their lives to smoke and ash, and the cage was refilled with their brethren. "Only 94 today," our guide mentioned offhandedly.

Karen spotted the black through the perpetually shifting bodies, crouching near the back of the enclosure marked "Tuesday," the day he would be destroyed if it rolled around again. To prevent that I claimed him as I wished that I could claim them all. His brother was nowhere in sight. So we were led deeper into the labyrinth, through a another set of doors into another ring of feline hell.

Stacks of individual cages, each just large enough for its occupant to stretch whiskers to tail, formed chest-high corridors redolent with urine and fear. Some individuals were labeled with a warning, like "Bites." Most only bore a five-digit number stenciled across the card with the information vital to their destruction, barely readable in the dim, flickering fluorescent light. Some growled or hissed, or swatted at a passing sleeve. Most curled up as far as they could from the barking din nearby, feigning sleep. After wandering corridor after corridor, we finally found the gray tiger with a card marked "Aggressive," head on paws, seemingly resigned to his fate.

Our two lost souls reclaimed, we were guided to a worn exam room with concrete floors and metal tables that smelled of disinfectant where they would receive their shots from the county vet. The vet techs asked with concern if I was certain I wanted to adopt them after seeing how wild they were, giving me dubious looks when I said that I did. They insisted that I hold the black for his shots, saying that if I didn't they wouldn't let me take him, thinking I would come to my senses and back away. I didn't.

The black received his vaccinations with great reluctance and some struggle resulting in a scratch or two. Perhaps it would be easy after all. When the tiger's turn came, he earned the label from his card. First, the techs had to use the loop around his neck just to get him out of the cage. When they did, he fought and slashed like the wild cat that he was. Skin was broken and bled. Scars began to form. Unsatisfied with a few scrapes, his teeth found purchase on a finger and sank in deep. I howled which scared him enough to let go and retreat into a corner where the techs looped his neck again before stuffing him back into the cage.

That encounter earned them both a mandatory twelve days in quarantine for breaking skin, with a trip to the emergency room for a tetanus shot with a two-week course of powerful antibiotics for me while I waited to see if they came up rabid. I knew it was unlikely. At that time, there hadn't been a case of rabies in the county for over 20 years.

The techs asked if I was still certain that I wanted them, whether I was going to come back for them, thinking as they watched me cradle my hand in my handkerchief that I wouldn't. I left them no doubt that I would. Satisfied that I would follow through with my lie taking them into my home, the techs softened, saying they would be ready when I returned, shots and all.

The nearly two weeks in isolation took any remaining fight out of them. The quarantine area left both of them with a cough, the black's worse than the gray's. After paying the $138 in fines and fees, and ushering them into the carrier I had brought, I finally took them home. Once there, I placed them on the porch to make sure they were ok before I released them. The gray tiger seemed mostly healthy, interested in the food I gave him, if as cautious of me as I was of him. My finger still throbbed. The black only lay in the carrier, wheezing and sleeping. There was no way I could let him go just yet.

After the gray tiger ate his fill, I opened the screen door to the outside. He approached it cautiously, step by step, conflicted by seeing me in the path of his freedom. Then he started into a dead run for the door from several feet away, swerving around me. He disappeared quickly into the palmetto stands around the oaks behind the complex.

The black I tended overnight. I opened one of my remaining antibiotics and mixed half into his food. I knew from the cats I owned that the dose was close to what he would have gotten in a day from a vet. He ate hungrily then slept. I fed him again the next morning with a second dose mixed in. Again, he wolfed it all down. When I came home from work that evening, I prepared a dish one final time with a final dose of antibiotics, hoping that it would be enough. He had improved significantly, his breathing was clear, and now he was restless. I opened his cage on the porch and set the food beside the screen door before retreating back inside. He ate ravenously as I watched through the kitchen window, bolting back into the carrier as soon as he heard me at the door.

I opened the screen door to the porch, then sat in the chair across from it and waited, very still. After several minutes, he slowly emerged from the carrier he now thought of as his territory, a retreat he could defend. With a careful eye on me, he crept toward the open door. At the threshold he sniffed the air and relaxed a bit, seeming to recognize the scents of home. Then he looked at me as though asking for permission. I nodded slowly though I knew he wouldn't understand the gesture. He crept outside a foot, then two. He sniffed the grass, then tested the scents on the air. I figured he would disappear quickly at this point, just like this brother had.

Instead, what he did stays with me to this day, set clearly in my mind. He turned around and came back onto the porch through the open door. He approached me cautiously, watching for any sudden motion. I sat frozen, knowing if I moved he would be gone. Once beside me, he rubbed against my leg hard enough for me to feel through my jeans, once, then twice, and slowly but more assuredly headed back out the door. Outside again, he looked me in the eye a last time over one shoulder, then walked toward the palmettos, unthreatened, vanishing between their fronds without a sound.

I never saw either of the brothers again, as I hoped I wouldn't. The techs had warned me that if they were rounded up a second time, as repeat offenders, the county would not let me save them from the needle's kiss. With no one feeding it, the colony disbanded but didn't quite dissolve completely. That winter on the eve of a Christmas freeze, Karen adopted one of their sons, or brothers, or cousins, another gray tiger, young enough to adapt to humans. The years he lived with us were like touching a piece of the wild. He was willful and independent.

A year later when the brothers' license renewals came, I listed them as "no longer owned." As if I ever had or could own them. As a final act, I recorded the names I had given them on the forms, to show, if nothing else, that they were more than numbers to me. For a year, they and their siblings had greeted me each morning or evening when I returned home from work, depending on the shift. Their mother had allowed Karen and I to watch them from the porch without much concern, until she drove them off to fend for themselves one day. Even then, they remained close to where they had grown up, sharing our backyard as their home. 16017: Dark Sky; 15985: Silver Moon. I hope they lived their remaining days as they were born, wild and free.

On days that I wonder what footprints I leave upon the sands of this world before time and tide wash them away, I remember that clear, cool Florida afternoon in spring when a creature who had no reason to trust me re-entered an enclosure that could have been another trap just to say thank you and goodbye.

That memory is worth the scars, faded now but still visible on my finger, sometimes throbbing though not often. It reminds me to give thanks for life and each opportunity I am given to survive, no matter how little I may understand the moments as they pass me by. Perhaps the need is instinctive.


© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III

Journeys over Water

We travel from our troubles toward a place of greater safety, a sanctuary if only for a day. Three times we cross the water at midday, three times we return at twilight. Six passages that echo like a spell of initiation gaining power as its mantra is repeated. Six shining swords of motion we now carry that resonate with magic each time we climb the stone hill arching above the bay.

A sparkling road across a deep blue field intersects our path, leading directly toward the sun. Before us, clouds trailing mist lighten the azure of the sky to aqua in their wake, though the illusion of their rain is dispelled long before the ground. Below, a spider web of lines anchors the fishing pier to the water.

Rafts of terns drift idly across the bay. Cormorants are stacked in a precise pecking order on the crossbars of a ranging tower. Open formations of pelicans glide just above the wave tops, their wingtips brushing the water, leaving a trail of ripples as if from a line of isolated showers. Ospreys sit sentinel atop the light poles that line the causeway like columns crowned with slowly blinking gargoyles whose heads swivel to eye us as we pass.

On the far shore, gray-bearded oaks witness our approach over an alien landscape their children will never visit while crows gossip across the sky, rumoring our arrival.

With our departure, distant clouds focus the setting sun into an orange-white blaze as they transit the horizon like distant mariners manning crystal ships that sail above the sea. Inland, a pillar of glass and steel captures the sun and is transformed into a burning beacon of divine providence or an omen of its impending wrath. The finger of flame fades as we slowly descend toward home, leaving us unscathed.

The sun now set, the turquoise mirror of the water reflects the pinks and lavender-grays of the approaching evening that marks an end to our adventures. Returning to familiar ground, we prepare to move the cycle forward into a better year ahead, the difficulty of the journey now behind us.

© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III

Drowning

The dream always begins the same. The memory surfaces with a line from a book, a scene from a movie, the splash of the shower against my face. My feet dangle above open water. The world becomes horizontal, no topography but the waves. The contours lie beyond the horizon, or yards below with the boat.

Another memory rises. Another body of water, this one with a sandy bottom pressed against my face. Me holding my breath as though my life depends on it, which it might.

Exhaling slowly, I simulate drowning in this personal waterboarding, only without the board or the information or the medical team standing by in case I fail. Only the water and her weight over locked elbows pressing against my neck that leaves me no leverage but deceit. When I lay still, almost floating beneath her hands, her grip slackens and I am reborn, reentering the world kicking and screaming, never quite seeing it the same after the struggle, after seeing the expression on her face which reminds me that I am alive, unexpectedly.

And she wonders why I lie to her. That day it was the only way to survive. I know I should feel guilty, and often do, for both lying and surviving.

When we begin this life, we can see the bottom clearly. Gold and jewels strewn from other people's wrecks lay sparkling upon the ocean floor, waiting for us to reach out and claim them. We learn to snorkel, then to dive. Confident, we strap on our equipment and slip beneath the waves.

Immediately, unseen currents pull us. Sharks maraud us and eels snap at us from hidden holes. Coral fingers grasp at our air hoses, at our exposed skin. Jellyfish and Portuguese man-of-war threaten to entangle us in their tentacles.

When we recover, we find the sun has retreated behind the clouds. The water has turned murky, the treasure is no longer within sight. Low on air, tired and cramping, we return to the surface. Some exchange air tanks and rest to try again, learning from their experience. Others learn to embrace the sea.

Novels become short stories that shrink to essays small enough to send by e-mail, descriptions without purpose, fragments without context repeated endlessly like waves upon the sea. Echoes of a life drawn to its own reflection in the water, the words my nemesis and her curse.

In the dream there is no weight, only the perfect freedom of water embracing me like a womb, the ocean a mother willing to reclaim me if I let her. The shore is distant. Darkness nears. I only have to wait. Though before I am drawn to her breast, the hands of strangers pluck me from the water. But I continue to hold my breath until I wake on the shore, safe in my bed, the sea still echoing in my ears.

© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III