Interrogations

Matt Mahurin

At dinner, he sat silent, staring at his plate while the others chatted--a ringing in his ears, a gray aura around the chop, sulfurous mist.

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The astronomer closed his dome at dawn. The morning star incised the horizon with a smell of lilies and a circle of blood on the eyepiece.

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The old woman in the wheelchair watched raindrops inscribe the window. She read its poem to her blind friend, who mumbled protest: too fast.

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She pauses on the bridge and looks down. Something about the way water moves, about light. But the child pulls her skirt, crying time, time.

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They sat on the bridge rail drinking wine in starlight, watching for meteors to etch their glasscutter lineage into what passed for future.

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Dying, by then, seemed normal to her, a breath and another breath and nothing, a stone dropped in water continuing in water to be a stone.

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In pinewoods at midnight the trapped weasel gnawing its own leg stops to consider its bitter self-taste.

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Horses in a meadow over strata of loess and limestone, reflections limned through the meniscus of earth by fossilized skeletons of dolphins.

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That singular point on the continuum from which time reads like an inscribed transparency: just ahead, the hospital bed, the miraculous IV.