An Entabled Moment

Last night I was walking home through the park after a play. It was late-dark. I saw a police car driving down my street with lights flashing. A figure was sprinting away on a side street and as the police car reached the corner the figure slowed to a non-conspicuous amble and disappeared down an alley. The paddy wagon turned into the park and drove slowly.

I followed the police car into the park.

Walking through the park I saw discarded clothes – hoodies and parkas lying on benches. The police car had stopped somewhere up ahead and I saw a cluster of angry figures yelling at each other. I heard a helicopter overhead. Back on my street another three police cars had arrived and were heading towards me. Somewhere beyond them was a man running. I probably shouldn’t have entered the darkest area of the park. I went home and locked the back door for the first time in a year.

Today I was sitting in the back park – the other one behind my house – and it was sunny and aggressively kind. I saw an envelope flying 100 feet above the ground a long way away. It was fluttering well above tree-level in the front park and I got up to find it. I made a beeline through the streets to the park I’d run from the night previously and stood looking for the white paper dancing in the breeze. Who was this letter for? Where had it gone? I never found it, and probably looked like a fool standing in the middle of the park staring at the sky.
I did find a cool white stone which I took home. It might make a good paperweight, which is a saddening waypoint in anything’s existence.


Some of your letters will never reach their destination. Our finitude defines us.

What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.