A Little Cloud
Writing a dozen stories
I wonder how it all got started, this buisness about seeing your life flash before your eyes while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence, could startle time into such compression, crushing decades in the voice of your desperate, final seconds
After falling off a steamship or being swept away in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand turning the pages of an album of photographs - you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.
A quick blur of curved silver darting away, having nothing to do with your life or death. The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all as you sink towards the weedy disarray of the bottom, leaving behind what you have already forgotten, the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.
After falling off a steamship or being swept away in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand turning the pages of an album of photographs - you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.
A quick blur of curved silver darting away, having nothing to do with your life or death. The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all as you sink towards the weedy disarray of the bottom, leaving behind what you have already forgotten, the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.
