Her Pictures

I tell her she will be with me all through the night. It is because of her pictures. The distance is hollowing, but her pictures provide stones for a bridge that well-stretches any distance. In her absence, her pictures are a compass and they are the reason for a new-found love of capturing scenery, buildings and life's moments. I am quick to save her pictures when they come. I have my favorites, call ID photos change frequently, and there is more traffic in my Dropbox than in my driveway. My iCloud is not a collage of tired selfies, not by any means, but a composition of unique fashion, silly randomness, captured grace, scenic metropolis, moments in rare time, on-the-job boredom, blunt reality, as well as unbridled happiness and draining woe. Her pictures always show more than just what is happening, the pictures are a window when there is no door.

The compulsion to save every photo darkens in every time-lapse of distance. Her pictures are the cigarettes you nervously smoke end to end while waiting for a bus that you know is coming, but you wait far too long and it looks like rain. I will sit at my keys, in a chair of stories, and sift through hundreds of pictures in an effort to crawl through the windows and forget my empty quiet. They are the windows on a slow-moving train, a slideshow of passing places and things for short moments at a time. All I can do is sit quietly in my chair, type whatever my mind can focus, and press my nose against the glass while waiting for my destination. Her pictures are calming and reminding of where the train will eventually stop, where I will have my stories and all those beautiful things I pitifully gazed through the window. When the sun sets, her pictures are the flickering candle against a soft black and white glow emitting from a small bedroom window off of a chaotic California highway. The candle is a tribute burning for the things I have no trouble remembering, simply finding it easier to sink into a vivid and tangible thing I can physically hold.

Her pictures are something I can hold in my hand and intensify emotions with my fingertips. So many moments in a distance are lost, but the pictures and the spontaneity behind them can provide the lost with the inclusion necessary to find direction. So many of her pictures share my physical timeline, but many more of them fill in the dark gaps of memory when distance was a harsh sentence, and a shadow hung in the air along with the acrid smog around the mountains. For me, her pictures are a constant theatre of hope, imagination, freedom, and a willingness to do anything so long as I am savoring every breath out of life. Distance is harsh, but her pictures burn in the window and there is an image of breathless imagination that oars against the current and calms the anxious open waters of coming new chapters. My phone will chirp and she will show me where she was and where she is, showing me what the world around her looks like. Through the distance, she gives me her life in a silent vaudeville clip show that I will cling to and revisit in my solitary midnight hour.

Her pictures are among my treasured items. I collect them like my books and arrange them like my stories. Her pictures are more than candles and oars, they are the feeling that nothing is really lost. They are an ease for lapses of time in the distance. They are, in so many ways, the privilege of opportunity to glimpse into a world that exists and is waiting. Many must rely on pure blind faith to believe that turning the page will be a beautiful and exciting thing. I am of the lucky few who can peer through a keyhole and see a room different than my own. I find calm in her pictures. I find hope and imagination in her pictures, and I survived countless nights of fear and worry because of her pictures.

The photo icon is a garden I fence from the world around me. The screen explodes with memories and she replaces in my heart all the things pillaged in the distance. Her pictures freeze time when I fear time is slipping.

She sends me a picture before her bedtime. The picture is a dimly-lit shot of pajamas and a quiet beauty. I missed nothing today. Her picture tells me goodnight and she will be with me all through the night...

Lost Without Content

I love getting lost in these letters. A ginger kitten teaches me that while scribbling a letter of great importance or structuring an alternate reality, I can exist in any city in the world. I can be happy in my own conjuring. The ginger kitten chaperones my otherworld travels much like the Cheshire cat. The clicking and clacking of the keys is a confection of popcorn noises that always mean the same thing, and hearts are explosive with expression. It means to truly dissolve into the alphabet puddle and wade through sticky bogs of story. It is in that bog where a thick fog curtains the outside world.

Because I am not writing anything in particular, I feel more self-conscious of the eyes over my shoulder -- the eyes that are not even peering. I quickly dismiss the notion that anyone is concerning themselves with what is occurring on a stranger's iPad at the next table. There is still that lingering statement suggesting that it is not only probable, it is enticing to others as well. It is the curiosity of what someone is saying. The fact that what they are saying is silent and purely intended for the writer or a specific party in mind. Most of us traffic coffee shops for a sideshow of society, and to people-watch and eavesdrop, and be nosy of others. I admit it -- I do it. Perhaps that is why I worry that someone is attempting to peer into my secret make-believe world. The eyes appear more watchful and in greater numbers when you see the daylight of your own arid disposition. There is no show to give the others -- simply hackneyed with a cup of coffee in your pedestrian endeavors. Getting lost in the keys is symbiotic with the onlookers doing nothing -- whether they have props or not.

The home is supposed to be a setting of comfort and control, but it can also be the most crippling. Escape from the lonely quiet requires hope and imagination. The ideals of mentally checking out all predicate insane notions -- concepts resulting in a healthier and clearer afterwards -- exercising dreamier practices, afterwards informing your closest of people that you never felt more sane in your life.

The ginger kitten lures me deeper into the bog. Content-takeaway seems improbable. The content is lost because I am lost with it. There is certainly nothing in it for the expeditious reader. It becomes the literary version of brief people-watching. I just want to have even the smallest score on the board. I am lost without content, but I want it to matter. I need to know that a wayward constitution does not necessarily mean an entire lack of content. Obscurity without self-consciousness was fine. The imagination was unbridled before it made up reasons to be reluctant. When the ginger kitten stops to nap, I confide in its sleeping ears that I am walking along with no destination. I impart that I will go with the flow and tell of my journey, with no understanding of having done so. I am haunted by the prospect of nullification, but reminded that sometimes people sit in their cars and simply drive nowhere for no reason for at all. People return from the drive and something is different. There was no point or particular destination and it was okay to venture. I love getting lost in these letters and sometimes I simply wish to drive aimlessly.

Journalists and storytellers are supposed to take you somewhere and give you something to take back. I just wanted to go anywhere at all and be okay about it. I want to know that I am still interested in driving whether I know where I am going or not. I wish to take the voyaging reader to unfamiliar points of interest, but this time around I simply needed to know that I can still navigate the road -- and that I still enjoy it. I wandered without point or relevance, and then found myself insisting that be okay -- if only for myself.

I love getting lost in these letters. These letters are the windows to parts unknown. Sometimes I get lost in these letters for no reason at all.

The Vagabond Furlough - Epilogue

Numerous delays in O’Hare Airport preceded the exhausted finale of the furlough. The delays were a blessing -- at first. One can only stretch a goodbye so long, sitting on the dirty floor just shy of security, before they drag you out of your shoes to wait for the long flight all alone. On the dark flight south, I appreciated what it means literally to be there for someone. When you walk with someone in their private world, never shorting a reassuring smile when they glance for one, and to listen to as well as encourage their thoughts and dreams you are walking the ultimate follow-through of supportive promises. I will always be there for you. That is the promise. Huntsville, Alabama is where the furlough continued. Huntsville is a city put on the map by NASA. The Huntsville airport is characterless after midnight. The bags came quickly and I was shuttled to my brother’s apartment. Entry was available to me and his candle had already burned out for the night -- he was fast asleep and I made myself at home, obnoxiously, spreading my things about and latching my equipment to every available electrical outlet before rooting through the fridge and cupboards, turning on the television. The first night was one of solitude, exhales of emotional exhaustion and mystery television. I fell asleep on the couch and awoke in a lonely apartment in the middle of nowhere. The evening brought a dinner date with my brother and sister in one of two small sections of town that serves for social scene. We declined the mentioning of the time since our last dinner date together -- just the three of us. It is always a sad and difficult thing to acknowledge senseless amounts of dead space in between being together. The difficult mentioning was fortunately needless as the night carried on with a joyous pace that stood still in time, allowing only those in that gravity to reconcile the dead space. My sister joined the early-morning expedition to Tennessee leaving my brother and me behind for another two days. There would be two days of lone afternoon daydreaming followed by evenings of campy horror films with my brother, ending with solitary, stormy midnights. Both nights in Alabama were rain soaked with violent thunderstorms. Resurgence and freedom with fear were the themes of thought during the nightly storms. I clicked my alphabetic keys and slobbered over the marvel of new eras, the ideals of freedom, and the chances taken on ones self in order to attain a higher calling. I needed to fight back against a decline, and I was slowly discovering that in order to usher in a new renaissance and preserve what I cherish it is going to require daring and sudden acts of change. The winds of change were certainly scrambling my compass. I decided to finish my journey without it. The storms behind us, Tennessee bound; my brother and I drove north for two hours discussing life in a way that holds as safe loose talk -- with no seriousness in the severity of big changes and choices. Our sister and parents were waiting for us in a small private apartment community on the outskirts of Nashville. Freedom was in its prime and teaching through example in the spirit of travel. A furlough of any kind is supposed to remind you that there is a bigger world going on outside of your own -- occupying the most surprising of avenues. Nothing ever has to be the same as it was. My final hobo days in Nashville centered on the mellow rainy days spent in our own company. The quiet calm was the result of happiness in being together again for no reason at all. My mind occasionally wanders back to Chicago, back to supportive promises. Forks in the road lay in place of answers. Detachment was necessary for a time. Detachment was easier than fearing the decline may have a looming aftershock. The changes are imminent. If an aftershock waits, the renaissance must begin. It is time to compose lists for various buckets. The renewal of spring is suitable of occasions committing to the dreams you allowed to wither in the winter of your soul. A vagabond furlough is a series of waves you can catch couch surfing the country. If done properly, you hardly slept, mailed postcards and did nothing familiar. If you caught the right corner of the right couch, transcended completely from the reality you know, you dared to wonder what-if questions without interrupting and calling yourself foolish. Before the flight home, I can only advise that you remember to pack the enthusiasm and hopefulness you picked up on the road. Coming home without it or misplacing it even for a moment can be quite devastating to the already-existing instability that caused you to pack in the first place. Travel safe in your next furlough. Be sure you embark for all the best irresponsible and reckless reasons, and be sure you claim a souvenir. Bring something back -- anything at all.

The Vagabond Furlough - Chicago

“You will not know anyone there anymore,” I said to myself in the terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. This place is not even familiar. I had no delusions of where I was traveling. I left this place over fifteen years ago and I have only returned once -- that was over fourteen years and six months ago. I have not returned since. There was only one reason to return at all, and I missed my window for the occasion repeatedly. There was never any other reason to return. It was obvious that my initial move was at the cusp of something significant in my life. I left the Chicago-land area when I was a teenager; I graduated high school and did all my real growing in sunny southern California. I never knew Chicago beyond the boundaries confined to a minor and I never celebrated any milestones outside of birthdays, family nights out and middle school events. The early signs of who I was to become were evident in my youthful obsession with becoming the fastest typist when home computers became commonplace; when my heart would only beat and my work ethic awakened in English class. Knocking out my teen years and then spending the entirety of my twenties and early thirties in the city of Burbank, California is the result of my Facebook hometown status. My family and I left the lackluster Midwest suburbs for the media capital of the world and my eyes opened to the artistic possibilities that I once dreamed about in those English classes. I find it enthralling that fate decided to pull me back towards the snowdrifts for holiday after years of clueless failure on the sun-blinded side streets of Southern California -- just when things were starting to get interesting. The snow cascades gracefully in the luminescence generated by a city designed to turn the gray melancholy into sparkling winter romance, and evoke big city dreams beyond the casting calls and palm trees. There is no need to be concerned for my footprints here; the snow is actively at work covering them. My passing presence will dissolve with the crunchy sidewalk salt and winter will deepen in the windy city after I trade back my scarf for Converse low tops. A campaign for growth in a slide of decline forged the tracks in the snow and the anxieties of the unknown coming chapters permeate the ideals of the movement. The stark vacuum of answers worsens the lasting question of what comes next. Watching a world completely opposite of my own from a café window, it is seven degrees with snow and fog, and a slight dancing wind. A tiny town far outside of Chicago named Geneva, the flurries swirl and mesmerize. Sidewalks and branches of the bare oak trees blanket with fresh powder under a vivid white sky and my anxiety joins them under the blanket. The snow quickly covers the tire tracks of those passing through the portrait of small town serenity, leaving a fresh sheet of blank wonder for the next. Occasional wind gusts blow large blasts of snow from the roofs of shops like fireworks in the park, making confetti of powder in the flurries. The small town post-eggnog chatter among neighbors and their children unconsciously rises and falls around the grinding of the espresso machines and I temporarily lose myself in the white noise of various topics of conversation. The café empties and my disquiet sleeps peacefully under the blanket. The incessant question of what comes next is pushing towards the nonsensical; the furlough still contains more travel. The answers wait for me quietly in the baggage claim in Ontario, California. It was never important to find familiarity in my return to Chicago; I was actually hoping not to. Chicago is a world unknown to me -- as though I was never here at all, and my true intentions were that of love. The decline was a dying of my voice, and this was an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only to reclaim my voice, but also to increase its volume and finally deal with matters of the heart with unabated optimism -- ensuring that regret would have no chance of survival. My throat is still a little scratchy, but my voice is returning and I am leaving the historic stomping grounds of Elliot Ness an unavailable man -- my heart is now the property of another. I got what I came for and after fifteen years of a buried personal haunting, time and geography, the mocking duo of my evocative sorrow, are finally dead and buried. There will be no memorial service for the duo, only the exhausted exhale of bittersweet grief and joy that comes from the death of a cruel and tormenting relative you always believed was going to be in your life forever. Every time I see a pair of headlights appear and grow in the distance, I look through the frosted window, through the glistening snow and hold my breath. The piano music plays in the dim lighting and the sun has long set. The crooner captures my ear and holds my attention every time he tells an unknown woman that he loves her and that he always will -- ever since he put her picture in a frame. The flat, empty, pseudo-rural Illinois lands stretch desolately for miles with lifeless trees and a shimmering whiteness. My departure is imminent and the unknown afterwards is affecting. I avoided this column sporadically throughout the furlough. Revisiting the emotions of it has proven difficult. The Vagabond Furlough lived up to expectations in the windy city. I escaped, I thought, I found ulterior consciousness. The furlough took me down the rabbit hole into a wonderland of surreal bliss. It was coming back to my world that I hid from the outside, locked in my room, forgetting how happy I am in the little city of mine -- comprehending how lucky I am. My little world here is a pleasant one; it was just so incredibly easy to dissolve into the world I toured. I cherished my time in Chicago. In fact, it was quite easy to forget that the furlough required more tracks further south. I made those tracks further south by way of east. I had no idea then that while things were getting interesting in California, far more fascinating developments were occurring in the most unsuspecting of places…

The Decline

I am aware all too much of my recent decline. It is not necessarily a bad thing to discover one day that you are in a steady recession. It will often inspire exciting change. I believe it comes from being too comfortable in one setting -- a sort of content humdrum that reflects in your personality or your work, as well as in your projects or your relationships. You are aware of your own potential and there are months and seasons where we keep the bar steady and shine our brightest. Inspiring others to do the same is what exhilarates the concept. Then one day, you notice that certain areas of your life have become sloppy but in repairable and tolerable ways, yet still leaving you with that next day feeling of having slept on someone’s couch. My decline started the instant I thought I had no more tasks of immediate importance. Once I had all my ducks waddling around my happy gazebo, I settled in to a slide of contentment and where I may be giving all my genuine gusto around my work and my loved ones, I am definitely not giving it my all in the areas that are supposed to make up my soul. With the home front nicely manicured, a reckless and irresponsible change of scenery is the only sensible option at this point. I will soon board a plane headed for scattered parts that include Chicago, Alabama and Nashville all in the spirit of living as the ceaseless houseguest for two weeks. With nothing in disorder and the spirit of a small town youth bound for a big city college, I am saying no to contentment, choosing to wonder once again, and live out of a suitcase among loved ones for the ushering of the New Year. Switching off the lights, locking the door and returning to a thin layer of dust over the pause placed on the contemporary. The luxury of stability almost insists on the liberty of temporary vagabond status. To shake the feeling of sleeping on someone’s couch is actually to sleep on someone’s couch. My decline reflects not just in the confession of this column, but also in the column itself. Ordinarily, I enjoy writing personally and publicly to feel what I am unable to feel when I am alone. My passion and sincerity has become my vapid practice. I find that I am clicking away, paying little attention, trying to look busy at Starbucks. It makes no sense whatsoever to be so absent from your passion when you truly have the world on a string. I am pecking away with little or no emotion, simply writing because I know I love it -- because I still have to eat. I could not be bothered to do more than run a brush through my hair and pile windbreaker layers over my plaid pajamas for the nonchalant stroll to Starbucks. Sitting at a sidewalk table with dead eyes in the approach of Christmas, I am seeing the jostling tension growing in the usually lax main street. The hostile exchanges between pedestrians and motorists, and the occasional barfly gloom among the Dean Martin Christmas classics have nothing to do with me. My inability to feel emotionally affected by the sneers of housewives dragging a couple of tiny apes in their tow reveals the dissention of passion. The decline is unfounded and downright socialist. It is the American way to desire more and outwardly live an insatiable desire for life. Time is the one commodity unable to replace and foolish to negotiate, and I am deeply troubled with the decline. And so must begin the vagabond furlough. Perhaps the life of a tramp in satirical fashion is what is necessary to make the keys clack for a good reason. Perhaps with things so tidy and organized in California, there is nothing outrageous to observe and wonder, or any zany obstacles to offer new life realizations. I want what I love to have purpose. I do not wish to mechanically love just anything and allow myself to spin monotonously. My daydreams and my expressions, my creation with passion are all on the decline. It would only sadden me if I did not care. Noticing and concerning are steps to ensure the seasons of change soften into the next. I am all too aware of my senseless decline. It seems that only the dramatic are able to thrive and progress in the hassles of life. For them, their wonder is the child’s captivation in a theater -- blooming only in the most spellbinding of circumstances. Others are taking the plunge as well. Although only some of their thrusts are relatable in travel, many are spontaneously pulling triggers on all forms of impulsive personal advancements. Mine has become a peculiar way to reinvent ones own position, but my circumstances necessitate a blasé wander in order to fixate again on story and expression. The laptop my bindle and the likelihood of an actual can of beans, revamped are the rustic boxcars for the mile-high happy hours soaring towards a blank leave of absence. The spirit is heading towards a boom against the recession that was on the verge of depleting my senses. In the fight against your decline, I hope that you find the senseless and impulsive action that raises the bar back to its proper setting. Pursuit of American excellence; the impulses entice while encouraging the old notion that something crazy might just be crazy enough to work. From here, I can only pack…

It Happened One Night at Pepe's

In the year of America’s bicentennial, President Gerald Ford was receding to newly elected Jimmy Carter, Steve Jobs gave birth to Apple, and the two-dollar bill was circulating for the first time with far out results, and a gunshot that ended in homicide was the catalyst that echoed a yearlong state of terror in New York City. One night, in Southern California, two brothers left their post at their family-owned Mexican restaurant in a Sunbelt of the retired citrus lands. The brothers found their success in the sixties and good fortune returned their nephews safely from Vietnam, but the year of 1976 could not secure their good fortune much longer. One night at Pepe’s Mexican Restaurant, the misfit staff of cooks and register jockeys found out what a keg of beer and a parking lot in summertime truly meant in the nineteen-seventies. It is an unexpected love story of carefree serendipity that became a word-of-mouth sensation for the rest of the year. The cover photo for this column has a date of several years later, but no one would ever need to know that. The palms and the building stand exactly as they did that one night -- a silent landmark commemorating a time in a generation that lived by its own infamy. As far as anyone there was concerned, the whole world was there that one night at Pepe’s. That dorky fat kid, who used to live down the street with his mom and dad, wore his favorite jeans and t-shirt and barely got his used Dodge out of the garage, but he made it all the way with The Bay City Rollers blaring on his speakers. In the parking lot, the kid let the music declare his spirit until his car battery died, and he discovered that everyone had finally seen him for the cool person he really was -- and he talked to just about every girl in his class that one night at Pepe’s. Long-distance friends in their thirties found the kid’s music to be the perfect backdrop to their reunion -- the reason for their summer. They were finally together, and they were both childishly eager to teach the fun-bratty youths of fast food the way you properly tap a keg. The couples’ misdemeanor behavior resulted in their dinning on stoner genius created by the kitchen that would never be on the menu again, and they were finally able to let go of their breath after holding it for far too long. Being ensconced in the high school atmosphere took them back to a time when they knew each other exactly as they did that one night at Pepe’s. A decision to take the band from prom up the coast to Seattle came to five best friends that night. The kind of decision you can only make over a keg of beer after your senior year with a crappy job in a burger shack. The boys took their vans back to their folks’ house and returned with all their instruments, using two parking spaces to remind everyone why they are soon to be gone -- and taking the summer with them. Unless you were using the lone battered payphone to inform others of the happenings, you were not making any calls. It was imperative that those missing or close to leaving work for the day knew of the potential in the night. The night held everyone to an unspoken obligation to keep the good times legendary and the right characters involved without attracting any outside elements that may ruin the most amazing, spontaneous and secret night of the year. The warm pink and peach sunset of an endless California summer gave way to the scraps of gusto held back by anyone -- a night forged without a concept of calendars. The overhead lights of the parking lot made a dim stage of the middle of the avenue and an eclectic ensemble performed for a night without status, league, or practicality. New friends made, troubles shelved, exciting decisions formed, and anyone who forgot about the possibility of realizing dreams found their memories again that one night at Pepe’s. The marvel of a cobwebbed accident that is by no means a calamity happens for no reason, other than to inspire the hopefulness that things can be different and beautiful at the same time. Only the greatest of changes and the biggest steps forward seem to be born on the most memorable of nights. Lives entangled in a social supernova that, without catastrophic incident, glowed with vivid life and burned out naturally of its own accord -- a social oddity as rare, and astonishing as a celestial one. There was not a single cop or firefighter or square figure of authority in sight that one night at Pepe’s. The brothers returned to a multitude of rumors and hearsay -- mostly exaggeration from the stuffy citizens of the neighborhood. The brothers found the cash register packed more than it had been in months and everything was surprisingly more orderly -- and nothing was going to shift interest away from that. Not a single thing, on photo or paper, can account for my stories or hold up in court, but I heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend that the summer of seventy-six was the stuff of summer legend. It was the all-too-real principle of what happens when yearning spirits accidentally come together in a cosmic force of carefree togetherness. I heard it all happened that one night at Pepe’s…

Midnight till One

It is four minutes until midnight; four minutes until the witching hour. A fabled journal entry found in an old stone church on the foggy shores of Northern California reads, “Midnight till one belongs to the dead. Good Lord deliver us.” The stroke of midnight is the ghoulish caress of anguish and trepidation for the dramatic and for all things darkly mystical. There are only the unproven accounts of those who claim to have witnessed the true darkness of midnight. Many have witnessed the hour slit through the outcome of a prison execution with all the lacerating ease of the Reaper’s scythe. Many others have prayed with tight white knuckles in the final heavy breaths before whispering the dread of midnight. The hour courts an unnatural stillness, the incense smoke dances to the orchestra conducted by the gentle wind. The stillness is broken only but suddenly and only for the flash of a moment. The speeding motorist ignoring residential courtesies. The passing motorist with frantic eyes and dirty hands. A motorist with miles behind them, desperate to put many more between they and the unquestionable scene left behind. The stillness resumes. The rain comes in waves. The sound of her breathing is the only sound over the splashing outside. Her exhales of rhythmic tranquility are a drug. The rain rests for the time being and the stillness resumes. It grows quieter, softer. Wet pellets drip in pattern and everything is dimmer, softer still. The approach of midnight. The hush. The first minute is the longest and there is no turning back from a purgatory of time. Her sudden startling and familiar sirens in the distance shatter fragile nerves, and somewhere close by the stroke of midnight has meant despair. The rain returns, gaining its confidence in the tension. The earlier sirens were not enough. Whatever despair occurred, more attention was necessary. Her unconscious disquieting was brief and unknown. The limbo is unflinching and the stillness resumes. Stray clouds lingering after the rain scatter the sky under the glowing stillness. Their movements occasionally muffle the light of the moon over the sleepiest of streets. A large dog barks at the unheard. The barking is fierce and adamant with such urgency that you listen. You listen for cautious footsteps to crush the wet autumn leaves. The unseen takes images in your mind, images of stories told of the darkest animals living among us. Deadbolts fasten and porch lights plummet along the sleepy street. In the silence, in the crisp chill dead of night it is the hour of the dead. Sweaty, horrid men who have made unholy deals sit in dimly lit rooms, stricken by the fear of imbursement. Smoking cigarettes end to end, they know the only price for the deeds committed is the one thing they are unwilling to pay. They will pay. The devastation of others harvests in time. When midnight to one belongs to the dead, all debts fair and proper will be collected fair and final. At the stroke of twelve, the dead and their blight in their hour of liberty find their all-too-late reprieve. Shattered by the hands of man, the darkest of unknowns has enabled the lost to collect in the most swift and unsuspecting of ways. The timid gentleman of yesterday’s high-society drops dead, alone and without witness. Those in the house recall of the hour with gooseflesh the bolt of a desperate shriek, then the thud of finality. His hands froze in twisted claws and his eyes the empty mirror of the terror of his final moments. His closest confidant takes to the grave the insistence that the death of his business partner was of supernatural consequence. The haunting of the past crawled slowly through time to take back what never belonged. The unspeakable details of arsenic and betrayal surrounding the secrets followed along to the grave. There is a train station a few blocks downtown. The rapid dinging of the track signals is a few minutes early. The routinely heard dinging sounds are no more a nuisance than the stampeding passenger train that will inevitably follow, trundling east towards San Bernardino with person or persons unknown. The midnight train is the last ride to sanctuary before venturing the witching hour in an abandoned downtown that favors in early closure. The rapid dinging of the east midnight train is the dinner bell for the citizens of the city beneath the city. The train is gone and its horn echoes from the darkness into obscurity. It is after midnight. The stranded of the station had better pull their coats up close and hold their breath tight. Midnight till one belongs to the dead. The hour has begun and the stillness resumes.