Short Stories

[mklsgl]

“Past Tense”

He had always tried to be a gentleman, courteous, respectful in the most thorough way, and believed he was doing his utmost to continue this philosophy when he realized he was having a heart attack, there was no way he could land the plane anywhere else, and he saw the beautifully ordered expanse of backyards open up before him like a shining path, the center line composed of fences and lit by the glint of the sun. His descent was gradual, the curve asymptotic, and after a few moments it seemed even leisurely, since the backyard-runway went on so far and so consistently, these subdivisions following the line of the Wissahickon Creek, which he could see off to the left, close enough to tempt him to change course but just far enough away to heighten the risk of falling short and landing in traffic.

It was the middle of the day. Most people would be at work, most kids at school, and those that were at home would be inside because it was cold and everyone was following the war on television. He was doing the best thing he could do, given the circumstances. Tragic circumstances. Torn laundry. Twisted, broken toys. Burned shreds of books and magazines. He was flying extremely low, and his progress was, or seemed to be, slow and quiet.

The simplicity of the subdivision's design was obvious to him, and the similarity of the houses, but the slight variations that made each passing yard and house unique were being stamped in his memory as the most surprising, significant details he had ever had the ability to contemplate. His point of view, he realized, was entirely, essentially new, and no one had achieved anything like this in all of history.

He had flown low over towns in Europe during the war that were architecturally spectacular compared to this, and had buzzed his brother's farm, but never had he, or anyone else, placed a moving airplane in the space between two rows of houses, and even if they had, it would probably have been over the street, facing the fronts of houses. He faced their backs, the more honest, messy, historically accurate parts, and he felt the taps and clicks of outbuildings and clotheslines as the wings touched them. He felt the fence posts pass through him, and the corners of old cement walls, and recognized the furrowed pattern just under the ground.

It had all been farmland at one time, of course, and before that, the bed of a river. The clay was red down here. He felt himself curl like a wave over the houses on either side, some of him entering kitchens and bathrooms. These gardens would yield big, bright tomatoes. Dogs would become obsessed with it back here. The cable company would have quite a time restoring the coverage of the war.

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"Without Grace"

Falling from favor, or grace, some high artifice, down he dropped like a discredited predicate through what he called space (sometimes he called it time) and with an earsplitting crack splattered the base earth with his vital attributes. Oh, I've had a great fall, he thought as he lay there, numb with terror, trying desperately to pull himself together again. This time (or space) I've really done it! He had fallen before of course: short of expectations, into bad habits, out with his friends, upon evil days, foul of the law, in and out of love, down in the dumps—indeed, as though egged on by some malevolent metaphor generated by his own condition, he had always been falling, had he not?—but this was the most terrible fall of all.

It was like the very fall of pride, of stars, of Babylon, of cradles and curtains and angels and rain, like the dread fall of silence, of sparrows, like the fall of doom. It was, in a word, as he knew now, surrendering to the verb of all flesh, the last fall (his last anyway: as for the chips, he sighed, releasing them, let them fall where they may)—yet why was it, he wanted to know, why was it that everything that had happened to him had seemed to have happened in language? Even this! Almost as though, without words for it, it might not have happened at all! Had he been nothing more, after all was said and done, than a paraphrastic curiosity, an idle trope, within some vast syntactical flaw of existence? Had he fallen, he worried as he closed his eyes for the last time and consigned his name to history (may it take it or leave it), his juices to the soil (was it soil?), merely to have it said he had fallen?

Ah! tears tumbled down his cheeks, damply echoing thereby the greater fall, now so ancient that he himself was beginning to forget it (a farther fall perhaps than all the rest, this forgetting: a fall as it were within a fall), and it came to him in these fading moments that it could even be said that, born to fall, he had perhaps fallen simply to be born (birth being less than it was cracked up to be, to coin a phrase)! Yes, yes, it could be said, what can not be said, but he didn't quite believe it, didn't quite believe either that accidence held the world together. No, if he had faith in one thing, this fallguy (he came back to this now), it was this: in the beginning was the gesture, and that gesture was: he opened his mouth to say it aloud (to prove some point or other?), but too late—his face cracked into a crooked smile and the words died on his lips ...

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