Dusk. A word I know but don’t use much, tending instead toward twilight or gloaming, “tending to darkness, moderately dark.” Or, “the darker part of twilight, or of dawn.” Just a little darker than twilight. I look up gloaming but the dictionary refers me back to twilight, to dusk. Arranging a gradient of lightest to darkest, I’d go twilight to dusk to gloaming. I’m less confident in sorting dusk from gloaming but they’re both beautiful. I want to stand under the canopy of them all, I want them all to last.
~
What hubris! What ephemerality! What 15 minutes! Activate Random Genetic Sequence C0V1DI9. And it comes to life, out of the soil, atavistic, dormant no longer in our markets, our factories, our sewers. It was waiting for the right tox of carbon diox, a Gaian cue.
~
In 1986 my dad’s favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, lost the World Series in heartbreaking fashion to the New York Mets. The Red Sox had twice led the Mets late in Game Six, repeatedly coming within one strike of winning the game and thereby the Series. But bad relief pitching and an infamous miscue by the Boston first baseman allowed New York to prevail in extra innings.
I was seven years old so I don’t remember the game well, but I do remember my dad moving from one room of the house to another, depending on how the game was going, believing superstitiously that how and where he watched the game could affect the outcome.
The next spring my mom bought me some clothes from an erstwhile store called Venture. Or it could have been Glik’s. What I remember is that among those clothes was an orange t-shirt that I really liked. The Mets wore uniforms with orange trim and their logo is orange on blue. The t-shirt disappeared. I asked my mom what happened to it. Apparently my dad had banned the t-shirt on the basis of orange being a “gang color” but I suspect that the shirt reminded him of the Mets.
~
You can’t make your bed while you’re on it. That’s what my mom would say to me as I tried to straighten the covers atop my bunk bed, the higher of two bunks in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother. At the end of the bunk was a window that looked out over our driveway, toward the house next door where Domino the German Shepherd lived, along with the couple who owned the house. I could lie prone on the end of my bunk and look out the window, high above our driveway.
Even though my bedroom was on the first floor it felt like a second-floor view because our driveway sloped down as it ran from the street to the back of our house. On our side of the driveway was a lovely terraced rock garden that my mom looked after. On the other side of the driveway was a steeply slanted hedge of unruly ivy and honeysuckle that my dad sometimes clipped. The valley-like feel of the driveway put our yard at a remove from our neighbors’ yard even though they weren’t but twenty feet apart.
We never had a dog when I was younger; my mom didn’t want any pets around. So I was fond of all of the dogs in the neighborhood and Domino and I got along fine. He would only ever bark at strangers.
One night Domino started barking and didn’t stop. It was June 1987 and I was eight years old, looking out of the bedroom window with a funny feeling in my stomach.
When the barking did not let up I went and told my dad. I said, Dad, something’s happening over there, something’s not right, Domino only ever barks at strangers. What could my dad do? He went outside, maybe with a flashlight, walked out into our yard, looked out across the driveway at the neighbors’ house. But it was dark and he didn’t see anything; he didn’t hear anything aside from the barking. Eventually I went to sleep.
I spent the next day messing around in the neighborhood, probably playing Nintendo at one of my friend’s houses. When I came home for the day, I looked down at the newspaper on the dining room table. USA Today, my dad’s favorite. On the cover was a photo of President Reagan in Berlin imploring Gorbachev to Tear Down this Wall! My mom was prepping dinner and she stopped to tell me she needed to talk to me. The prior night, she said, our neighbors’ house had been burglarized. Domino had not been harmed but for a long time after that I was afraid of the dark.
~
Today, I sit at my desk, with notebooks, with pens, that’s my work. Transfers, rewrites, the piecing of things together—snippets and lost lines. It’s a puzzle really. A piece of writing—whether poem, essay, or story—is an attempt to exit. It’s an answer, or at least a guess. Writing, like other art, is an offered solution, a proof. It’s an attempt to be correct, just as a scientist proposing a theory runs an experiment to test the idea.
But there’s no way to know for sure so I sit and chew my nails, switch pens, type, schedule, scrap, reclaim, erase. I look up words. Whether dashes are needed. What the plural of emoji is. This is how I found out that the word harbinger has more than one meaning, or used to. I spend time with language. If I’m doing it right, that’s what I’m doing. Until I have nothing left to say.
~
I was looking for something I could drive—a distant smudge, a curious comet. I’m originally from the Illinois side of the St. Louis metro area. Unsure how to go about writing short stories after graduating from college with a degree in English, I went instead to law school in Texas. When I told a classmate there that I used to live in St. Louis, she said, Oh yeah, you guys have that arc thing.
~
Who does the dry lawn’s laundry? Elapse please, I’m asleep. Who popped the Majesty’s magic sty? A shield delish. Mad hatters levied veiled threats—dam. Like pistol pilots, fluency flew into the sea and celery’s ancillary but it was terrible to tear a bull, a disappointment to diss an appointment. That’s why the Savior saved your ass.
~
Up until the fifth grade—when my parents moved us away from upticking crime and into a beautiful new country house halfway to the next town—we lived not far from where we went to school. I would walk home with my older sister sometimes. One day I was telling her I’d like to play drums in the school band. Why would you do that, she said, laughing. Before dismissing the idea, she told me, You have no rhythm.
Later that evening, with my mom in earshot, I fired back, calling my sister a whore. I didn’t have a precise sense of what the word meant but that didn’t matter to my mom, who promptly had a lather of soap going in my mouth. It was around that time, also, that one of the toilets in the house backed up, the one in the bathroom my dad used. I remember a long gray corrugated hose being brought into the house, to empty the system out. Coupled with that image is one of my dad darting out from that bathroom naked, before a shower, slapping his ass and singing his favorite jingle from the time. He’d uncontrollably laugh as he sang, “The Meat Man knows it’s May-rose.”
~
I read through the pages and asked, Who would write such things? And from a mirror the question echoed. Not me, I answered, and answered again from the mirror, Not me. But there I was with a pen in my hand and in the mirror with a pen in my other hand, also.
~
Written language is our Secretariat, our secret carrier, our official means of expression. Written language is not the only way to communicate but it is a communication we can point to after the fact. It’s not lost to the wind or other weather; to echo or downed cables or computer glitches. O, cradle your next best thought like a pearl, hold it like a tiny tiny egg. And if you want me to read it, to see it, to say it—please, write it down.
~
Dancing, danger in the house of your name. Only strangers came, surviving.
~
These days there is always a new telecommunications satellite being added to the sky. Just look up, once it’s dark. And watch for a pinprick of light scuttling across the atmosphere, looking like a star on the run; plotting a straight line between here and here again.
~
When I think of my father in a diaper, with a cane, struggling to lift himself off of the couch; when he cannot chew anchovy-topped pizza because his mouth is falling apart, some visceral, tornadic, lightning strike of shock uncurls in my sternum, tries to run up to my brain but gets rejected by my brain stem, reverses course, shoots back down along the spine, and free-radicals itself out into the world by exiting from my nether.
~
Budget my roots, then, back them up. Next rest area 127 miles.
~
Hello, son.
I just look up at him. He’s having a good day, noshing a plum.
What are you doing?
I’m working.
Nosh, nosh. He came in here to say something, probably to tell me about the client calls he just made. They are clients I used to know, that used to be mine also, as recently as five years ago when my dad and I were still working together in the investments business. I overheard the calls on the loudspeaker, no mistake. He was working from home down in the basement. In that way, the enhanced acceptability of working from home during the pandemic has given him more runway, kicking further down the road the can of his retirement.
I was up in the dining room of my parents’ beautiful house, the one we moved to when I was in fifth grade, some thirty years ago. I live in St. Louis now but I return to the Illinois side more often lately, to spend time with my parents. A risk, a gift. He wants to talk but I’ve got the laptop on, earbuds in, word processing document alive on the screen.
It never did rain, did it?
I look outside. Barely, I say.
One more bite and he leaves.
~
In the end, there is only a book, perhaps a pad of paper. Lucky you a pen. Someone, some lot of people taught you how to use these tools. When you were little, your parents read to you in bed. That once was the acme of entertainment. Then came cable TV and video games and the Internet and social media and you’ve imbibed it all but it overwhelms you, it’s too much, and you need some time away from it all. Here your pen and paper are a luxury, your winnings, a field of future treasure.
Write hard then look up.
The fan above spins so fast you can’t make out the blades but you can feel their pull. Did you make this bed or are you only lying on it? Will you be with us just for the one night or might you stay a little longer?
—St. Louis/Belleville, 2021.
The Writing of John B. Randall 