THE HIDDEN TRACK

The following passages are dedicated to Leopold, to the vernacular, to certain evil women (you know who you are), to certain wonderful people(they know who they are), to soft afternoons and quiet Sunday evenings, to Fall and seeing your breath for the first time since Spring, and to Isabelle Ya Feng ... a soul slipped by like two ships passing in the still, moonlit sea.
-- Abraham Ahmed, the Surfing Beatnik



When Telemachus is Not Enough...


A small boy dances down the dim lit sidewalk at dusk. Below his feet, the sidewalk turns into great stepping stones across a great divide: Odysseus to Ithaca, a single step at a time, so long as all cracks and expansion joints are missed. He stares down not more than a few paces to his front and hums a soldier’s tune from World War I.

With a mighty sword of elm branch in hand he defies the attacks from cannibals and malicious nymphs in the form neighbor’s hedgerows and overhanging rose bushes. He stamps out a great serpent nears a spigot and pauses under a giant maple, the Foble’s home within eyeshot. The boy leans against a telegraph post and watches for his seven o’clock moment: Mrs. Foble.

The darkened, second story window bursts with hazy light as the trembling curtains announce the young woman’s entrance. She glides to and fro, from chest-of-drawers to bathroom, from bathroom to mirror. At last, she gently shifts the curtains to the right and lifts the white, wooden window frame up. She sits sideways upon the sill and places a cigarette to her lips and lights the cigarette. The boy, now entrapped by the snare that is Mrs. Foble’s luminance, shifts his body behind the trunk of the great maple. Mrs. Foble leans her head against the window’s frame and stares into the dimming night. She lets the cigarette rest for what seems like hours in between each puff,  and she closes her eyes and, perhaps, imagines her moments in Troy.

“Penelope,” the boy whispers into the falling leaves of the maple tree form of Laertes and Athena and Ithaca, restored.  

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