Shard 1

The oak, the sapling oak. Imparting cold to my stiff hands. The rocky brown earth mixed with gravel. We can hear the road's commotion, the white light enflaming the tops of the trees; a morning hollow. One large rock, dirt-caked, blackened moisture, our nostrils filled with two ounces of splendid dirt. What quotidian phrase are we all searching for? All of my yesterdays’ mournings, my common wickedness. Sin so often calcifies banal, they are hardly worth stooping to lift.

Two of them, the first my fellow branch, the second my first seed, half the age of the first. Rezekiel and Josuh. My sapling hands me the sapling. I receive its tender shoot. The bark is softly pocked, imitation barnacle mouths pressing tiny against my finger skin. In both, I stop to look; only a few leaves, tiny outlines of magic nymphean gloves, made for a forest species of inelucible sprite-like substance.

Warmth condensating gently against my cheek signals the arrival of the sun. It’s easier to drink deep of the waters when the light dances broken crystal across its ceaselessly flowing plane. We are next to the river, and my wife across it steps down from the edge of the road in the distance, one infant in hand, one child in tow. Her face is a pen cap at this range, and yet still somehow it glows. All I can hear is the water. Down it plunges, this newborn sap into dark, rank earth. We cover it over, I mound with my hands.

But on the way back home my wife, Issie, loses a letter. We were walking together when she produced it, a correspondence from the surveyor of urgent nature, its reveal preceding unknowingly a derelict gust of impetuline wind. The parchment dangled midair, then pirouetting, arabesque, flitting across the newly desolate wheat fields, recently harvested. Their spines stick dryly in bristled rows ten acres clear to the next trees. There’s squeals and screams. I take off running, dashing, zagging in hot pursuit. The severed sheaves underfoot oppose me most bitterly in rapid attempts to cause me tripped. The wind has continued tempest, it’s lifting the chaff in the air. I’m pursuing my letter, caught in its sail, and lifting me with it, twisting us both, among updrafts of whipping chaff.

I need to decide my Way.