Semi-Urban Cartography

Roads Leading Somewhere

A blanket of snow came in a rush on Tuesday night. No one predicted it until moments before when weather models acquiesce and precious barometric electricity takes over. The warm, wet front that the authorities correctly called for pushed in on the city from the ocean. What it didn’t do was push the cold front out of its way. Instead it laid in over top and the precipitation came down as heavy snow. Just as quick as it came though, the cold front eventually moved on eastward and eventually the rains poured.

This morning there was still a thick layer of snow on my neighbor’s front lawn. The rest of the white stuff in the neighborhood had already melted away to nothing, a few snowballs the kids had formed on the city strip for snowmen but nothing else. The sight of my neighbor’s white lawn stopped me momentarily in the doorway. It was strange testament to how a little shade from sunlight keeps the cold conditions socked in. His lawn existed in another climate. It felt a different place from where the rest of us were present and experiencing.

Hours later, the snow is gone now. Images of it stay with me though.

This morning I completed the third draft of another short story, “A Season For Living.” While it wasn’t my original intent, what took form on the page was erotic, sexual, filled with intimately seductive images. I’ve more than written fifty short stories in the last couple of years and none of them heated up like this one did. The sexuality was natural sexuality. Never forced. Written and re-written over the past few mornings, I feel like what “A Season For Living” presents are aside from pornographic. There are unique sexual/marital situations which are real to life. Its characters have faulted appetites which are both fragile and insatiable. Leslie is sympathetic. Troy is complicated: at once urgent, needful and others like a father figure. The arrangement they seek is bound to hurt in the offing.

Maybe what’s unique about “A Season For Living” is what makes me so fond of it.

One day in January, perhaps just as cold as this morning, I’ll bring a bundle of story submissions to the mailbox. They’ll be accompanied by a letter, traveling to magazines I’ve never heard of. In my catalog, the story will comprise its own micro climate. The lawn that won’t thaw. The holdout of electricity.