Part One•Section III•1

     Aimée was awakened by the sound of the two budgies calling from their cage to the sparrows nesting in the ivy outside her bedroom window.  In the early morning light, her eyes traced the silhouette of their cage: a simple arched French wirework Cours Soleya find dating from the turn of the last [...]

Read Full Post »

One•II•3&4

     Stretched out on the floor, his head gently rocked by the rhythmic swell and dip of the dog’s breathing, he was dreaming about the large grey clapboard house on the shores of Lake Ontario where his first girlfriend, Alison, had lived. (They still exchanged Christmas cards or marked significant events—the birth of a [...]

Read Full Post »

One•II•2

     Rennie never went anywhere without a little black moleskin notebook in which he recorded his dreams.  Sometimes his notes were spare, mysterious, an obscure shopping list of words or images: 
silver rain—carburetor—olive tree—golf?.
Sometimes, they were a kind of idiosyncratic haiku:
moonless night,
silent on cold wet flagstone,
Pterostichus melanarius.
(Torn from a copy of the National Geographic [...]

Read Full Post »

Part One•Section II•Paragraph 1

        Rennie.  Rennie was a promise whispered, earnestly, in the first faint half-light of infatuation.  He had a certain beauty, although, more often than not, of late, the perception of it escaped Arden: when not lying prone on the floor of the study, he had the lithe athleticism of an otter.  And like [...]

Read Full Post »

One•II•8&9

         Stopping on the landing to gird herself, emotionally, for the inevitable—and, it seemed lately, nightly—fray, Arden glanced into the study.  There, on the floor, lay Rennie, his head pillowed by the swollen belly of Talisker, their golden retriever. The television was on.  A half-finished glass of wine stood, precariously, on the carpet [...]

Read Full Post »