The Writing Inertia

  After twenty years of marriage, we walked out of the bush and on to a rough dirt road we followed till we saw a pond we might be able to get to. The ground was boggy and buzzing. The pond was thick with weed and slime. It was not the sort of pond anyone would swim in, but we did — picking and sliding into the water over the bog and bees, bees we suddenly noticed were everywhere, were settling on our hair as we swam, ducks turning surprised eyes our way. After twenty years of marriage what is surprising isn’t really so much the person you are with but to find yourselves so out of place in this scene, cold but not able to get out without stepping over bees, so many bees.

  Two feet of snow at my parents’ place, in another season. Here, the cicadas sing like Christian women’s choirs in a disused cotton mill. Belief is a kind of weather. I haven’t seen proper snow for three years. The new urban forest for native plants and birds will be splendid if the local cats don’t kill the birds. The problem is, all my sympathies are with the cats. The friendly disturbers are more endearing than what they disturb. A trimaran called 3rd Degree spinning around its cable in the channel: that’s how love is here and should be everywhere. It seems so unserious or contentedly ironic; it’s the kind of thing you either look through or ignore. But you’d be wrong. The question isn’t: Why is love so strange here? It’s: Why did it feel normal somewhere else? In quiet places, the present is just gossip about the past. The future is a critique of that. All my best. - Erik Kennedy

It was the hunter's first time outside Montana. He woke, stricken still with the hours-old vision of ascending through rose-lit cumulus, of houses and barns like specks deep in the snowed-in valleys, all the scrolling country below looking December—brown and black hills streaked with snow, flashes of iced-over lakes, the long braids of a river gleaming at the bottom of a canyon. Above the wing the sky had deepened to a blue so pure he knew it would bring tears to his eyes if he looked long enough. Now it was dark. The airplane descended over Chicago, its galaxy of electric lights, the vast neighborhoods coming clearer as the plane glided toward the airport—streetlights, headlights, stacks of buildings, ice rinks, a truck turning at a stoplight, scraps of snow atop a warehouse and winking antennae on faraway hills, finally the long converging parallels of blue runway lights, and they were down. He walked into the airport, past the banks of monitors. Already he fe...