Annin Brothers

"What are you gazing at...? What's there outside the window...?" "Outside the window...? Nothing." "Nothing? Looking at nothing?" "It's her... my... my ghostly girl." Beloved women... They, like a sudden downpour, come, turn you into themselves, and vanish… leaving you… leaving you alone with your own shadow called sorrow.

It's hard to imagine strange things like those you could hear on the road from chance fellow travelers. The muffled clatter of iron footsteps bringing a soothing rhythm to the capricious flow of life. Fragrant steam rising above an almost cozy little table infecting the soul with a sense of weightlessness. And memories out loud free from the etiquette of dependence.

"Skin touched skin." "Speak!" "Hands touched a pink patch of skin." "Speak! Please speak!" "Hands touched a pink patch of skin—a swarm of interjections poured out as a pink rash and loud holes, meaningless holes in space." "That was in the beginning, right? In the beginning?"

There was a warp before his eyes, before his right eye, an uncommon warp—something like two faces, like two halves of different faces. One for real, living, responsive to the world. And the other . . . about which, echoing your senses, you would say: Whatever for? It shouldn’t be there. It shouldn’t be born in the first place, because whatever’s born is there to embrace life, not repel it, not clam up, not frighten it, not for it to repel the born, not one about which you would say: He’s…

“I was fourteen at the time. I and my friend Leo Carper went to the Grizzly Rocks,” the storyteller hesitated as he stumbled on a thought, then continued: “I should have put it a different way, so I correct the error. Leo should have come first: of the two of us, he was the major figure, as it were. Daredevil is about him. Ringleader and photographer par excellence,” the storyteller paused and could not go on for a few minutes as he rode out his overwhelming feelings. “I thought back to his…

Evelyn was sitting on the bed, knees to her bosom and hugged by her hands. Her nightshirt drenched with sweat, she was cold. She hunched up but would not bundle herself up with her blanket: she needed the cold feeling that swept her skin, like the air itself. It was there to tell her that she'd come to, she was there, that the horror of her dream hadn't torn her soul to pieces. Evelyn remembered the dream very well, but the horror was gone: it had escaped with her frenzied scream. She thought…