At the age of five years the world opened up to show me death, a gaping maw that swallowed up all motherly affection and hope. Within two years the clouds of doubt had so obscured my way as to make meaningful navigation a folly of comical proportions.

The great city welcomed us then, great folds of concrete and glass reality flickering open, showing slits of lights before blinking them out again. Down tortured streets we traveled, my father and I, no destination but away, no goal but a sort of not entirely being.

The city obliged, as it always does and always has, for scores upon scores of immigrants, dreamers, criminals, and rats. When those curtains of urban majesty closed behind us all other reality ceased to exist.

Fields that rolled forever with grass that swayed in the wind flattened into dull, gray memory.

Endless skies of happy blue turned ashen and dark.

My mother, and the sting of losing her, slipped back into a busy oblivion, a departure we both welcomed silently, the stoicism of men.