Truth Front

With a sky like creamed fire hewn by low smoky clouds the man appeared at the corner and I marched toward him with my head down, his body an approaching shadow against the brick façade in that electric dusk. My eyes at my hip rather than my head and askew in a diagonal upward awareness dreamlike and dizzied as we merged, I could feel the energy of his menace as he sped toward me and I could see the faded red and white checked pattern of his shirt, for in that sallow crepuscule of summer the air was warm and dry and charged with anonymous violence wrought from the gods solely to entertain themselves with the malleable human experience.

The sounds of our shoes clapping concrete swift and strident like the echo of my heart there in the luminous hum and from his left hand a flash of light born of an oddly fluid motion and the blade whistling past and then dissolving into his pocket as quickly as it had emerged. He walked past and turned the corner and was gone to the cold trickle of blood on my arm and in his wake the scent of vile wretch and other like aromas and with each step toward the waning light waxen and pure I plodded a course of total loneliness with the laughter of the mad and a broadening crimson trail behind me, and I had never felt more alone nor further from home.

And waking breathless from the dream in the dark unknown I felt the wound on my arm closed up to that strange indirect realm and I confused the sweat on my body with the sweet tackiness of blood, for my gaze now forward and properly aligned the shapes of a world now familiar materialized from the shadows.