221Bibliophile

  He stood on the edge of the world, looking down.  Rain collected in pockets on the uneven road beneath, swimming pools for miniature children. His fingers tightened around the hand that held his and he blinked away the droplets that clung to his eyelashes. Mist rose up from the street in an opaque cloud. He tried to cement himself into the curb as the sign lit up on the opposite end of the street. Cross.                  The hand pulled.                He stumbled forwards into the basin of rain water collecting at the side of the road. For a split second it rippled, and after his foot broke through the surface, shot angrily into the air

    There is a man who sweeps our street, with a broom as old as the lines on his face. He sweeps dust in the summer and ice in the winter. You can tell the season by merely looking at his boots. Crushed, colorful leaves in autumn. Ice crystals, miniature rainbows, in winter.      To my Mother, he is the man who always misses the corner of our porch, the lazy shadow that comes in the night, and is not there to yell at in the morning. She sees his footprints in the mud besides the road and spits in them. One time she took the trash from our house and spread it all over the road, cursing. It was gone in the morning, except for a tin can in the

     Sybil was a young woman of fifty-nine.  She had youthful gray hair, a bit stringy with grease. She was a swan in a pool full of ducks and walked with her pale, beautiful (if somewhat bizarre looking) head held high above the mundane. They walked with their feet upon the ground, while she, Sybil, supreme being, floated on her cloud above them.      She floated too high. This is the story of how Sybil got hit in the head with a baseball.      She was neither aware of the baseball nor aware of her proximity with it. In fact if you had asked her for an opinion of baseball, she wouldn’t have been sure which sport you were talking ab