the dance most of all

Eventually the future shows up everywhere: those burly summers and unslept nights in deep lines and dark splotches, thinning skin. Here’s the corner store grown to a condo, the bike reduced to one spinning wheel, the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds. The clear water we drank as thirsty children still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often. The old tunes play and continue to move us in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance, lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets. We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named. We name it the past and drag it behind us, bag like a lung filled with shadow and song, dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” is set on August 4th, 2026 - and there is a recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive :)