the singing knives

I did not want to grow up. I didn’t aspire to be a member of the adult world, with its endless responsibilities. I wanted to be free to roam, to construct room by room the architecture of my own world. But the unstoppable mechanism of change was coming. I was most moved by the weed trees and would be saddened to find them felled. Still not quite dead, they oozed a milky substance from their slim branches. They were regarded as a nuisance, but they touched my lying heart. I lingered around the borders of the train tracks, where they still dominated. I had a growth spurt; I felt one with them as they grew quickly. You are my bamboo, I would whisper, the princesses of the train yard.

The fog seemed to glow and was everywhere save where he stood. He played another game of moving swiftly so as to observe the bright hole where he had been, but it moved with him—and the fluttering within was ominous and strange. And he was transported to the October of his youth. The brilliant trees burned through the heavy mist and he climbed them to pluck leaves of gold, cramming fistfuls inside his sweater, imagining the wealth that would be his. But, in his own room, they had lost the properties contained in that eerie light and they were no longer gold. Just dry crinkling leaves. And he lay back on his pillow and stared up at the ceiling fathoming roses and serpents, surrendering upon a bed of leaves into the good graces of sleep.