Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

and she looked at him
for hours, and he didn't go anywhere.
And she could have looked at him
all night, and he would not have
disappeared, as in Orpheus' recurring dream
turned nightmare in the morning,
a constellation whose stars
are a burned correspondence
still flaring before the seer's eyes.
JASON BROWN
Halloween
SHE WAS HAVING the best game of her life that day. The tennis balls
were rocketing, starting low, rising just over the net and dropping
in the far corner. Her coach was hungry, his stomach growling,
his arms and legs like rubber bands, and he was bored. The sky
over the training fields had turned orange and violet. The tanks,
half a mile east, killed their engines for the day. Troops marched
in formation right by the courts on their way to the mess hall. She
followed the ball with complete attention as if her life depended
on the perfection of its path.
I am her brother, two years older. Back then I was much more
interested in the meandering path of a daydream than in the perfection
of a single act like a swing. The beaches a mile from the
base looked out over uninterrupted ocean, and the temperature in
October reminded me of summer in Maine where we had lived
until just a year earlier. A friend named Andy, a short kid whose
father, like mine, was a pilot serving in a war thousands of miles
away, lay spread-eagled in the sand with a long stick wedged in his
arm pit. He was playing dead, waiting for his mom to take us
home. I was picking up sticks and half-shells off the beach and
throwing them back into the ocean, dreaming, as always, of the
places I would arrive, and the person I would become far in the
future, though I had no idea how to get there. Olive-green