Hard Times
by Ulrica Hume
None of this is real, he says, and the path slopes down to a house that is possibly haunted. One always looks in such windows, one cannot not look at the predictable detritus of another's failure, a queer satisfaction, a fairy's dust. But no, not real, none of it. And the trailing wolves, soft in quicksand, are but a preternatural threat because they are also illusion, the great book says. (The great book itself being also not real.) This is my instruction. We turn, or are turned by it, this clockwork world. No keys on the table. No table. Just these blue-eyed wolves, tame pets that someone let out, forgot to call back. The way doesn't matter now because in hard times all ways are hard. Rip of parchment blue, a simple pleasure, this. In amber all dreams stop.
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Author's Note
this originally appeared at Unbroken.
Other stories by Ulrica Hume
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*****
I really connect with the silence, with the stillness here - against the motion - like a Bresson film.
"We turn, or are turned by it, this clockwork world. No keys on the table. No table."
Excellent work. *
Some of the word orders in this are quite beautiful.
"One always looks in such windows" *
"In amber all dreams stop."
Really nice.
thanks for your thoughts everyone.
Love this. Wonderful close and That Final Sentence!. Never thought of amber in those exact words. Brand new to me.
Enjoyed.
This intimidated me when I first read it several weeks ago, feeling too fragile to risk a comment that might betray my lack of sophistication to appreciate abstractions without at least a gossamer thread of narrative to reassure me. But now, reading it again I re-connected with some of the visual effects that struck me at first, the sloping path, the wolves, the "predictable detritus of another's failure," and, most startling, the amber that stops all dreams. The saving grace, those first five words: "None of this is real."
Maybe I wanted real back then, despite the presumed "real" of life of late driving me deeper into the illusion of safety from tRumpian melodrama to a kindred sense of rational stability freeing me to smile and nod and think, "yeah" without fooling myself. In this instance the amber promised clarity.
Mathew Paust, thanks for revisiting "Hard Times." sometimes reassurance comes from a form of surrendering.
*