“Hey Phil, I heard you’re thinking about putting in a pond back here. Maybe turning those caves over there into a waterfall,” Derek says. He lights a cigarette and points with its glowing tip.

We’re sitting in my backyard with Bev and Marley Ann, sipping cocktails and listening to crickets and cicadas outperform Jerry Garcia, enjoying one of those impromptu happy hours that makes summer summer.

“Where’d you hear that?” I ask, glancing at Bev who evades me by following Derek’s gesture toward the rock wall known to us as The Caves.

I say known to us meaning known also to the flourishing tribe of Tamias inhabiting the wall. Of course, the chipmunks have their own phonemes for home sweet home that sound something like a long trill and a cluck, not to be confused with the rapid trill and cluck they line up to chant each morning, dutifully facing east, from the crack of dawn until the sun has risen and I’m wide awake…

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Short shorts of preternatural origins by Bill Gourgey. Click to read… Into the Glade The Chest Diary of a Synesthesiac If you like what you read or simply want to comment, please contact us at contact-us@jackedarts.com

As Corey set out, running uphill on his usual route into the park, umber light, the first of dawn, seeped from dark hills beyond the hollows. Crimson-soaked cirri raftered an otherwise silky ceiling eager to slough off lingering shades of night. Short-lived as it was, Corey loved the break of day, when the sky showed off to a soft symphony of noct- and diurnal chirpings that blended in counterpoint, prevailing briefly over the valley’s inexorable locomotive drone. By mid-morning, Shohangham Township’s usual industrial commotion, with its cacophony and haze, would rush in like ocean fog, palling for the rest of the day its undulating hills and the vibrancy of everything within including this view and those small voices now chiming from bush and tree. Only at this fleeting frontier between night and day, before ignitions began to grind, did the day’s promise seem pure and unblemished–Terra Incognita, flush with fresh possibilities. And more than anything else lately, Corey needed to belong to this moment of the day…

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“Uh-oh, Rex!” Rose said. I sat up so fast, my heart skipped a beat. After forty weeks pregnant (it’s weeks not months when you’re in delivery mode), Rose’s due date had just about come and gone. Disappointed, but still brimming with anticipation, Rose and I had just settled into bed, conceding that she would deliver late. We turned out the light and resigned ourselves to the possibility of inducement in the coming days when, at a quarter to midnight, just under the wire, we heard a pop in the dark–the slightest sound to me, an explosion to Rose.

“My water broke,” she announced without a trace of doubt or concern…

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