Paul Hughes - Broken - A Plague Journal

He opens his eyes and finds himself at his kitchen table, the cat stalking a fly around the linoleum. The coffeemaker sputters its completion. He stands on grating knee. Stacks of newspapers. Boxes of memory. Photographs hidden away upstairs. An empty inbox. And he can’t remember what made him. Can’t remember the faces of the lost, the tastes of the dead. Can’t remember their songs or the textures of them, the warmth of skin or the secrets between them. Forever poised in the moment before a first kiss, the phantom scents of cheap beer and cigarettes and something rich and hidden, something fading from him no matter how he claws to hold it, something rending and beautiful hiding behind blue eyes.

He reaches into his chest and feels nothing at all. He’s hidden the artifacts, or someone’s stolen them. There are pictures on his walls of people he doesn’t know.

He has coffee. Another cigarette.

January cuts a deeper distance.

He stands at the window and watches the snow fill in the morning’s tracks. He loses something in that.

Love is the farthest unsteady light.

He knows they’ll all go eventually, leaving behind an unfinished equation, an unwritten song, a fragile calculus in which nothing is integral. Forevers are redefined in departures. He doesn’t have to do anything at all to deserve nothing. He can travel around the world to end up where he began. He can search a lifetime to find the one who will ruin him. He can fall to the floor, stumbling through bent physics, hands searching for the ineffable past, sobbing for the war dead, the faces he can’t remember, the whispers, the gasps: Paul Hughes, come here? Paul Hughes, I love you.

Because suddenly he’s looking back and a week is gone, a month or a year, five, a decade, a lifetime, and it feels like a lifetime, a decade, five, a year or a month, a week, a day, hours, minutes, she’s there, seconds, she’s there and they’re together, instants, she’s there, moments, there, now, she’s there, now, there forever, there, walking together down thin paths into broken futures and todays, and they contain multitudes, lifetimes of stillness hovering in the air between them.

And they’re running down those ancient streets, hands held, eyes open, laughing and whispering and knowing.

Staring, but not seeing.

Thinking of the thought [itself].

Breathing, but not living.

In the struggling light, the snow looks silver.

He inhales.

I don’t know who I am anymore.

He exhales.

Bracketing those dead to us, delineating the forms and histories of our desires, in a breath, in tears, in the pattern two opposing collections of striation compose in the catalytic reaction of palm to palm, all physics are bent, and all probabilities, all convenient presuppositions and extrapolations of futures not yet lived are erased: all we have is now, this moment, this beautiful, fragile moment, and

Paul Evan Hughes is the seven-time Independent Publisher Book Award-winning writer and editor of Silverthought Press. His work includes the novels Enemy , An End , and Broken: A Plague Journal and the short fiction collection Certain Devastations . He lives in Evans Mills, NY with his wife and sons.