Paul Harding - Enon

At night, I am tired from work. I sit in my white room in the chair and look at a library book under the lamp. Sometimes I fall asleep in the chair. Sometimes I dream about Kate. I wish the dreams could be us sitting together in the garden, talking peacefully, with me kissing her forehead at the end and promising to see her again soon. But my dreams are the usual bizarre, fractious affairs and Kate always shows up just as I am about to slide off a steep roof, or when I am wrestling a wild dog in the desert, or when I’ve forgotten that I had a daughter and am enjoying the inexplicable admiration of a beautiful woman at a party in a majestic house. The timing is always terrible and I am always caught off guard by her sudden appearance. I try to tell her not to move because the tiles on the roof are loose and she will plunge to the cobbled street below if she does not stay still, or I yell to her to run before the dog notices and turns its fangs from me to her, or that I am sorry for flirting, and that I miss her so much, every single day, everywhere, all the time, and that I love her so much, and this is all a dream, and she knows how dreams are, and that I didn’t mean to let her out of my thoughts for even a moment. As upsetting as these meetings are, there is consolation in them, too — real joy at seeing my daughter — whether they anticipate an eventual reunion or are just figments that comfort me once in a while until I, too, simply cease and there isn’t a soul left in Enon or anywhere else on this awful miracle of a planet to remember either of us.

PAUL HARDING is the author of the novel Tinkers , which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. He was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College.

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