NOTE: This post is by Austin Ricketts, a dear friend and contributor to this site who passed away in August 2024. I later found unpublished drafts he wrote for this blog. With his wife‘s permission, I will occasionally post these items with the caveat that Austin’s mind and craft were always evolving, so these posthumous posts represent a snapshot in time and not necessarily the final form Austin would have wanted. But still, they allow us a chance to spend just a little more time with the man we loved and miss each day.
This piece is from March 10, 2009
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[A Gilead-inspired short prose piece]

Today you awoke, and it was finally Autumn. Actually, it’s not that today is the first day of the Fall, but it’s the first day that you realized it. There you were at the Railway Station, surveying the huddled masses, nervously tapping each of your pockets. You were assuring yourself that all was in its right place. Then, the whistle. The train is coming.

The breeze picks up as the train nears, fronted by a Zephyr-like standard bearer. The gust begins to tug at your skirt, but your legs aren’t cold. The wooden platform rumbles, feeling like the deck of a ship at high seas as it moves with the coming cavalcade.

The Engineer is visible. There is the steam. The Engineer is invisible. The whistle, the whistle, three times the whistle blows. Smack!

Your book fell. You recover it from the linoleum floor. And what is that screaming noise? You look up. It is the birth pangs of tea, steaming and salient on your stove. You throw the blanket off of your legs, and onto the arm rest of your chair.

Provoked by instinct, you run to the stove and turn the knob, dryly dousing the flames, and the steepled screech stoops to susurrus. With your heart settling to a rhythm less like Sousa and more like a serenade, you look at your now vacant chair.

You wonder at the events which all too recently unfurled. You are certainly not at a Russian Railway Station. It was the book that suggested such to you. And it was the book that tore you from the dreams it created. It is the book still clutched, white-knuckled, in your hands. The tea is steeping, nearly ready to drink, and the book is still in your hands.

You remove the now saturated leaves from your mug, and prepare to baptize your tongue. That book and your palm are still immodestly mingling. You raise your mug and take the holy water to your tongue in the old Lutheran style, full immersion. During this sacred drowning, you look through the rising steam, passed your window and out upon the gray-sepia sky. The Sun is not so high this time of year. It is Autumn, and you are truly awake. So, with all the tenacity of a Catholic Nun at a High School dance, you put some distance between your hand and that book.

You continue to hold that mug, that holy water, but with two hands now. And you think.

“The Autumn is like Baptism. Everything is damned. Cursed are the flaming red leaves. They are doomed to dust and ash. These particles can speak nothing more than a sneeze into existence. They are only lisping now. But soon these will say Amaranth, Baby’s Breath, and Chrysanthemum’s colored white. The dust was once called upon to give life, soon it will give new life. It will bud forth a Resurrection. Autumn is like a Baptism, and it is all so beautifully damned.”