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 I later found unpublished drafts he wrote for this blog.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
___________
[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.
Continue reading
the long way home 