(12/265): The Unfinished We were characters in a story the writer couldn't bring himself to finish. When he left us it was late, a child was crying, newsprint smudged on our fingertips as if to make of us a mechanism by which the world would repeat itself, its story: this happened--did you hear?--then that. so many disparate words, shrouded there, hanging, so cold. And the tenderness--how the words barely touched it, as if to speak it were a further hurt. It was night when he left us, and the child who could not yet remember her dreams woke saying, "where are the toys of the moon, are we the moon's toys? Outside, lines of stiff trees stood like hieroglyphs, the configuration of the one for dagger so close to the one that stands for shrub, so hard to understand the difference; or the one for fear that also could mean reverence, the one for medicine so similar to entreaty and to prayer. And in the distance the red tremor of the radio tower, and the planes that passed above us as we held to the earth and didn't understand the earth.
Laurie Sheck, "The Unfinished"