Vignettes

Written years ago during a period of unsatisfying employment.

These are about experiencing our world - while walking, while bathing my kids, while riding the bus, while sitting up alone at night. Since childhood, I have yearned to share with you. If I don’t talk to you right now, right here, the business of life will come rushing back in and the portal will close.

**

A teenager, walking home at one AM through the humid summer night of Long Island - cicadas, fireflies, foliage lush like a jungle. Light and sound absorbed, the orb of my footfall is close and solitary.

One long dark road is in tumult of construction, now silenced for the night. I thread through a cluster of sawhorse barriers, each topped with a blinking orange light. The lights flash and flash, silently, independently, oddly out of synch.

**

My room in Brooklyn is the top floor of a brownstone. Large and rough, its chance window overlooks rooftop upon rooftop, sloping down to the harbor and lower Manhattan in the far distance.

Night, and I am alone. The air inside is cold and extremely still. I’ve lit a stick of incense whose wood holder sits on a chair tucked under a sloped ceiling.

Later, I am reading. Over my book my eyes find the plume of smoke. It rises almost two feet in an unbroken, snake-like column, lit by a desk lamp, darkness beyond it.

Some combination of forces disturbs the smoke and a dramatic filigree emerges, fluttering like a series of folds on a dress. The display holds for a long breath. Then the stretched column returns, reaching sinuously into the cold room air.

**

I am commuting home across the Kansas prairie, from Kansas City to Lawrence an hour away. It is dark and my old car is warm and the dials glow green.

The sky. As I leave the lights of the town behind me, the cloudy sky is black at first. But as my pupils open, the blackness comes to life. The clouds resolve into a nighttime quilt that blends strips of contrasting grays: deep gray, black gray, milky gray.

Beneath it all are the tree-clad hills. A million bare branches reach into the grays and grandly display true black, deeper and richer than daylight.

With trees and hills as contrast, the gray-black sky actually glows. Not the city’s dynamo glow from below, but the gentle light of the moon and stars from behind; the elements of the night speaking the language of light its faintest registers.

**

I am living in a one-bedroom apartment in Lawrence, Kansas. It is my first apartment that is all my own, the top floor of an old stone-built house, accessed by a metal fire stair.

My bedroom has no door – just an opening from the kitchen, but it’s a lovely room, with two tall windows, one facing west towards the tree lined street.

If you looked into that west window from outside you would see a large cotton print tacked to the wall above the bed. It had a dark blue border but was mostly deep red, with small blue and yellow flowers neatly patterned across it.

A late afternoon in autumn. The leaves are gone and it is brown and cold outside. I arrive home as sun breaks through, peering under the cloud cover for one last look. The bare trees allow the low light into the west facing window.

The red glow is visible from two rooms away. The setting sunlight strikes the cotton print full-on. The rays bounce back, warmed and dyed, filling the apartment with a red, royal aura.

**

It is a June evening in Seattle, and still light even after the twins’ bath. The splashing has ceased, and they have scrambled away.

The soft light from the window above bounces and reaches through the water. I bend down to drain the tub when a drop from the ceiling (squirt gun?) falls into the still surface of the bath.

Because I am alone, I hear the drop. I see a dark circular ripple above the lighter tub floor expanding to the tub walls. It rebounds, creating arcs that strike other arcs from the opposite wall. And slowly the water returns to stillness.

The next two drops fall at almost the same time. Instantly, circles intersect, bouncing, splitting. Then stillness again.

**

Rob Valenti

Seattle, WA