The Afternoons

Now, the sun red behind the buildings, it is the hour when things are lost. Crumpling paper, gazing at the river, or staring into the void, suddenly, so eerily, you begin to disappear. It happens so quickly and you are there, somewhere, anywhere but here.

Yet that is not the worst of it. When you leave this room, this day, your self, the others go with you. Those you have loved. They fade so easily. It is said so often, it could even be true.

But what of those yet to be born in your imagination? Can you tell me why they too must go, paper in the trash, swept away in a murky flow? Or worse, on thin air?

You never even knew their names or their faces, what they might have thought of the moon.
©Christopher Woods

Christopher Woods is the author of the prose poem and short fiction collection, Under a Riverbed Sky, and a collection of stage monologues for actors and actresses, Heart Speak. His play, Moonbirds, about doomed census takers at work in an uninhabited desert country, received its New York City premiere by Personal Space Theatrics. He lives in Houston and in Chappell Hill, Texas.