| Excerpts: Read: From the Prelude: The dreams told of a distant place and another time, a past that seemed to belong to someone else. Yet among the images, he recognized himself—the cloaked character that gripped his lapels against a cold no one else felt Saintly icons, robed in mourning purple, buttressed a church. Worshippers, bent on their knees, prayed in repentance for sins their sufferings had revealed. Self-deprecating penance, dispensed in the isolation of the confessional, guided their psalms. He was cloaked in the purple shroud of Catholic Lent. Mark had grown up in the ethereal culture of Hispanic Catholicism, where sorrow, guilt, and prayer formed the cornerstones for primal absolution. Through this spiritual purification, one gained God's regard for the dispensation of judgment and granting of rewards.
Mark retrieved the pen from behind the laptop he was working on and twirled it between his fingers, as if to prime himself for a review. He studied the words he had written, on a topic he had not attempted before, and was baffled by the melodrama. He modified the lines, but he could not get rid of the passion. Melodrama, he thought, was the exception of our lives, our enigma, not the historical fidelity required for his monthly column. He sat back from the computer screen, as if to clear his thoughts with distance. Melodrama, he considered, was our heightened selves, but it also was the language of his Hispanic culture, through which he had learned to interpret the world in which he had been raised. It was not, though, his style. Mark determined to let the lines remain, for he did not write about himself.
Silence beyond their voices stalked the rustle of a gentle breeze among the trees. Were it not for the flicker of lights on the south shore, he could imagine they were alone on earth. "There are a billion stars in that sky," she said. "Can you be sure of that?" he replied. "Yes," she said, and with a finger dipped into the void, she began to count. |
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