A Stage of Memory

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Fine, crystalline powder lay scattered along the cracked molding between the mattress and the wall. The tiny white grains met crumpled tissues and hairballs under the lip of a dingy fitted sheet. They sparkled incongruously along a thin trail across the floor of Derek’s shabby room, reflecting where, it seemed to Derek, there wasn’t any light.

The ripped windowshade cast a jagged knife of daylight on faded Variety clippings taped to the opposite wall. The outline looked like the tapering gap between a pair of legs… the legs of a runner in mid-stretch, making time against the plaster.

Derek Blakeney contemplated the runner.

Headless, torsoless, it had started over near his closet, narrow and slow. As the afternoon wore on, the shadow widened and the jogger seemed to catch its stride, legs reaching like a steeplechaser’s. Its progress across the wall became terrific… a yard, at least, in the last twenty minutes.

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