My Brother's Team Won Their Last YMCA Tournament Game 27-23. He Scored 11.

My brother's team won their last YMCA tournament game 27-23. He scored 11.

Fall of the Wayward Wunderkind, painted in a pretty unstable frame of mind, given to my friend Aaron, who's a pretty unstable kind of guy. 

Sonnets 1-3

Here you go, Deepayan and Kai – thanks for your kind words. These are from a longer narrative collection of sonnets called "The Storyville Fish and the Prince of Cats," a love story.

***

1

Deep in the lurid dark of New Orleans,

Its streets awash with tar and summer sweat,

An old composer rose from halfway dreams,

Awoken by the sound of a cornet.

He peered out into the lonely streets,

Discovering he no longer knew his town—

Once French provincial homes with drooping eaves

Now shotgun tenements of ill-renown.

Down on the corner beneath a lamppost

A coal-wagon boy relaxed on the curb

Where he played a long note, low and morose—

The saddest sound the old man ever heard.

“That’s just the way the music’s gone,” he said,

Fed his fish, fell asleep, died in his bed.

2

The movers arrived the following day

At the Karnofsky family’s front door.

They said, “The last great maestro passed away

Leaving you everything he had, no more.”

“The fish and its bowl aren’t worth a lot,

But the piano, it’s quite a treasure.”

Mrs. Karnofsky agreed with a nod

And invited the movers to enter.

They set the piano down in the hall

And then they handed the fishbowl over.

Left by herself to consider it all,

Mrs. Karnofsky searched for some closure.

“Grandfather didn’t have much in the end,

But for me, his piano and his friend.”

3

The Storyville Fish heard her think out loud,

And was amazed she had been called a friend.

Unsure whether to feel humbled or proud,

She found she simply could not comprehend.

“Old man lived alone

Heart bursting of things unsaid

Fish lived alone too.”

Thus pacified, the fish turned on her tail

And traveled round and around her glass room.

She never tired swimming the same trail

For it was the path of the sun and the moon.

This home was not much different than the last,

She thought, brushing a fin against the glass.

Hey there. It's been a while. I remember when we were 18, and it's funny to think that I've gotten older but you haven't. It'll be even funnier when I'm 50, and I think back to us traipsing through the Venus flycatcher fields of Tomahawk, Wis., burning newspapers in the woods on Halloween, eating candy in the tub and smoking out of apples, and you still wouldn't have changed. You and I will always be 18 together. That part of me that's stuck to you will never grow a day older. 

Aaron can't come to terms with the fact that the world still turns. I can't comprehend it either. For once, I have no idea, no theories and nothing at all to say about that.

I owe you. We'll see if I ever find a way to pay you back.

Excerpt

This is the beginning of a yet-untitled novel about the lives and loves of a few hell-bound people in Brooklyn, including an excommunicated man trying to prove himself worthy of adopting his own son and a dominatrix sex worker prone to fits of homicidal rage. 

***

One

It was 4:59 a.m., New York City in September, as Roman Hayes lied awake in bed, staring up at the mottled ceiling of his Brooklyn flat. And as he lied there with his blankets kicked off to the floor and his t-shirt plastered over his chest, where a great stain of perspiration had spread like blood over a gunshot wound, Roman breathed tentatively.

He looked over at the alarm clock on his nightstand. It read 4:59 in seedy little digital figures. Ante Meridiem. He switched off the alarm before it was due to detonate at five and sat up at the edge of his bed. Pulling his bloody shirt off over his head, he sat there with it in his hands, his hands tremulous with sweat, his head numb with a sense of misplacement. As his eyes gradually adjusted to the dark, Roman ran a hand through his hair, over his neck and shoulders and arms, and was relieved to find himself the same twenty-eight-year-old man he had been before he fell asleep.

He sighed. He had had such an explicit vision just prior to waking of being cut out of the womb. In his dream, he had been a fetus sleeping in amniotic comfort when suddenly he was brought out of darkness and exposed to fresh air, the cold and all the forces of the world bearing down upon him at once — gravity and normal and the like — pulling on him in every which direction, contorting and compressing his features to resemble that of a human being. Though in his dream state Roman had felt inexplicably invested in that painful process, he was relieved to find he was not, in fact, a fetus.

The premature grey light of daybreak seeped through the cracks in the blinds, reaching toward the hardwood and plaster surfaces of Roman’s room with reticence. Sensing his master was awake, an ancient Doberman rolled over in his cot on the floor and glanced up, his drooping eyelids giving him an air of perpetual world-weariness.

“Morning, Captain,” Roman muttered as he stepped over to the window and peered out.

At 5 a.m., the sky was pink and layered with wispy cumuli. The streets of Bensonhurst were empty but for a few stragglers — a bald man in a bathrobe checking the air in his tires, a dog circling a lamppost, some kid sneaking back into the upper story window of a condo down the street. A flock of pigeons abandoned a nearby rooftop to perch in a stand of rustling aspen lining the sidewalk. Meanwhile, the first commuter of the day pulled into nearby 71st Street Station, glowing with a telltale halo of radiance as it halted before the rising sun.

Captain came up behind Roman and gave him an affectionate nip on the hand. Old as he was, the dog possessed a resilient devotion to routine, and pawed impatiently at the doorknob while Roman grabbed a change of clothes and donned his running shoes.  

John Shurna (24) made history yesterday as NU's all-time top scorer, helping the Wildcats beat Minnesota 64-53.