Dunes by Stephen Hastings-King

I went out through another cold still morning, erasing my steps behind me not because I did not want to be followed but because I did not want to find my way back again.  By degrees the erasures became systematic and the space I occupied smaller and smaller until I reached an area I had only heard about where the present slips beneath the past like geological plates and dunes made of forgotten things run along the fault lines.

They say that the present is a threshold and that we are figures made from memory performed over what falls away.  They say that what falls away has a shape so consistent that even collected in dunes there are no objects, only irregular grounds against which other figures are said to emerge. But no-one ever comes here.

When I look at the dunes I do not know what I am seeing.

© 2012 Stephen Hastings-King

Stephen Hastings-King lives by a salt marsh in Essex, Massachusetts where he makes constraints, works with prepared piano and writes entertainments of various kinds. Some of his sound work is available here.  His short fictions have appeared in Sleepingfish, Black Warrior Review, elimae, Ramshackle Review, Metazen and elsewhere.  I put new work up to dry at Edge Effects  http://100edgeeffects.tumblr.com

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