He came in distraught and ranted for several minutes. Then he fell on the floor and rolled until he’d broken the coffee table and slid beneath the sofa.

I didn’t know what to do. I poked him with a broom handle, but it was like pushing a sack of beans.

I sat down over his head so we could have a conversation. I punctuated my statements with little bounces on the weak springs. I could not make him responsive.

She knocked on the door. She was not at all what I expected. There was something disjointed about here, as if she had outgrown her skin but had yet to shed it.

She had scrubbed make-up from her face hastily amid tears. Her hair was pulled back. Her dress was torn. She had broken the heels from her shoes and walked awkwardly on what remained.

She asked me, without pause and with too much privilege (in my opinion), to lay off. She did this with a hand on my sleeve just above my wrist. She seemed to have expressed all her intentions to me in just that simple gesture.

I smell him. I taste him. There is a martial art to his presence. I await him. I marvel at his approach. I can do nothing but wane before him, giving over all ambition, all thought of power or concept of victory. I am a doomed bigfoot. No bigfoot. No man. I am doomed.

My half-brother approaches and the duty is a mere token by now. I have fled so far in lieu of it. I have run past my own horizons to not oblige it. I am a stubborn miscreant.

He brings me what amounts to a strip of jerky, all life removed. It is a thing like a shriveled mummy. A thing with no impact or power. A thing to fall to dust through the fingers. No fear remains of that great terror I fled. All fury has flown.

And yet the smell of him, the taste of him on the wind. I am reminded of myself as I was and what is facade crumbles away and what remains has no name.

I heap the ashes on my head, the final injustice, the great and merciless shame. I wallow and break apart and will not be made whole.

I have been trying to write this scene where a man confronts himself across a fence line, a mirror, some magic slip in reality. I get him nearly to his confrontation and spin out in flames. I suffer the Hindu Zombie Fever.

I can only regret what must end. I can only assume the chain of moments will find a new course. I am stiff and sleepless with the first anxieties of middle age. I pace the lawns all night, shining my light and glaring at the stars, beaming them questions without answers, as if I were a little star myself and the wild fluctuations of my beam were merely my twinkling across light years of best intentions, till just this device of language remains. Till distant sensors confirm that we did exist and speak.

And those impossible futures will be able to read our long dead story.

I stare out through the distorted atmosphere, out across the minor travails of emptiness, all those endless miles of nothing, the great gap: the mirror.