One day.
Soon.
You'll kiss your wife goodbye and leave.
That's the last anyone'll see
Of you.

Vanished.
Gone.
Plucked from the streets and not seen again.
They'll find just your car and your left hand.

One day.
Soon.

It's time for a sing along.

A cold man slumps against a skyscraper
dreaming the days away as he sinks deeper into the bottle.

Meanwhile the salmon in the suits fighting the current
put their days up their noses.

The man in the snow's got that thousand yard stare
and Pete Townshend sings: "I can see for miles and miles..."

The bottle never fills but gets bigger every day.
Standing at the bottom looking up, its mouth laughs and stretches ever skyward.

Someone once said that there is no art without angst. If that's true, then what follows qualifies as art, though we have our doubts. We've always been skeptical of our own poetry. Nonetheless, for your reading pleasure we present you this week's feature, a poem entitled The Light Under The Basket, which reminds us that when times are dark you can rest assured that they can only get darker. And so, without further ado...

I prefer not to see the light shining through hard times.
When it’s dark you can’t see just how bad you have it.
But when even the faintest of light glimmers in, is when you realize
The mess that surrounds you.

If there’s a light at the end of the tunnel,
It’s probably the train headed my way.
Better that the light be off,
So that I needn’t see the number of the train that hits me.

Take me down. Put me in a cave. You can take my eyes but not my vision.

Lock me up. Throw me in a cage. You can take my wings but not my freedom.

Chain me down. Stick me in your irons. You can take my hands but not my works.

Stuff me up. Wire shut my jaw. You can take my mouth but not my...

He couldn’t remember when he had acquired the mask. He had come into the room one day and realized it was there on the great marble mantlepiece, in a place of honor, candles and sprigs of greenery around it. Days went by and it remained there, though the greenery eventually dried up and was cleared away; by the servants, he supposed, for he certainly had not moved anything. He did not go into that room very often. It was too large, too formal, too much in the middle of things. His scattered thoughts and a sense of restlessness led him to prefer the more remote areas of the mansion. But when he did enter the room, the mask was always there.

He liked looking at it. It was formed like the face of a man, eyes closed, serene smile on his face, but the lines were far too perfect, too beautiful to be any ordinary person. Perhaps it was the face of a god; had one of his friends who enjoyed traveling found it in some distant land where such idols were worshipped, and, knowing his love of beautiful perfection, brought it to him?

Come to think of it, he had once loved to travel. How long had it been since he had set foot on train or ship in search of beauty and excitement in faraway places? He didn’t know. This strange restlessness, accompanied by the equally strange inability to decide where he wanted to go or what he wanted to do, had had him in its grip for as long as he could remember.

 The more he looked at the mask, though, the more it teased him with a sense of familiarity. Was it only because the mask itself was becoming so familiar to him? He spent more time thinking about it than about anything else, and when he left his lonely retreats and ventured down the grand staircase into this room, it was always the first thing he looked for. 

 Something deep inside of him told him that wasn’t the answer, though. He thought–he thought that perhaps the man depicted by the mask was someone he had known once, long ago. But he couldn’t call a name to mind, and surely he would have remembered an acquaintance–or perhaps someone even closer than an acquaintance?–who was so beautiful.

* * *

He had always lived alone in the house–at least, as far as he could remember–so it came as a surprise one day to wander into the grand room and find two elegantly-dressed women standing there. One of them he didn’t know, but the other seemed so familiar, like a long-lost relative he had once been close to and then lost touch with. The women were standing by the fireplace, talking, then the strange woman gestured towards the mask. Curious to hear what they might be saying about his treasure, he drifted closer, taking care not to interrupt them or startle them with his presence.

“Yes, that’s him,” the familiar-looking woman said. “So handsome! All the ladies sighed over him, but, sadly, he never married.”

The other woman made a tsking sound. “What a shame.”

“Yes, it is. And gone so young, barely even forty. Even though masks are out of fashion, we had to have one made, so that we’d always have something of him with us.”

His curiosity piqued even more, he moved to an angle where he could get a better view of the familiar woman’s face, and gasped in surprise. The two women didn’t seem to hear him. The familiar-looking woman bore a striking resemblance to the mask. Forty, she had said he was. She appeared barely older than that–the man’s sister, perhaps? Too young to be his mother.

“Why do you leave it here, then, instead of keeping it at your house?” the other woman asked.

“I’m not sure. It just seems more...fitting, somehow. As though his house would be too sad and empty without something of him in it. Though sometimes, when I come by to make sure everything is all right here, it almost seems that I can still feel his presence...”

The two women moved off towards the hall leading to the kitchen and pantry, the sister saying, “Of course, we’ll have to sell this place eventually...”

He went over to stand before the mask, and looked at it as though he had never seen it before. Of course. And he wondered why he hadn’t realized the truth before. Had it been simple denial? Or that sense of not quite recognizing yourself when you see yourself in a portrait or photographic image?

There was an ornately-framed mirror hanging over the mantlepiece. Why had he never noticed it before? Or had he been deliberately avoiding it? He looked directly into it, and saw only the room behind him reflected in it. An incredibly odd feeling, but he found himself smiling nonetheless. If he wanted to remember what he looked like, he had only to look at the mask, and see himself as he would always be–forever beautiful, forever in his prime, forever as he had been in life.

This piece, A Familiar Face, was authored by Kyra Halland. She is the author of dark-edge tales of fantasy and romance and has written several books and short stories. She lives in southern Arizona and has two young adult sons, a very patient husband, and two less-patient cats.

Photo and picture by Ms. Halland.

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Each penny you drop in that well as you wish
Corrodes into poison that stifles a fish.

Each balloon you let fly on warm summer days
Gets lodged in seals’ throats and they too pass away.

Each rainbow you see that brightens your mood
Is somebody’s torrent of rainfall and flood.

Each dime on the ground that you should pick up
Fell out of the pocket of a guy with hard luck.

Each triumph you earn, though wrought at great cost,
Means that someone else had to have lost.

So all the good times in the past that you’ve had,
Means you’ve made someone, somewhere, sad.

And all the good fortune that should befall you,
It results from someone else’s getting screwed.

How do you chase something whose footfalls make no sound? What nets do you use to snare something incorporeal? And, assuming you can catch it, who in their right mind would dare hunt something no one knows anything about?

Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. The point is not to convince you that these events happened. Rather, it is to share with you that they did.

The home where I grew up was built in the 1950’s, in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Its living space was distributed in such a way that the master bedroom was at the extreme front corner of the structure, with a window looking out into the front yard. The other bedrooms were connected along the same side of the house via a corridor.

When my sister was born, we built a second master bedroom for my grandparents to live in, and the rest of the family played musical chairs with the living arrangements. My sister took my old bedroom in the middle of the hall, I moved into my parents’ former bedroom at the front of the house, and my parents took my grandparents’ old bedroom at the opposite end of the hall.

By the time my brother was born, there wasn’t any more room to make additions to the home, and so he moved in with me. My bed was arranged parallel to the wall closest to the street. Were you to enter the room from the hallway, you would see my bed in the far left corner, with my brother’s along the opposite wall.

One night, when the house was quiet and everyone was asleep, I awoke. I found it strange that I should be awake because there hadn’t been any loud noises or anything that would have roused me. Lying on my back in bed, I actually considered this, when I noticed a faint light in the hall. It was pale green, like the face of a glow-in-the-dark watch. The light slowly grew in strength, as though its source were drawing nearer.

I was terrified. I had no plausible explanation for what I was seeing. At the time, we did not have any motion-activated lights in the hallway, and when my mother did eventually buy those, they were incandescent orange. Worse - whatever approached was coming from the hallway, which was the only way out of the room.

The glow entered and lit up the doorframe with a sickly green haze. The light was pale, and transparent - even as it drew closer I could see through it to the desk and television hutch behind it. The glow moved toward me. Once it had wafted halfway across the room, it changed. The light shifted to its extremities and became a ring. It did not become brighter - it was as if the light compressed itself and had become opaque in the tight area of the ring it formed. Within the ring it was as dark as the rest of the room, but not so dark that I was blind. My bedroom walls were painted stark white, and I had white furniture and so with the scarce light of the streetlamp beyond my window I could still see.

The space within the approaching green disk darkened, as if it had become a sheer film of black silk. The figure within the disk was human. It had a clearly discernible head, trunk, and limbs. I could not see details. I could not see its face, or digits, nor could I tell if it had either. The legs and arms were positioned away from the trunk in a posture that might have been uncomfortable for a person to maintain for too long, but this made it abundantly clear to me the figure was human-like. The air space that the figure occupied was perfectly dark, opaque. The area it did not occupy I could see past.

It floated toward me in a slow, even pace, as though it were on a conveyor belt. It did not swing its arms or move its legs as it approached. It did not have feet, but the pointed ends of its legs appeared not to touch the ground.

Just as it brushed against my bedside, numbers lit up in the glowing green circle. Twelve at the top, three to the right, six at its feet, nine at the left. In the center of the figure’s torso appeared a tiny disk of green light from which shot three bars - an hour hand, a minute hand, and a second hand. The seconds ticked with rigid precision.

I watched, wide-eyed, as the figure drew within arm’s reach. Meanwhile, my brother slept, unaware of any of this. Had it gone for him instead of me, I don’t know what I would have done, if anything at all. It was all I could do to keep from screaming.

The figure brushed against my bedside, then, as abruptly as it had appeared, it vanished. The shadow in the clock was gone. Without its green glow, the bedroom was darker than before.

I did not sleep the rest of that night.