The Door to the Clouds
Everyone knows it takes more than one exit to disappear. It’s too easy to pull someone back in over a single threshold; to escape, you need a path so littered with doorways and arches that once you pass through and keep walking, there’s no going back. And no one can find you.
Reprieve
I walk down the blaring avenue, across Klingle Valley Bridge, past condo buildings and side-street bungalows to the place where pavement dead-ends and forest begins. A flock of blackbirds whirls from a leafless tree, swooping and soaring above me and everything. Down the path I go toward Rock Creek. The air smells fertile, of winter’s rot and mold come clean and soil freshly remade.