Sudetenland Tales by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Sudetenland Tales

Page 18

like lanterns then. That same post now carried an LED ad, flickering statistics about carbon capture.

"Even our regrets have been digitized," he wrote in his notebook.

Mark didn’t curse what passed for progress, every other Tuesday when the damn Dem fact checkers went on break, though he probably should have. He just missed the perceived imperfections of the past; no longer allowed to state its case anywhere on “social” media; day by day becoming another of the disappeared. The messy, soulful threads of human error, of late buses, cracked vinyl, off key street singers who sang because it healed them.

He sat again, this time leaning against the sycamore stump. His notebook was half filled. He flipped to a blank page and wrote slowly:

"There’s a real villain here. It’s not just forgetfulness. We forgot how to linger; how to fill the ravages of time with delightful nonsense. How to care for crooked things. I write not to resist in farted-around-futility; but to remember, to make a record, to leave a message without a bottle. The past isn’t necessarily perfect. But it’s warm. And we are cold.”