We’ve all got work to do
fiction by Luke O’Neil
Come and look
The clouds were sponged violet across the sky over the old wool mill. As the sun diminished I pictured lava draining backwards into a volcano. I was busy trying to lasso it all impossibly into my phone while you walked ahead of me down the quiet side street we use as a short cut into town. The wormhole we call it. Why does no one else ever come this way we always said. Like it was a secret of our own. I thought for the first time in many years of a painting of a lighthouse sunset we found at a yard sale in Maine that I bought for you even though it was $40 which is ambitious for a yard sale painting and was about all I had to my name. We left it behind during a move somewhere along the line and you cried when you couldn’t find it later.
The decline of the street emptied us out at the 150 year old church on an overlapping hill where the woolworkers must have once filed through one by one to launder their mortal filthiness. They painted the insides condo gray a couple of years ago to sell it.
What do you think they got for it you said when I caught up. They tried for 1.5 at one point you said. That doesn’t seem worth it to me I said. In this town.
All my pictures were turning out poorly. Years of secondhand smoke in the lens.
Keep us breathing fire!
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