Magic Eye

On the train from Newark to New York after a flight from Virginia. Substituting misty dripping woods and lounging cows with tired, concrete-colored industry, the odd pastel box car. It looks like Shanghai outside: the unbending gray, the smog giving up the fight and dissolving into dusk. A shock of tawny marshland and now, more reliably, highway, a little sprawling town. Already, the glimmer of being back in the States has dissolved to the norm. Landing in Newark, I didn’t feel the blush of generous joy that came with landing in Charlotte a week ago: it was simply another airport.

When writing fiction, this freshness is equally evasive. It’s so easy to slip into a tired, retired tone. There’s a faint loop trail near my residency in Virginia that has fallen into disuse after a wind storm hit last year. What remains of the trail is covered with leaves. If your eyes try to find the scant path while standing in place it doesn’t work. You have to walk and your eyes snatch it without trying. Occasionally, you wind up in a blackberry bush. I would say it’s like seeing the picture in those Magic Eye posters but I never could see damn thing. So it’s more like encountering this teenage deer (see photo above) in the field, who bounded away as I approached, as graceful and awkward as a first draft.