as_though_speech_were_a_still_performance cr0wl he stood at the water's edge and felt the smooth stone that he had been fingering and palming during the chilly evening's walk through the forest of norway pines. the ground was soggy and mud seeped from beneath his boot tracks. snow still sat in shadow cast, appearing like forgotten cloud props in a children's fairy tale theatre. the sun was low in the sky and was only minutes from setting. the magic hour, he thought, when everyone or anything that is photographed comes out in its total and complete beauty. he did not have a camera except for the one his eye was. he gazed out upon the lake remembering the many times he stood there. when he was someone else and wearing a disguise. even when he came upon this character he created from thought and desire, he did not know it was himself. he spoke in a voice that sounded foreign and accented with a tempered lie. there was alcohol on his breath and smoke in the air. then gone. but the smell lingered and it was the stench of his deceit. he removed the smooth stone from his pocket and looked at its blank surface, grey and fissured with thousands of flecks, with lines exploding from one round crack in the middle. it looked like a spider web whose methods of capture were cruel. or you could even say it looked like a windshield on a pick-up truck after someone had smashed it angrily with a boulder. from his other pocket he removed a small handmade journal. cradling the stone in his right hand he deftly opened the book to the first page and read aloud to himself, scattering a crow that had roosted in a bare oak tree near him. "you_are_a_sunset. i am a wildfire." he pulled a black sharpie pen from the last page of the journal and wrote the same words on the stone. one sentence and then he flipped it over and wrote the second. the pen rode the cracks like a bat in the night sky. he managed to stick both pen and journal in his pocket and then cupped the stone letting it bang against his closed hands like a trapped animal. in one quick movement he transferred the stone to the thumb and index finger of his right hand, cocked his arm with lightning speed precision and let it fly. it hovered in the air like a water-skimming bird and flipped over, alien spaceship style, and hit the water creating a perfect circle of two surfaces colliding immediate and definitive, with ripples producing waves, and waves building currents that eventually reached both shores. with the force and velocity he had flung it, the stone hit the water a second time and then a third, fourth, and fifth, making identical circles of rippling waves, all of them extending their way outward to opposite banks. finally, it hopped totally out of the water and bounced seven times with descending impetus until it stopped still and void of energy. the man smiled to himself. that was a good one he thought. 100318 what's it to you? who go blather from