loading . . . 'If Time is an Illusion' by David Luntz âThen you can paint tomorrow any color you want,â Uncle Kev tells me in Chartres, circa 2004, walking below the stained glass windows of the Cathedral, when he points to the tolling bronze bells and says, âWatch first the sounds of light shimmering off them, then listen to the screams in the stained glass, and you will see the hairline cracks of spreading colors, each filament an echo of pain, loss, and regret,â and I do my best, but hear and see nothing there, and, anyway, now we are passing below a window that depicts the binding of Isaac and he says the name âIsaacâ means âfrom the laughter,â because Sarah, his mother, was ninety when God told her she would have a son, and, yeah, sure, I can hear Sarahâs disbelieving cackle at Godâs news, but apart from that Iâm not sure why Uncle Kev has brought me here, because he knows I tune him out most of the time, which is when he says, â You know the Dark Ages werenât that darkâjust look at this cathedral, this levitating, heaven-arching, stone-turned-spirit miracle,â but Iâm too young to get it and to make things worse, weeks later, when I find him stone cold in the tub, the frosted glass window crowning late summer sunlight rainbow shards above his sunken head, I have no prism to pass that broken light through to make it whole again, or any other way to bring Uncle Kev back, which if Iâd known was going to happen that day at Chartres, I would have stood below that stained glass window for as long as it took, until the glass exploded, and the scream Uncle Kev wanted me so badly to hear carried us back to that world where it was first howled.
---
Work is forthcoming in or has appeared in Post Road, Hobart Pulp, Farewell Transmission, trampset, scaffold, ergot.press, X-R-A-Y Lit, Maudlin House, HAD and other print and online journals. More at davidluntz.com Twitter: @luntz_david http://dlvr.it/TLM2tP
