Threshold by dead lizard grin

released December 17, 2018

The last perfect day arrived without announcement, and we, unaware of its significance, simply lived within it. The air was still warm but edged with something finer, something just beyond reach. The great oak held fast to its leaves, their green untouched by autumn’s slow fire, and the southern breeze moved through the old stones with a hush that felt almost like speech—low voices from another time, stirring but not yet waking.

We laid out our picnic beneath the branches, the world beyond reduced to whispers. A distant highway murmured in the wind, a faint breath of movement from somewhere else, somewhere irrelevant. Now and then, the sky shuddered as airliners passed far overhead, silver phantoms drifting through an unbroken blue, their passengers oblivious to the two figures below, framed by the quiet geometry of the graveyard.

The wine was cool against the lingering heat of the afternoon. We drank in slow sips, watching how the aging light filtered through shifting leaves, how it leaned against the stones, warming names already softened by time. It was as though the entire day had been placed under glass, preserved just for us, just for now.

Change was close. It always is. It waited at the edges, patient, inevitable. But for a little while longer, the world remained whole, untouched. The leaves stayed on the branches, the warm wind carried only familiar things, and the ghosts—if they watched—remained silent.

Not yet.

Not just yet.