Memories

Memory Screen

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“A heavy rain drowns each raindrop; a light rain, like the kind I saw in the woods out behind my house when I was a child, a light rain striking the leaves and branches of trees, further slowing their impact, that rain produces the strongest petrichor of all, the one that renders me into an seven-year-old noticing the world for the first time.
 
“The lightest of rain after the driest of spells leads to the most argillaceous petrichor, which is the kind that humans smell as relief, the thought that things will start growing again.” — “Petrichor,” Jan. 26, 2015

We called it “The Woods.” Well, I did. Sometimes, I referred to it as a “forest,” which it most certainly was not. Our backyard ended at a line of trees and the dross beneath them; our lightly manicured, suburban lawn did not grow beyond that line, despite my teen-aged lawn mowing efforts to expand it by clearing the dead leaves and branches away. That tight boundary made The Woods appear all the more elemental and foreign.
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Begin in Dreams

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In one dream, a dream encountered once each month or so, a password to an email service or to the office desktop itself can not be remembered. Or interruptions prevent typing it in within a fifteen-second countdown. He has been away from the office for so long—a decade—and he sees the voice mail light flashing on his phone, but he can not remember the four-digit access code. How many messages? he wonders.

Even without the password, he catches a glimpse of the waiting emails and they scroll without him touching the mouse, and he has a deadline to meet that somehow exists simultaneously as “just missed,” “about to be missed,” and “missed a decade ago, so why are you dreaming about a job that was three or four jobs ago”? Is this even his cubicle, anyway?

No bosses are visible, but unseen bosses are the only ones required in a nightmare.
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An Ideal Reader

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

(First, a note on the photo: I have attempted to set up photo shoots with Ángel, el gato de amor, my girlfriend’s cat, that feature her with my glasses and a book. Because hilarious. Ángel has made it clear—by pushing the glasses off the bed slowly, very slowly, super slowly, threateningly slowly—that if I could get away with this, the price would be very steep. I would be getting away with my life and it would be a cheap life from that day on. Thus the photo of the unknown cat above. Because hilarious.)

This first appeared in “Message in a Bottle.”

* * * *
Everyone who writes has an imaginary friend.

There is an ideal reader in my imagination, a figure who finds even my shopping lists and notes in the margins of books interesting. I have not yet actually met anyone who fits this description, but I keep writing, just in case.
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