Again with nightfall stones fly here and there, one lucky throw nailing a porch light, its warm cone inhaled up into the nostril where the struck glass shattered; the filament, drenched in oxygen, drowns like a kitten. They’ll have issued rifles by now, by now clicked their opaque visors into place. Moonless, starless, reverberant dark, I hear a boy’s voice, familiar to me, but straining for a man’s pitch, urging strength. I hear a rasp, deadweight metal dragged across asphalt, leaving a chalky scar, a line for daring to step, which gives me the idea to haul the old wardrobe we saved from my grandmother’s house across to block the bedroom window. The kids ask what are you doing what are you doing and I say go to sleep go to sleep go to sleep.
Bios
John Geddes
John Geddes is an Ottawa writer who has tried his hand at lots of different kinds of writing. As a political journalist, he’s won National Magazine Awards and Harvard’s Nieman Fellowship. His novel The Sundog Season won the Ottawa Book Award. Last year, he picked up a Digital Publishing Award for a personal essay about the Nazi past of a Viennese painting in the National Gallery’s collection. Most recently, the Irish literary quarterly The Moth published one of John’s short stories. [provided for the 2022 Diana Brebner Prize]