Howie Good

A Long Spiral of Going Down

I can remember your exact advice. I just can’t remember following
it. The best thing for me to do, you said, was to do nothing. I
glanced down the train tracks, first one way, then the other. There
were no bare hills anymore. Months passed. Everyone was now
into the music of a singer-songwriter who had committed suicide
by stabbing himself in the chest with a kitchen knife. I escaped to
the seashore. The water was full of seals, small boats, people I
didn’t know, one a crying child, her face scrunched up like a knot
commonly used by sailors.