Adam Tavel

 
The Book of Blue Snows

A thousand candles hissed as guards clanged doors behind my hood-drips. Summoned by midnight again, I knelt before the mad abbot, drumming fingers on his vellum volume, clutched like a lost child’s doll. He whisked me to the shallow chapel in the apse so neither of us could see his throne, a thing he saved to love alone. I only caught half of his wispy gushing. Whenever he paused for breath, I’d drift to cold October pelting the rose window, where a thousand flames hovered in the weeping that they singed, lithe and spectral. Wordless at last, the abbot opened his tome like a bodice. I feigned study long enough to spare us both embarrassment. He had not found the Book of Blue Snows, I said gently, that fabled folio whose every copy lived inside his mind. I bowed and took my final leave across the drenched grimaces of sentries, who paced each other’s echoes down corridors of puddle-haunted stone. That night I paid the stable boy to say he saw my sable mare chase thunder until it burst to crows. No snow in desert almanacs—just some distant hand, same high sun, each page dunes.

Pipsqueak

Pipsqueak likes the sound the ball makes falling through the old net longer than the other two. Pipsqueak jukes autumn tickling his shirt-sweat while his looped hoodie droops like a sloth over handlebars. Pipsqueak pretends a crowd through his own wide teeth each time he banks it in. Pipsqueak sinks one shot in ten. Pipsqueak can’t time his layup and blames his legs—in the paint, beyond the arc, always clumsy stutter-steps, even chasing down his own rebounds. Pipsqueak sneaks a recess ball behind the dumpster so he can hoop all weekend long. Pipsqueak sails so many threes into the crabgrass patch, his jeans fit looser now. Pipsqueak packs a sandwich and water bottle in his backpack, and that one time, his sleeping bag, just in case. Pipsqueak winces each day at dismissal when the loudspeaker says, goodbye boys and girls, be sure to read at home. Pipsqueak knows seven blocks is close, even when you pedal slow.