The night sluiced softly beneath his footfalls while a crispness carried him along down the burlesque street.

I felt a clear welt on my conscience that day. It started with a slight itch, one of the kind that wells up from somewhere in your soul... one of those places you haven't looked into for a while, you know. Not that you deliberately forget. Time just washes up and licks the shores every little bit, and a dribble melts lazily off. That damned itch wended its way back somewhere through it, is all.

A quiet astonishment rolled around at first, but gave way to a more supple kind of resentment. I hadn't meant to, after all. And anyways, it was just about twenty years ago...

Here's my first post, the latest bit of abortive writing that inspired me to make this blog in the first place. With any luck, this public self-flagellation will get me off my ass and finish something one of these days (or at least get halfway, for Christ's sake). It's just above.