Having mastered the once cryptic rhythms of the necessary daily tasks, and once seeing to the demands of my own upkeep, I take myself to the Square, not knowing what else there is to be done. The Square is neither one in shape, nor is it known as such by anyone other than myself. Of course there is generally no need to refer to it: one is either already there or with others to whom any reference to the place would be lost. The Square is a patchwork of up-turned asphalt; the sliced-off corner of what was once the parking lot of the Dollar Store. Like a vestigial landing behind a stairwell, or the accidental negative of some architectural design, it has the quality of having emerged all on its own, a kind of geographic funnel trained on a desire to “hang around.”

Due to its position, which has the bike path to its north, and to the southeast a row of boutiques, it acts as a kind of pedestrian thoroughfare, and so a kind of resting place or park. In the time before the Square, and proceeding the closing of the Dollar Store, a few of us, independent of one another, and starting at various corners of the lot, began to encroach in an answer to that place filling magnetism, not knowing what would happen of course, if we would be shooed away, or the next day a fence shoot up, or if the place for some unknown reason would simply lose its draw.      

Years after when the bike path was first being constructed, I sat in what by then had become my usual position and watched as the workers’ daily progress brought it closer and closer until, passing just in front of me, further and further away. For a while after, it seemed almost inconsiderate of the cyclists to do in moments what previously, making it possible for them to, took weeks. As for the boutiques, which are always changing hands, their various permutations may have some effect on the ebb of the atmosphere, though for all their (what seemed monthly) aesthetic contortions, the same people have always come shuffling in and out of them, slightly refashioned, with the same panicked looking grins.

As someone around since the Square’s inception, I’ve felt some degree of responsibility for the effect of these and other outlying forces, and for its general upkeep, which of course no one has ever asked of me, or would have ever imagined to. I’ve felt a responsibility, not to its appearance, or to its trash heaps, or overgrown weeds, or to its daily augmented shrines, but to the ever-circling and buzzing life of it, its amplitudes, its personage, its frenzies of activity, and its hours of deadly calm, which coming together on any given evening can teeter on the point of unraveling; the raw materials of its contents tugging on the various humors as many liquors in one man’s gut.

And so I began to take myself to the Square with the purpose of its general guardianship, unable to shake the feeling that it remained always somewhat un-put-together, like what it was was always about to touch down, and that this could be at least somewhat impacted or even determined by the consistency of my presence, which had in essence, been there from the start.

So having for some time now developed an efficiency of the required routines, I’ve taken it as my supplemental duty to be simply a presence in the Square, where for so long now I’ve sat and watched, taking note of no one thing in particular, that when the time comes, as it does each evening, to carry myself back home, the initial steps, stepping away, it’s like I remain there for a while still watching, still taking note, until, as the distance grows increasingly psychologically untenable, the immediate comes ruthlessly whacking me in the back of the head like someone letting go of a rubber band.

At various times, the Square became a hotbed of social activity, attracting certain of us who, for whatever reason, attracted others. There was the time of the pawn shop thief who, being pursued by police, and wielding a weed eater which he claimed was his, and his sole means of income and protection, took refuge in the Square, engaging anyone who would listen about the merit of autonomous zones. There was young Lee, a stone mason in training who, after getting drunk, would repeat the phrase, “I’m a stone mason,” like he couldn’t believe it, and with pride. There was Barb, who never lingered, but was always looking at things and shaking her head. As if the bush, or the trash can, or the curb had made some obvious, embarrassing error, which shaking her head would at least acknowledge, if it could not set right.

And then one day, a pair of missionaries arrived. Elder Sonny Falepapaniña and his partner Elder Forsythe. Even as it became clear almost immediately that none of our souls would soon be moved, the pair fell into a rhythm of visiting the Square which seemed for them a revitalizing break in their day. Standing next to each other, they looked like a pair of college students who might’ve paid to be in a sham honor society. Who would’ve gone to the sham dinners and only met because they were the last two politely entertaining sham credit card lenders set up under their sham tent. Sonny was broad-shouldered in a way that could have been imposing if inhabited by a different temperament. Forsythe looked bashful and was, his cheeks often rosy which made him look like he was always cold.

I’ve said I made it a point to try and become a continuity of presence, taking note of no one thing, which one evening was wholly thwarted involving the missionaries. Sonny was chatting with Joseph, the “Mellow Monk,” when Joe innocently flicked his cigarette. It landed upright a few feet away from them, continuing to burn for a few more moments before going out. Sonny instantly declared the incident a miracle.

He looked at Joe for a long time until remembering that a miracle could be performed through anyone. Still he rifled through the remaining cigarettes and inspected Joe’s hands and his ratty coat sleeves like a magician’s assistant silently going through the visual checklist, proving there was nothing to be debunked. Parts of Joe’s left foot were missing, which, no one knew exactly why, but he kept wrapped in tan-colored bandages. For a second it seemed Sonny thought the foot could have something to do with it, if it really was some elaborately orchestrated illusion, in which case would need to be unbandaged if performed on-stage. Sonny thought about how difficult it would be to right the cigarette, he later told me, with a series of unseen strings. Easier, he thought, for it to already have been there, and our attention directed to it at the right time.

Over the course of the next few days, Sonny drafted a request to his local stake president and bishop who’d been recently instructed by the Quorum of the Twelve to keep a record of “all miracles observed,” to register the upright cigarette butt as an officially miraculous event. The cigarette butt stayed upright for a few weeks of temperate weather. Someone put a wooden frame around it. Someone put an empty PBR bottle next to it with an upside down label. A good start to a reliquary. After almost walking over the cigarette butt in its frame, and being informed of what had happened and its significance to a growing number of the Square regulars, Bernard, who’d spent most of his life as a cobbler, which no one could easily forget due to the universally agreed upon likeness, that he himself in some ways looked like a battered shoe, only said that everything is a miracle, just some things people cause more of a fuss about.

Joe unwrapped something small and white from a bandana and without a word, added it reverently to the shrine.

A few days later, Sonny got a concerned phone call from his stake president. And a few days after that, a letter directing him to return back home. Citing their own oversight, the church leaders referred to the inappropriateness of Sonny’s request as a clear indication of their own failure as God’s educators. According to the bishop, the context and content of the incident was not only disqualifying, but put it into the category of as nothing more than a degraded accident. In his letter, the bishop likened Sonny to an eleven inch tall being with a three foot stride. “Your mien outstrips that which you know,” he wrote, which was a difficult sentence for Sonny to admit he did not get.

Bernard, to lighten the mood, said that he’d once seen a mark on the wall in the Basilicata region of Italy, where a saint had apparently quasi-levitated.

“How does someone quasi-levitate?” asked Forsythe. “Were they lying down or standing up?”

“It was half on the baseboard and half on the floor. A hell of a bold line, as I remember it. Or maybe it was part-way up the wall, and was meant to mark the top of the body.”

“So we would need to know how wide the person was to know how far they were off the floor?”

But Sonny was not really listening, away on his own mental trajectory. He surveyed the surrounding area, which before seemed to him a kind of static backdrop, mostly empty, where things occasionally happened, and began eliminating elements of it one by one. He removed the outlying landmarks that together made up the borders of the Square. He removed the people, and then the sunlight.

Where it not for the simple fact, he thought, that what was previously an unnoticed expectation came to the fore, that after landing, after possibly even hesitating on end for a while, it would succumb to the nature of what it was, and the forces that were working upon it, there would be little to remark upon. That remarkable aspect, he thought, had to do not with what actually happened, but took place internally, in our own minds, at the moment that that previously unnoticed expectation had become known, and not been met.

Opening his eyes, he saw a woman walking a dog, whom he knew would continue in a more or less singular direction, the dog stopping, occasionally tugging at the leash, and that the leash would stay tethered to the hand and to the animal, and grow taught as their distance grew.

Joe said the news was too bad, but that he was not all that surprised. “You flick enough cigarettes, one or two are bound to…” but the mention of two judging by the look on Sonny’s face was too much, and      had the effect of popping a child’s balloon. But then again, Joe spoke in a way that sounded like pennies in a phlegm-lined well, in a way it’s possible (likely) Sonny did not comprehend.

“I’ll tell you what’s a miracle,” Joe said, “how something like ourselves, who start off as nothing more than a kind of goo, could develop, or wind up with something so hard and unwavering as a tooth. I’m sure it can all be explained by some calcium depositing printer in the skull.”

In the coming week (his mission manager had screwed up the dates, and bought a greyhound ticket for then), Sonny continued coming to the Square, still in his shirt and tie, though he’d given up on ironing, and the tie was loose. Forsythe was still following Sonny around, looking more skittish than before.

“You’re on your own now, sonny!,” Bernard said, confusingly to Forsythe, grinning in a way that tugged on the leathers of his face, exposing his blackened gums.

The day before he left, Sonny had an awful dream. The bike path had formed the entire perimeter, rather than one edge of the Square, and met back up with itself in a shadowy corner behind the Dollar Store. Silhouettes, like shadow puppets, entered the path from there, some walking, some riding bikes, one that resembled Joseph walking alongside his bicycle with his handlebars loaded with plastic bags. Sonny was alone in the center of the Square, the ground covered in what looked like hastily scattered bags of potting soil.

He was startled by what he first thought was another person, and what turned out to be a bronze statue of someone he did not recognize. The statue was covered in splotches with lichen, and attempts to color parts of it with crayon. The silhouettes multiplied. Underneath the statue was a placard. Clearing the cobwebs he read the words, “Here* lies Sonny Falepapaniña,” with an asterisk next to “Here.” Adjoined to the corresponding asterisk, was a finger-sized hole in the ground. Without thinking, he poked the hole with a stick which instantly crumbled leaving a larger, fist-sized hole. As he started back, the light he had been blocking was cast into the hole, and leaning over it carefully he could see illuminated by the beam, hands folded over a chest that he swore he saw rising and falling, displacing the newly fallen soil.

The next day Sonny left, and we knew we’d never see Forsythe again. The weed eater, which had been left behind by the pawn shop bandit, was put to good use, careful not to disturb the shrine. Bernard and Joseph went back to staring into the middle distance. Lee intoned the foundations of masonry with a fellow vagabond. Barb paused, shook her head and kept moving.

***

Of all the rubble dragged out of the ground and altered beyond all recognition, the millions, billions collectively spent on vinyl siding, faux decking with its sadly distinguishable sag, the arborvitae planted along property edges in desperate attempts at old-world pertinence, a year later, the only sliver of actual “town,” was still the scrap of overlapping easements, or overlapping apathies, or overlapping ideas of the land’s best use we called the Square.

And though I had seen it as my vocation to maintain a level of presence with the regularity of a full-time job, there comes a time even professionally to step away for a few days or a week, in hopes that when you return everything will be different, almost imperceptibly, by a degree.

And so, ahead on the tasks of keeping up in the usual tack, I walked onto a train not far from the Square, and stepped off in a seaside town. From the station I walked through a decrepit neighborhood of old factory housing, each with its own narrow driveway and the remains of a low-height, decorative iron fence. There is an aspect I’ve observed alongside others, in which you can tell by the look of the buildings that water is near (though I’ve never determined why).

I walked for a while until the factory housing gave way to something else, a bend, a slant in the established street pattern, with more irregularly shaped front lawns. In the distance I heard voices carried gently over the houses, like a Persian Avaz as through a child’s twirling singing tube. As I walked, the sounds grew more staccato, words began to have beginnings and ends. In this way I was led, by what crystalized into the gentle howling of vagrants and broken glass, into a dead end sandy lot not far from the public beach. There was a fire, and a diversity of seating, including a retro refrigerator turned on its side. And there, with his face lit by the embers, motionless as if in deep contemplation, I saw a familiar face.

“Sonny!” I yelled, but the person did not respond. “Sonny, Sonny. Hey, you doin’ alright?” But still he was motionless.

He was lightly bearded in patches, older looking, but I knew it had to be him. I sat next to him on the old-timey refrigerator and did not speak for a while. The sun dropped behind the buildings. The first stages of dozing off overcame me sitting next to the fire.

“Things scheme to be derelict,” he said, starting me from my stupefied state. “Things what, Sonny? say that again,” I was desperate to get him talking, but thought I had not fully registered what he’d said.

“Even the new things have taken the form of their own ending—which is why everything looks the way it does.” This time I was sure I had heard him, though I still had no bearing on how to respond.

“At one point,” he said, “the passenger pigeon was so prodigious, their migratory flights would black out the sun. Canada to Mississippi, Georgia. Some flocks were partial to the Great Lakes. And it wasn’t just south for the winter, either. They would migrate at random, it seemed in search of new topologies to deprive of light. Opossums, fisher cats, and other nocturnal creatures could be fooled into thinking it was night. And with the pigeons gone, could be caught in the middle of a town field, exposed to the daylight, with children in cars pointing at them, the day-time traffic whizzing by, frozen, betrayed by physiology, and the passenger pigeon in flight.”

“Look at them now,” he said, referring to the pigeons, and gesturing upward, over the rooftops and the Italian trees. There were a few cranes off in the distance. Apartment buildings rising beneath their bent arms. The sky looked different, emptier than I’d ever seen it. Sonny waited for me to say something, as if my answer somehow determined both his fate and mine.

“I don’t see anything,” I told him. “Sonny, I can’t see anything!”

---

Ty Holter is the author of the chapbook Extended Stay (Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks, 2023). His work has appeared in Protean, Firmament, and elsewhere. A teacher and poet, he lives in Western Massachusetts. Twitter: @tylerleeholter Bluesky: @tyholter.bsky.social