By Catherine Gammon.
It was hard, living on a hillside in Los Feliz, in a rented house with walls of glass, not to imagine the mountains surrounding the city burning. As if in a nightmare of perpetual fire. Lurking within the benign appearance, the appearance even of beauty, the beauty itself was the fire to come. Or something like that.
If she still wrote fiction, this would have been the start of the story. She lived on the hillside just a few days, visiting her daughter, who did not live on the hillside either but in a neighborhood to the south or east with a housemate who had no patience for guests. Because it was a holiday weekend, her daughter’s Los Feliz friends were out of town and the house was theirs.
Out the wall of window she saw the hills on fire. Was it fiction or not? What was it? She has never known, and still doesn’t. Her head shaved, she’s a renunciant these days, renunciant in training, and not so young anymore. Once upon a time, she had grown up here in this city where lately her daughter has come to live.
After a lifetime of stories, what story is there to tell? Any writing ends up writing about writing. Writing is writing’s only subject, just as thinking is all about thought. Meanwhile, the hills are on fire and cities fall into the sea. What is writing for, then?—what is thought?—balancing on this point, turning neither this way nor that—
In a story something always comes next, in a poem—some music or irony or gesture brings the frisson and illusion of completion. In the meeting face-to-face with the teacher is it also only this? Balancing on the point until—gesture irony music the hills on fire the head the cities falling and words empty as always?—Thank you, bow, ring the bell—
With the daughter, too, the time comes, the time is, the time passes away—meet at the airport, say goodbye at the airport—adepts with words, with hands, with walking and cooking and cats and dogs. All love and face-to-face no words for love. And still the cities burning, the hills falling away—
Coda
No, she wants to add, many years later now—how many years? No, she wants to say. There is more to these meetings, to all meeting, fire or not, falling or not, meeting or missing or not. There is more. When she meets her daughter, when she meets her teacher, when anyone meets, or fails to meet, face-to-face or side-by-side, in the light, in the dark, when cities burn, when mountains fall, when the bell rings, in the day, in the night, when fire comes, when fire goes, when earth rises and drops, when water drowns or dries up, when wind gives and takes away, still, there is, would be, will be, always, again, another, other, unknown, inconceivable, irresistible—more.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catherine Gammon’s most recent book is the 2024 story collection The Gunman & The Carnival from Baobab Press. Here novels are The Martyrs, The Lovers; China Blue; Sorrow, and Isabel Out of the Rain. Catherine taught at the University of Pittsburgh throughout the 1990s before leaving academia for Zen training in California. She lives again in Pittsburgh with a garden and a cat. More @nonabiding on Substack.
