Chronicle of Unwritten History

by

David Galef​

includes your one-night stand with three women in your book group the week you read Orlando; self-important nobodies like the bouncer at Maud’s who admitted people based on their astrological signs but let you in even though you’re a Virgo; my brief marriage to a trapeze artist before she left for a circus in Venezuela; your third miscarriage, which left you in a funk through 2019; the Final Skirmish at Vonderaal, a place now left off all official maps, though you claim it as a birthplace; the beginning of the Vonderaal Empire, often confused with the end of the Vonderall Confederation; the Great Blizzard of ’17 in Hackensack, when more than 500 snowmen appeared in front yards (yours, with three carrot noses, was the most artistic); failed board games like Sacrilege, in which the loser has to pay for the desecrated pieces, and you must have cheated; your unspoken resentment at your mother after she joined the Republican party; my childhood accident with a flit gun, which left me with a permanent squint; the evenings I waited up for you, long after you had any right to return; the days we did without while dreaming of with; what never happened but could have.