Robert Froese
Fiction Writer
Current Publications
A Dark Music
The Forgotten Condition of Things
The Hour of Blue (out of print)
Selections
from The Forgotten Condition of Things:
The geometry of this place rains down on us and down on us, simulating a world. Stone and brick and mortar and steel---exactly the materials someone would use who was trying to construct inertia. The place could be a monastery, a fortress, a museum. But it isn't any of these. We who are in here know what it is: a compound administered by the Bureau for the Correction of Errors. They have to keep the mistakes somewhere. Life is confusing enough without a lot of bad examples running around, tangling our wires, short-circuiting things. Creating sparks the size of Volkswagens.
Here in this forever box-shaped geography, the walls are too much like our parents. We sit with our elbows pulled in, contemplating our Jell-O, worrying over the length and complexity of the corridors, wary of churning into one another like so many bugs in a jar. Somewhere removed, the specialists on human defects stand with their arms folded, observing. One scratches an eyebrow. Another purses his lips. Afterward they'll have coffee together. We're stuck in the middle of nowhere, but not them. They can fall back on deliberation and caution. They can fall back on the fact that we're in here to begin with, which must count for something. Whatever mistakes they make won't be enough to land them in where we are.
from A Dark Music:
They first heard the mountain lion over a week ago. So pure a sound, it seemed to him almost visible, and without a source. It tore his far-flung thoughts right out of him, replacing them with the broad and clarified night. Afterward he thought it must have come from on the mesa, and then he thought maybe he hadn't heard it at all.
But everyone had---that time, and again three nights later. He had just picked up the thermos, was weighing the coffee in it, debating whether to refill his mug, when the animal's second cry ripped across the heavens and was gone, leaving a hollow shape like fire in the memory and a silence so complete that all eyes ended stupidly on the hissing Coleman lanterns, as if only then noticing them. He looked down at his hands then and was surprised to see the mug and the thermos still there.
Each time he was a little less startled, a little more ready, if that were possible, so that the third occurrence arrived like the fulfillment of an expectation. He was exactly on the verge of looking up when the beast cried out.