Why do I return so often to a moment that passed like a bird’s shadow on a wall? What pulls at me to close my eyes and see again that different morning light? I washed dishes while my wife and baby slept, trying not to let pots and pans clang too loudly. I looked up at the window, translucent with frost, and paused. The sun had just come up and something about the brightness caught my attention: it was as if I could gaze at the glowing square until I reached the edge of pain, and then I could see more of it without pain. My vision opened, and brightness poured into me. Even as I wanted more, I wasn’t capturing it so much as it was rushing through me. A cold light, but warming. It took no form, but I experienced a sense of myriad particles moving in a cascade. It seemed a sort of invitation.

Then an incidental sound in the house made me look away, and when I looked back the swelling wave was just frost, and glass, and faint steam wafting up from the sink.

Time passed. Work and meals and illness; holidays and school plays; gardens and funerals—. And still I remember that square of light as an important thing. One I can say little about, though re-imaging it almost takes me into it again, at any time.

Daryl Scroggins

has taught creative writing and literature at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of North Texas, and the Writer’s Garret, in Dallas. He now lives in Marfa, Texas. He is the author of This Is Not the Way We Came In, a collection of flash fiction and a flash novel (Ravenna Press), Winter Investments: Stories (Trilobite Press), and Prairie Shapes: A Flash Novel (winner of the 2004 Robert J. DeMott Prose Contest). His poems, short stories, and creative nonfictions have appeared in magazines and anthologies across the country, including Blink Ink, Cutbank, Eastern Iowa Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Star 82 Review, and Third Wednesday, among others.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Suitcase Full of Clay: An Ekphrastic e-Collection in MacQueen’s Quinterly, aka MacQ (Issue 18, April 2023)

⚡ Roadshow, microfiction by Daryl Scroggins in MacQ (Issue 15, September 2022); one of three pieces by Scroggins selected as Finalists in “The Question of Questions” Ekphrastic Writing Challenge

⚡ Spring, microfiction by Scroggins in MacQ (Issue 12, March 2022)

⚡ Writer Boy, microfiction in MacQ (Issue 4, July 2020); nominated by MacQ for Best Microfiction 2021

⚡ Field Trips, flash fiction by Scroggins in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Summer 2019)

⚡ New to School, microfiction in Eclectica (Jan/Feb 2018)

⚡ Two Fictions: “Almost Baptized” and “Against the Current” in New Flash Fiction Review (Issue 10, January 2018)

⚡ Eight Stories: A Mini-Chapbook by Daryl Scroggins at Web del Sol