Mr. Bounds remained lucid long enough to know when he needed a single small room—with a window—in a place run by others who would see to the details of his remaining life. He felt lucky, though this impression had since shifted somewhat. Or at least it had taken on a kind of distance. Or maybe it was inflation. A new diaphanous quality in the light. He hadn’t anticipated the way his small room and its square ceiling would begin to seem like a theater. The screen dark on dark at night, but populated with constellations. And then light streaming in again at the window, possibly from a new day or one he was recreating.

A mathematician, Mr. Bounds aged into questions that began to appear more as animals than arrangements of integers. Symbols acquiring the articulation of birds, their direction of flight taking them to any number of times and places. An imagined or remembered mountain always stood out, or the ice on it did, when the still-weak sun touched it before a bird arrived; he thought he must have spent some time there and had not wanted to leave.

Nights began to bring a forest to the screen, perhaps from illustrations he had seen in books. A tree line, and dark woods beyond, seen from across a harrowed field. Some poet’s darker darkness of a stage set being struck silently; or, then again, every bush supposed a bear.

At various times a young man who was his grandson would appear with a paper sack from a deli, and Mr. Bounds would be eager to be alone again with his sandwich. Ham and cheese on coarse sourdough rye. He liked to look at the half-bubble shapes in the bread. Yeast respiration. Like the lattice of bone marrow. Like the interstitial arcs of nebulae.

One favorite question, the last one to grow feathers in the night, was that of why there is something rather than nothing. Was it—that something doesn’t like a wall, or something doesn’t like a vacuum? And why did the image of a posturing British fellow always come along with a revisiting of the question? It seemed to Mr. Bounds that limits pushed against may also be nothing, and sometimes were only not regarded as such for fear of pitching over into an abyss. A dark water perhaps, given the birds and frogs still being heard. No. It seemed likely to be a thinner medium (please, not the ether of that ethereal Brit). An expansion like a breath. No stopping the light and no wish to do so, no matter the consequences. Massless photons bringing shapes back to all things with their always Now of time.

And one night, waiting calmly under the screen for signs of a premier, Mr. Bounds realized he was already in more places than all his dreaming had almost shown him, with nothing at all about to leave for good.

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