—After The New York Window by Childe Hassam*

I read “widow” in the title every time. A woman in composite pose, painted in the year of a great ship’s encounter with an iceberg. A sluice of light makes ice of the figure’s dress. But the window imposes, its proportions wide and tall. Sheer curtains challenge old impressions with a cubist’s view of city and sky. Past and future blur here, melding, melting. A bowl of untouched fruit glows nearby; I supply a fly, flitting there in sudden parabolas about plums and grapes. The trappings of a still life, anonymous in its bounty and indifference to it. The woman almost sleeps. The sleep of grief, perhaps. The path of grief best shown not in tears, but in turning away. She waits in a waiting place. Nothing in the coming day requiring her leave to appear, or vanish.

* The New York Window (oil painting on canvas, 1912), by American artist [Frederick] Childe Hassam (1859-1935), is held by the National Gallery of Art:
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.166494.html
(link retrieved on 22 December 2023).

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