Ian M. Anderson

Fever has sent me spiraling into the past, I smell the ancient dust in Lessingham's parlor, and now the newsprint, upon which I saw his name for the first time, rises out of that same fog I thought I escaped. -- But no! His is the nightmare, and I'm sure of it! He possesses what each man longs to take of his own accord. Yes, his is the nightmare. *** I was young and building a name for myself as an art dealer. No family of my own to restrict my travels, I was eager to find a rarity, something no one looked for or expected to exist, something ancient. The normal studios and art shows wouldn't do. I learned the names of those who sold what they did not own and reaped what they did not sow. A man named Daha led me to Lessingham. Daha had collected a map of sorts, a trail of clippings, stolen manifests, and ill-got receipts that led, he said, to this Lessingham and the astonishing pieces in his possession. He twisted in his seat and pulled at his cigarette when I asked h...

Our little one -- there! the boy crouched within the yellow forsythia blossoms -- he waits beyond his years, is patient as an old man is forced to be patient, for he hunts the butterflies that will soon come to this bright corner of the yard; no, he does not hunt them as most boys would, for a collection. He wants their sound. All else he's captured: the colors, the shapes, delicate both, but isn't the sound impossible? More delicate than their wings, than the multitude of scales we call "dust," is the sound wave created by the flap and dip of the butterfly. Boy is covered in pollen. The skin on his forearms sticks to the skin on his biceps. Behind him, the sun is reluctant to set, and his eyes blink away tears from the glare reflecting off the tall windows a few feet away. A flurry of excited sparrows fill the branches surrounding him, one or two mistaking his head and knee for forsythia. Their argument swirls and expands to the nearby turf, to the maple trees on t...