{"id":1494,"date":"2008-12-02T09:38:13","date_gmt":"2008-12-02T09:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=1494"},"modified":"2008-12-02T09:38:13","modified_gmt":"2008-12-02T09:38:13","slug":"mark-reep-has-seen-the-umbrella-of-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/mark-reep-has-seen-the-umbrella-of-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reep has seen the umbrella of the future"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Umbrella of the Future<\/span>
 
\n<\/span>


\nSarah finds the clicker, turns on the TV, sips her tea, waits.  Cold
\nmornings lately, the little Sony seems sluggish, slow to wake.  Sarah
\nhopes it\u2019s not dying, hopes this is just a winter thing.  Imagines a
\nsmall black animal, old, squarish, sedentary.  Dreaming colorful TV
\ndreams, waking reluctantly, shivering a little.  Regaining its capacity
\nfor speech first: \u201cNext- Is this the umbrella of the future?\u201d someone
\nat the Weather Channel says.  By the time the screen has brightened,
\npicture wholly coalesced, they\u2019ve gone to a commercial. <\/span>


~ ~ ~ ~ ~<\/span>


Alder Run<\/span>
 <\/span>

Midnight or thereabouts, on the way home.  Climbing the long slow third-gear hill up out of Alder Run, too steep, too rough to make in fourth.  A low rolling dust plume rising unhurriedly behind, drifting downslope toward the darkened houses on the left. <\/span>
 <\/span>
Passing the last, imagining what someone lying in bed there hears, or dreams of: An old truck pulling but not hard, reaching the treeline now, the sound of its steady labor growing fainter.<\/span>
 <\/span>
Near the crest of the hill, where the woods give way again to wide fields, a car\u2019s backed into the mouth of a farmer\u2019s lane.  The dome light\u2019s on inside; a girl\u2019s sitting at the wheel.  Apparently alone, perhaps waiting for someone, she watches me go by. <\/span>
 <\/span>
Be safe, kid.<\/span>
 <\/span>
The threatened storms must have passed elsewhere; it\u2019s clear now, but still warm: A perfect summer night, the kind we used to spend outside, lying on our backs, looking at the stars, talking.  Why don\u2019t we have time for that anymore. <\/span>
 <\/span>
Off at the edge of the headlights\u2019 beams, a passing landmark: A rusty stub of capped casing from a gas well sixty years abandoned.  I smell new-mown hay, roll my window down the rest of the way. <\/span>
 <\/span>
 <\/span>
 * Mark Reep says “I\u2019m an artist and writer based in New York\u2019s Fingerlakes region. My prose has been published online in <\/span>Read This<\/span> and <\/span>Gloom Cupboard<\/span>, and my drawings have been featured in <\/span>American Art Collector<\/span>. <\/span>

<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Umbrella of the Future  Sarah finds the clicker, turns on the TV, sips her tea, waits.  Cold mornings lately, the little Sony seems sluggish, slow to wake.  Sarah hopes it\u2019s not dying, hopes this is just a winter thing.  Imagines a small black animal, old, squarish, sedentary.  Dreaming colorful TV dreams, waking reluctantly, shivering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}