When I purchased the notebook, I could not guess that halfway through my writing in it my father’s light would flicker and go out. I continued to write as diligently as a schoolboy in that blue, lined notebook...a daily set of notes and observations, sketches for stories, lines of poetry. One of the fierce insults of death is that the world appears so little changed: overdue notices arrive from the library, charitable organizations telephone to ask the deceased to make a donation this year, chatty letters arrive from friends who haven’t heard the news and chatty letters arrive from friends who have.

Fool that I am, I never write dates in my journal. I did not write about the funeral, the condolence letters, the awful task of finding the right words to be chiseled into the headstone. Today, many years later, I open that journal, sure that I can tell before and after by tone and diction alone. But there are no great rift valleys in my notebook, no chasms. The words flow smooth and seamless from page to page: an idea here, a recorded café conversation there, elsewhere, the colors and behavior of a cardinal or flicker in a friend’s garden. The world in words a continuing fiction, spider-traced in black fountain pen ink. Unaltered.

—Second Honorable Mention in the KYSO Flash Triple-F Writing Challenge

Tony Eprile

is the author of The Persistence of Memory (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), a coming-of-age novel set in South Africa, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and listed as a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. His collection of short fiction, Temporary Sojourner, and Other South African Stories (Simon & Schuster, 1989; reissued by PFP Publishing, 2011), was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

His stories appear in Flash Fiction International, Agni, Ploughshares, Post Road, StoryQuarterly, and elsewhere. He is on the fiction faculty of Lesley University’s low-residency MFA Program.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ An Interview with Tony Eprile by poet Marcela Sulak in The Ilanot Review (Autumn 2011, Vol. 3, No. 2)