The Ones Who Never Left

There was a road, a path, a way. No one remembered who made it. Some say it was always there.

It was simply there, worn into the earth by feet older than memory, the grass pressed flat, the stones turned smooth by passing. It went somewhere. Everyone who walked it knew this, not because they had been told, but because the walking itself told them. Something in the body recognized the direction even when the eyes could not see ahead.

For a long time there were no signs.

Then a man came back.

He had walked the road to its end and returned, and he was changed in ways he could not fully speak. Out of love — only out of love, there was nothing else in him at that moment — he cut a post and set it in the ground at the place where the road began, where it was easy to miss, where the grass had not been pressed down enough to make the path visible to an eye that did not already know to look. He carved an arrow. He pointed it true.

Then he walked back into his life and eventually he died.

Others came. Some saw the sign and walked. Some stood before the sign and felt something move in them and followed it down the road and did not look back. These ones also changed, in the same way the man had changed, in ways they could not fully speak.

But some stood before the sign and found the sign itself remarkable.

They studied it. They measured the angle of the arrow. They debated whether the post was the right wood, whether the carving had been done with sufficient care, whether the man had fully understood what the sign was pointing at when he erected it. They wrote careful accounts of the sign. They taught their children the accounts. They built a shelter over the sign to protect it from weather, and the shelter became a building, and the building became an institution, and the institution appointed keepers, and the keepers kept.

Pilgrims arrived from great distances and were brought before the sign and shown its meaning and examined on their understanding and sent away satisfied. The keepers were kind. They were not corrupt men. They loved the sign with a love that was real, as real as they knew how to make it, and they believed that tending it was the same as honoring what it pointed at.

Far away, in a country where the sign had never been erected, where no one had heard of the man or the arrow he erected or the institution that grew around it, a woman woke before dawn with an ache she could not name. She had felt it for years. She had tried to fill it with the things available to her and none of them had filled it. One morning she simply rose and walked in the direction the ache pulled her and did not stop.

The terrain was hard. There were no markers. There were stretches of darkness where she moved by feel alone, where the only evidence that she was still on a path was that her feet kept finding ground.

She walked for a long time.

She arrived.

She could not have said where she was. She had no words for it that would have satisfied the keepers of the sign, had she ever met them, had they ever thought to ask. But she was there. The thing the ache had always been reaching toward received her, and she was changed, in the way the man had been changed, in ways she could not fully speak.

The keepers still tend the sign.

They are not wicked men. On certain evenings, when the light falls at a particular angle and no one is asking them questions, one of them will sometimes look at the arrow, and follow its direction with his eyes, and feel something he cannot name pull briefly at him, like a current beneath still water.

He looks away. There are duties. He must maintain the sign.

Unaware of Any Sky

Prologue

He does not come when called.

That is the first principle.

One may sit by the pond for hours in pious expectation, rehearsing questions, arranging thoughts as though preparing an audience. He will not come then. He is not a confessor, nor a tutor, nor a domesticated emblem of transformation.

He arrives only when he deigns.

The first time I noticed him—truly noticed him—he hovered at eye level, no more than a yard distant, as if measuring me. His body was a narrow rod of lapis lazuli, his wings vibrating so rapidly they seemed less like appendages and more like a trembling in the air itself.

He did not blink.

Dragonflies do not blink. Their eyes are already nearly all eye—vast compound hemispheres that see in directions the human skull was never designed to accommodate. I felt regarded from angles I did not possess.

“Ah,” I said, aloud and foolishly.

He moved neither closer nor farther. Suspended. Exact.

Then he departed—straight upward, without arc, as if gravity had briefly reconsidered its commitments.

The pond resumed its composure.

I

He hunts with an efficiency bordering on arrogance.

Mosquitoes vanish in his vicinity. He arrests midair, pivots without visible preparation, reverses direction as though inertia were advisory rather than binding. His wings move independently, a subtle asymmetry that produces impossible steadiness.

I watched him for weeks before admitting that I had begun to wait.

He kept no schedule.

Some afternoons he skimmed the surface in quick patrols. Other days he did not come at all. When he landed upon a reed, it was never the same reed twice.

No pattern was to be discerned.

His body caught light differently depending on angle—blue one moment, green the next, then nearly black. It was possible I had seen three different dragonflies and had, out of preference, consolidated them into one.

The pond did not clarify the matter.

Once, he settled on the sleeve of my coat. The weight was negligible; the steadiness was not. I could see the articulation of the thorax, the delicate architecture of the wings, the vast curvature of the eyes.

Only precision.

He departed without hesitation.

II

Before there were wings, there was silt.

The nymph does not glitter. It does not hover in sunlight. It does not arrest the eye of a passerby and cause him to pause mid-thought. It lives in suspension among weeds and sediment, armored, blunt, patient. Its color is the color of concealment.

It breathes through hidden gills. It moves by impulse, expelling water from its own body to lunge forward in short, decisive bursts. The hinged jaw—an apparatus both ingenious and faintly grotesque—extends and retracts with mechanical precision. It is not beautiful. It is efficient.

Years pass in this element.

Above, seasons turn with spectacle. Leaves flame and fall. Snow forms and recedes. Children shout and depart. The sky performs its elaborate variations. Beneath, the nymph waits.

It feeds. It molts. It grows by increments invisible to any watching eye.

There is no rehearsal of flight.

No hint of iridescence.

Only duration.

I had known such water.

Not mud in any literal sense, but rooms where light was steady and unremarkable. Shelves heavy with volumes that few opened. Papers drafted and redrafted with care disproportionate to their audience. Sentences weighed not for applause but for consequence.

Most of my adult life had been spent parsing language that determined outcomes. Words examined for fissures. Clauses tightened against ambiguity. Arguments constructed to withstand scrutiny, though scrutiny rarely arrived with drama. It was a discipline of precision rather than spectacle.

Years accumulated.

There were no headlines. No sudden recognitions. No visible ascent. Only the quiet refinement of judgment, the slow correction of error, the recognition—hard-won—that certainty often masks impatience.

At the time, I did not think of it as formation.

It felt, more often than not, like sediment.

I read when others preferred summary. I annotated when others skimmed. I held to arguments unfashionable but internally coherent. I resisted certain enthusiasms not from contrarian instinct but from suspicion of haste.

None of this made me luminous.

The pond’s surface remained undisturbed.

I sometimes wondered whether I had mistaken depth for obscurity. Whether the refusal of spectacle was discipline or merely temperament. Whether the years were accumulating meaning or merely accumulating.

The nymph does not ask these questions.

It consumes what passes within reach. It survives. It grows until its exoskeleton tightens against further expansion. Then it splits and sheds, leaving behind the evidence of enlargement.

I, too, had shed skins. Positions once held firmly, later abandoned without ceremony. Assumptions relinquished not in crisis but in attrition. Convictions refined by encounter with stubborn fact.

But the shedding was not dramatic.

No one marked the reed.

The husks fell unnoticed.

If there was preparation, it was not for display. If there was transformation, it was gradual enough to escape detection. The years beneath the surface did not whisper of eventual flight. They whispered only of continuation.

When I first learned that a dragonfly might live two or three years submerged and only weeks in the air, I resisted the symmetry. It felt too convenient. Too consoling.

Was I to believe that duration beneath the surface is always apprenticeship? That obscurity is inherently preparatory? That waiting is purposeful?

The pond did not confirm it.

The nymph hunts because it must. It waits because there is no alternative. It grows because growth is the consequence of survival, not of design.

It does not know the sky.

Perhaps that is the truest thing.

I had not known the sky either. Not in any luminous sense. There had been no moment of sudden iridescence, no public ascent, no season in which I hovered brilliantly over the surface of things.

And yet, I remained.

The nymph remains.

Years pass in water that reflects nothing of what is forming below.

One evening, after watching the dragonfly depart without landing, I walked the perimeter of the pond and found an empty shell clinging to a reed. The thorax split cleanly along the seam. The legs fixed in their final grip. The mask of the face intact but hollow.

It was lighter than I expected.

I held it between thumb and forefinger and felt the frailty of what had once been armored.

No sentiment accompanied the discovery.

Only recognition.

The shell crumbled in my hand.

The pond held its surface.

And somewhere below, another nymph waited, unaware of any sky.

III

The next afternoon, I brought a camera.

He appeared almost immediately.

He hovered above the shallows, then settled upon a low branch. I adjusted the lens. The viewfinder reduced him to framing—wings, thorax, angle, depth.

The shutter clicked.

He lifted.

The image, when examined later, was competent. The wings caught mid-beat. The eyes sharp. The background softened into abstraction.

He looked contained.

The following days passed without visitation.

The pond remained.

Wind disturbed the surface. A heron stood in the shallows. Insects moved in small, unnoticed arcs.

The camera remained on the desk.

Waiting resumed without apparatus.

IV

He had not come in eleven days.

I counted without meaning to. The mind, deprived of its irregular visitation, begins to mark absence the way it once marked presence.

The pond continued without him.

Mornings arrived grey and then brightened. The reeds thickened toward autumn. A skin of algae moved slowly across the northern shallows, indifferent to season or witness.

I read. I worked. The kettle was filled and emptied and filled again.

On the eleventh night I dreamt of forests.

Not forests I had seen. Not the managed woodlands of memory, thinned by path and signage, explained by a placard at the trail’s edge. These were older. The air was thick and warm and carried a weight that modern air has forgotten. Ferns rose to the height of buildings. Moss covered everything with the patience of something that had never known urgency.

The light was greenish. Diffuse.

They moved through it slowly.

Enormous. Wings like pale membranes stretched across frameworks of impossible delicacy. Wingspans wider than my arms extended. Bodies long as my forearm, hovering without effort in air that seemed designed to receive them.

There were many.

I stood among the ferns and was not frightened.

One descended to my level.

It regarded me with eyes that were almost entirely eye.

It said:

“We were here before your certainties.”

Nothing more.

I did not respond.

It ascended without haste.

The forest continued.

I woke before dawn. The room was dark and familiar. The books on their shelves. The papers where I had left them.

I made tea.

The dream did not feel symbolic. It felt geological — the way certain facts settle past argument into simple weight. Three hundred million years. Before birds. Before flowers. Before anything that called itself a thought had moved through any skull.

They had flown through all of it.

I drank the tea at the window.

The pond was dark, the reeds motionless.

I did not write the dream down.

Some things are diminished by record.

He did not appear that day.

Nor the next.

The dream did not repeat.

V

He returned on the fifteenth day.

The color was less decisive. The lapis lazuli had dulled toward iron. The wings, when he settled, did not lie as cleanly along the body. One bore a slight tear near the margin, visible when the light struck it.

He lifted, hovered, adjusted, then settled again.

The motion was precise.

The pond had begun its turn toward autumn. Insects were fewer. The evenings cooled without declaration.

He hunted as before.

If there was diminishment, it was not in capacity but in surface.

He remained longer than usual.

The sun moved. The light changed temperature.

He lifted without ceremony and crossed the pond once, low, then rose beyond the far bank and vanished into trees I could not see through.

Fear, when unexamined, seeks climax. It wants a marked ending — a final landing that can be named as such. The pond offers no such assurances.

The absence was not dramatic.

It was seasonal.

VI

The mornings arrived colder.

Mist held briefly above the water before lifting without trace. The reeds stood rigid at their bases. The algae withdrew and thinned.

There were fewer insects now.

No blue crossed the line between reeds.

The branch where he had once settled bore no mark of preference.

The pond clarified as the season advanced. Stones along the bottom became visible. A fallen limb half-buried in silt. The slow movement of something unseen slipping between shadows.

Nothing announced absence.

It settled.

One morning the surface lay entirely still.

The water reflected the sky without distortion.

The light moved across it without instruction.

A thin skin formed at the northern edge and broke before noon.

The reeds inclined slightly in wind too distant to be felt on shore.

No visitation followed.

No summation arrived.

The pond continued.

The surface held.

And beneath it, something moved—unaware of any sky.

Of Goose and Grin: When Tales Step Off the Page

What happens when the characters tumble from their tales? When rhyme stumbles, and the Goose remembers? In this playful and poignant poem, nursery rhymes unravel, fairy tales awaken, and the stories themselves walk past their plots. “Once Upon Askew” is a whimsical reflection on the lives of stories—and those who dwell within them.

child reading book in front of shelves of books — Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

Once Upon Askew

or, The Story That Would Not Sit Still
by Donald S. Yarab

Listen, child—I am the Old Grey Goose,
And I was there when books came loose,
When volumes tumbled, pages flew,
And all the stories mixed like stew.

It started with a mighty thud—
Books falling open, words like mud,
All swirling, mingling, line by line,
Till Alice’s world came mixing into mine.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” she cried,
Right into Cow’s green pasture-side,
Where “Hey Diddle Diddle” used to play—
Now Cow asks questions all the day.

The Spoon caught Alice’s strange delight,
Abandoned dishes, fled by night,
Beneath a moon from whose bright story—
From Carroll’s tale or Goose’s glory?

I squawked from my own tumbled page—
Which book? What tale? What ancient age?
While Cat’s grin stretched across our scene,
Belonging nowhere, everywhere seen.

We passed the wall where once he sat—
Poor Humpty, puzzled, round, and flat.
Though patched, he watches, cracked but clear,
And murmurs, “Not all ends end in fear.”

But one lay still beyond the swirl—
A slumbering, untouched young girl.
The tales all passed; she did not wake,
No prince, no plot her trance to break.
Yet in her stillness, something stirred—
A dream not shaped by spoken word.

We found Red Riding Hood alone,
Her basket lost, her sure path gone.
The Wolf came next—not sly, but stunned,
As if unsure what he had done.
They walked apart, then side by side,
Two stories stripped of fear and pride,
Each wondering if what they knew
Was ever really, wholly true.

So off we walked, this mixed-up crew:
Alice with questions, Cow with moo
That carried wisdom, Spoon with light
From every moon and every night.

Behind us trailed the broken bits—
Half-rhymes and verbs that sought their fits,
Metaphors in mismatched dancing shoes,
Still seeking out their missing clues.

No longer bound by story’s rules,
We’d become something new, no fools—
Not quite the characters we’d been,
Not free of them—but in between.

And hovering above our band,
That smile from Cheshire’s distant land—
A grin that needs no cat to hold,
A question that will not be told.

This is what happens, child, you see,
When stories tumble, wild and free—
They find they’re more alike than not,
And walk together past their plot.

The Weight of Existence: Sisyphus’ New Dawn

**Franz von Stuck, *Sisyphus* (1920)**
Oil on canvas, 103 × 89 cm. Galerie Ritthaler, Munich.
© Collection Galerie Ritthaler.

“Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.”
(“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”)
—Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942)

But perhaps he was mistaken.
Perhaps the truth is simpler:
When the stone is gone, the man remains.

Sisyphus Undone; or, It Was Tuesday

by Donald S. Yarab

He rose, as ever, with the morning’s breath,
the hill still steep, the silence oddly wide.
No stone to greet him with its weight or will—
no groan of earth, no task to be defied.

The gods were gone. Their laughter had grown faint,
or else the air refused to carry sound.
The path he wore through centuries lay bare,
a scar now healing into senseless ground.

He searched for signs: a crack, a trace, a mark,
but found no proof that toil had ever been.
His hands, once strong with strain, now idle hung,
still shaped by burdens long dissolved within.

He sat. The dust rose lightly at his knee.
A lark began to sing, then flew away.
The sky, untroubled, held no word for him.
The world had turned. It was another day.

What is the self when labor fades to wind?
What is the myth once struggle slips its chain?
He breathed. No answer stirred the lucid air.
The hill was whole. The man was left, and plain.

Thin Books Are Dangerous

**“Every door leads deeper. Every step farther from certainty.”**
(Samuel van Hoogstraten, Perspective View of a Corridor, 1662, oil on canvas)

Prefatory Note

In my youth — now roughly four decades past — while studying the slender yet profound Itinerarium Mentis in Deum of St. Bonaventure, there arose in my mind a simple observation: “Thin books are dangerous.” By their brevity, they conceal depths which the unwary may mistake for shallows. By their compactness, they pierce more swiftly, and leave marks more enduring than tomes of a thousand pages.

The small variations presented below draw their form, though not their genius, from the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges — that master of mirrors, labyrinths, and forgotten libraries. If there is any virtue herein, it is owed to his example; if there is error, it is mine alone.

May the reader proceed with care, for the thinnest books, and perhaps the thinnest tales, are those most difficult to escape.

“The shortest books require the longest penance.”
— Anonymous marginal note, Biblioteca Laurenziana

I. The Library of Thin Books

In the city of Aram, whose streets no cartographer has ever agreed upon, there was once a secret library known only to a few scholars and fewer fools. It was said to contain the sum of human knowledge, but organized strangely: the thick books were shelved in dusty catacombs, seldom touched, while the thin books were kept in a bright chamber at the center, on shelves of polished cedar.

The Keeper of the Library explained this arrangement to all who entered: “The thick books are for forgetting. The thin books are for believing.”

Each thin book contained a single idea, expressed so perfectly that it resisted all argument. Sovereignty Belongs to the Strong was one book. The World is a Dream of the Gods was another. Still another was simply titled Obey.

Visitors who read the thick books emerged thoughtful and burdened, full of hesitations, counterexamples, and second thoughts. Visitors who read the thin books emerged transformed: resolute, fervent, certain.

Over time, it was not the heavy tomes that shaped Aram’s kings, priests, and scholars, but the thin volumes, read once and carried forever.

It is said that the city of Aram fell, not through invasion, nor famine, nor pestilence, but because, in the end, its citizens each lived by the idea of a different thin book, and could no longer understand one another.

The Library still stands, or so the story goes, though its doors are sealed and the books grow thinner by the century.

There is a final book, the thinnest of all, placed at the highest shelf where none but the Keeper can reach. It contains no words at all.

Its title is: Certainty.

⁂

II. The Shadows of the Books

There is a city — it does not matter which — where it is rumored that a second library exists beneath the great Library of Learned Tomes.

The surface library, the Library of Learned Tomes, is a noble place: its corridors are vast, its tomes heavy with ink and argument, and its readers slow, uncertain, weighed down by the burden of complexity. No truth is simple there; every assertion is marked and belied by a hundred footnotes, every conclusion bruised by rebuttal.

But below, beneath stone and time, there is another library. It is said to be vast but weightless. There, one finds only thin books — so thin they seem at times to flicker in the light, as if they might vanish.

Scholars, sensing the rumors, sometimes descend. They find books titled with dangerous simplicity: Justice is the Right of the Victorious, History is the Story We Tell Ourselves, The Future is Written.

Each thin book feels familiar. And well it should. For these thin books are the shadows of the thick books above¹: each vast, tangled treatise, compressed into a single, unassailable maxim.

The discovery at first seems marvelous. Why wrestle with a thousand pages when the essence can be grasped in a sentence? Why debate, when the answer can be carried in one’s pocket, ready for all occasions?

But the thin books are not summaries; they are distortions. They are what remains when doubt, nuance, and contradiction are stripped away. They are the husks of thought — seductive because they seem lighter, easier, final.

In time, those who read only the thin books come to mistrust the thick ones. They grow impatient with questions, contemptuous of ambiguity, zealous for a clarity that admits no appeal.

Some say that it was not neglect but the rise of the thin books that doomed the upper Library. That the heavy volumes grew dusty because the city’s rulers and citizens alike began to prefer the glimmer of certainty to the slow, earned labor of understanding.

In the end, the Library of Learned Tomes collapsed inward like a drained well. And the shadow library, weightless and triumphant, remained.

Somewhere, perhaps, it still remains.

Somewhere, perhaps, it is growing.

⁂

III. Coda: A Reflection in the Labyrinth

Some say that even the tale you have just read — the account of the thick and the thin, the surface and the shadow — is itself no more than a thin book: a single idea, polished to gleam, shorn of its necessary doubts.

If so, it is but one more glimmer in the labyrinth.

One more reflection upon reflections, cast by a candle already guttering.

One more danger to remember, and to forget.

IV. Scholium

¹ Cf. the lost Tractatus de Umbris Librorum (“Treatise on the Shadows of Books”), attributed to the forgotten scholar Balthasar of Istria (fl. late 13th century), who wrote: “The greater the volume, the more labyrinths it contains; the thinner the shadow it casts, the more swiftly it pierces the heart.” No complete manuscript survives, though fragments are said to be embedded in certain marginal glosses of the Biblioteca Laurenziana. Some dispute the existence of Balthasar himself, suggesting he is merely the invention of later compilers seeking to dignify their own thinness with the patina of lost antiquity.