A Soft Edge.

I put down the little black book and placed it on the desk next to the four piles of cash.

Neat piles. Ten times ten times fifty times four. It’s important for me to stay organized. Have I told you already ? I forget things. To alter the system, to use three or five piles, I would need to incessantly recount it. Quietly flustering through sheaves of Ulysses S. Grant’s judiciary stare, attempting to avoid eye contact. Lost in my own wallet.

This sunlit scene of a little black book and four stacks of cash is as familiar to me as the face awaiting you in the mirror on your next trip to the bathroom.

If I took a photo of this scene, these four piles of cash, from my brain, the observant of you might notice that it had been repeatedly exposed on the same film. Each time offset by an infinitesimal amount.

That same person may also note, important details such as the table’s edge are shifted just enough to allude the image had been re-captured innumerable times. A soft edge forever obscuring which layer was first. Sepia seeped into the cellulose of who I was and the record of who I wasn’t. I was here now. Again.

I think I was once a psychologist or a possibly a hypnotist?

I am now simply constituent matter, a woven mat returned to thread, to factory fungible material. An automaton inventor who had perfected a consistent repeatable procedure, to take apart a person into re-usable, recyclable form. A reverse Frankenstein’s monster.

Only problem is I’ve done it so many times I’ve forgotten how I did it.

Beyond a tinker-toy personality set, I had also perfected second system.

A system of arriving in a new town and setting about sewing social constructs within corner-shop-pie sized servings of small talk. An unassuming elbow touch here, a local euphemism inserted at a crucial moment a conversation lulled. Inhabiting the soul of ‘Oh that guy? You just missed him. He’s been here forever, but don’t quite recall which town he came over from. A town or two over at most’.

Sometimes I see people on the news that look like me, or at least how I think I used to look. Not that I could tell you in any certain detail what I look like. I look familiar, like that cousin. Of no real determinate age, no real specific ethnicity. Regional accents I can slip into like flip-flops, right down to their dip-thongs. That part I enjoy.

I like to think of myself as an in-between person. I don’t know if there are more of us, but how could there not be.

In fact I don’t exactly know what I do. I don’t think I kill people, but more than once, there have been questionable items to wash, once I myself had been through a rinse cycle.

Prior to my success, I was already quite good at forgetting things. Why I now doodle so often, to record the moments that are important for me, permeate me. Capture that texture that inter-substantiates us all.

What is it I sketch you ask ? Patterns of surfaces of coffee shop tables, the mischievous glint of a door knob worn to a gleam, squirrels. The corner stones of buildings.

Immutable things that people and society revolve around, permanent things with soft edges that hold society together. I am of these things.

I do have three only’s. My only note-able possession is a shoebox of pocket sized sketchbooks.

I only sketch in permanent ink. I only keep the cornerstone sketches.

The contents of each book is the same.

On the right facing page of these books is a clean, think ink line sketch of a cornerstone of a building. Clearly and faithfully reproducing the name of the structure, inscription, date, and azimuth appropriate shadows variable by the time of day.

On the left facing page of every spread is a bleak onyx smear of thick marker. When I flip through the earlier bushels of this harvest, I’m frustrated when the ink has seeped back onto the cornerstone sketch on the page before. I like to keep some details straight. Despite my fretting, paper is as susceptible to memories bleeding through it’s skin as I am. I shall set aside some of this stacked money to purchase heavier weight paper.

Returning to these four stacks of neatly piled money.

When they appeared this morning, my body knew what to do.

The black book didn’t seem so little now.

It wasn’t the first time I had picked up the marker.

It wasn’t the first time I turned to the last page on the left.

It wasn't the last time I would smear out my name.