Boys in the park wrestle
All elbows
Throw their stones, draw blood
Panting with toy pistols in hand
Firing caps across the field or at the sky
Obscenities and executions
Repeated as if in rehearsal

They spot him coming
Cheeks red from windburn, lips chapped
Wet like he fell into a fountain
Dragging behind him the entire cosmos
They stop what they are doing to watch his approach
Day has had the light choked out of it
The Dead Man raises his hands in surrender

…

Tristan Foster is a writer from Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father and 926 Years, co-authored with Kyle Coma-Thompson.