issue one / serendipity
beside His olive tree
Ian Monchesky
I only met him twice.
First, halfway up a mountain in Newfoundland, his face a patchwork of
rain tarps, prayer rugs and book spines.
Never had conversation been so steep, abstractions
theorized, truth sliced into bite sized falsity, grinning as he tore down tenets before my very eyes.
Leashed by words in stride, my mind
woven and strung by ripe demeanor, fruits hand picked but
not hand fed, chewing on bitter philosophies
amid broken olive branches.
Gasping every sunken step inclined, our
rests punctuated by breathless regret; a
lawless lawyer, his son, guiding clients to
forbidden fruit, decomposing in the dumpsters of
backend burger joints. His daughter, an
educationless engineer, her DNA coiled in
non-Euclidean artistry. Sneering as he recounts
morals twisted in inconsistent helixes,
truth characterized by quantum mechanical drives.
In life, he told me, probabilities reign
when you're not looking.
Lightning, he taught me, strikes twice. I didn't
understand until, a decade older, I found him
slouched in a coffee shop, espresso cold, his children tending to his wits' end.
Only when they left did I
slip into his cracked leather,
his eyes leveled with mine.
He spoke kindly enough, spilling
atrophied anecdotes, mouth agape, asking who I was.
Today, I read his obituary.
I found it published online, his words
cataloged, archived, dust lined,
abridged in three sentences of
hereditary guise.
In my backyard, I seeded an olive tree, standing alone despite snow and cobbled stone, his last
anachronistic shrine.
First, halfway up a mountain in Newfoundland, his face a patchwork of
rain tarps, prayer rugs and book spines.
Never had conversation been so steep, abstractions
theorized, truth sliced into bite sized falsity, grinning as he tore down tenets before my very eyes.
Leashed by words in stride, my mind
woven and strung by ripe demeanor, fruits hand picked but
not hand fed, chewing on bitter philosophies
amid broken olive branches.
Gasping every sunken step inclined, our
rests punctuated by breathless regret; a
lawless lawyer, his son, guiding clients to
forbidden fruit, decomposing in the dumpsters of
backend burger joints. His daughter, an
educationless engineer, her DNA coiled in
non-Euclidean artistry. Sneering as he recounts
morals twisted in inconsistent helixes,
truth characterized by quantum mechanical drives.
In life, he told me, probabilities reign
when you're not looking.
Lightning, he taught me, strikes twice. I didn't
understand until, a decade older, I found him
slouched in a coffee shop, espresso cold, his children tending to his wits' end.
Only when they left did I
slip into his cracked leather,
his eyes leveled with mine.
He spoke kindly enough, spilling
atrophied anecdotes, mouth agape, asking who I was.
Today, I read his obituary.
I found it published online, his words
cataloged, archived, dust lined,
abridged in three sentences of
hereditary guise.
In my backyard, I seeded an olive tree, standing alone despite snow and cobbled stone, his last
anachronistic shrine.
Ian Monchesky (he/him) is a 17 year old writer and former competitive swimmer based in Halifax, N.S. He is the Co-Founder and Editor-In-Chief of Wild Thyme Literary, a literary journal targeted at young, developing artists. He is currently in the editing phase of his novel, Reflections. When he's not writing, he can be found getting hopelessly lost while hiking through the woods.