Gap in the Grid

by Matt Briggs

AT COSTCO, WHILE WAITING FOR MY TIRES TO BE FIXED, I went for a walk along the Green River. I am at the Tukwila CostCo on a road named after the warehouses. I am in the parking lot of an office park of small businesses in warehouses. A stand of cotton-wood trees surrounds a pond that at first, I take to be an oxbow of the Green River, a slough of wet land. I walk along the Green River flowing from the south. The river runs from the slopes of the Cascades south of Black Diamond from the Cedar River Watershed in the jungle of passes where I-90 passes over the central Cascades. The Green River used to be joined by the Mount Rainier glacier fed White River and then the two rivers empties into the Black River at Lake Washington, but things changed the flow. A massive log jam flipped the White River from the channel going north to the west, where it emptied out into Commencement Bay in Tacoma. The lowering of Lake Washington caused the Green River to shift into the Duwamish River channel. The Green River now changes names in Tukwila to the Duwamish. The entire valley floor of the Kent valley feels the echoes of these changes. This is land given over from the cultivation of vegetables to office parks of little warehouses.

A Curtain of Darkness

by Matt Briggs

I woke on the Sunday before my work week began after a week off during the Fourth of July with a massive shape in my left eye. It appeared like a hole in my field of vision. That is, it appeared like something that wasn’t.

As I stared at it, I could see through it like a slip of cellophane stained with spaghetti grease. The shape obscured an 1/16 of my vision in the lower left-hand side of my left eye. It disappeared as suddenly as it appeared when I wasn’t staring at the wall near my bed. When I closed my eye I could see a halo of this visual disturbance in my inner eye, on my eyelid, or whatever it was that I was looking at when I was looking when my eyes were closed. I vaguely remember seeing this object before I went to bed, but I couldn’t be sure. In any case in the early morning it seemed to have vanished like other objects in my eyes have vanished before. I thought it has some artifact from my reading light like I had stared into the book light without realizing it. I didn’t want to think about it.

An Education in Lies

by Matt Briggs

When I returned from Basic Training, I started looking for classes to take in writing. I was just past the registration date for the University of Washington Experimental College where there was a short story class taught by Richard Berman, M.F.A. The title at the end of his name, tacked on like P.H.D. seemed to indicate a professional status as a writer, certification by a board that confirmed his abilities as a genuine writer, although I was unsure what it meant. I had missed the registration date, but I called the school in the off chance there might still be a spot. They took my name, and I thought that was it, I had missed my chance this quarter to study writing. I viewed this as a major setback because I only had nine months before I went to Whitman College in Walla Walla and I intended to have a novel finished before I went. Every week counted. I had to prove to myself that I could become a writer. I had a schedule to follow. As I understood it, it was a lot of work to write a novel.

Genre of Silence

by Matt Briggs

My Father and the Genre of Silence

My father died in 2011 and left behind him a rebuilt red Chevy Super Impala convertible 1968, a couple of houses, and about a half dozen shoeboxes full of several thousand photographs of the Central Cascade mountains. I hadn’t spoken with my father for five years before his death. Even before even though my dad had a lot to say and said it, his conversation was hardly intimate or even interactive. He delivered monologues that precluded any type of exchange. His talk was the superficial “How’s the weather,” sort of talk. His main line of conversation was to deliver very long monologues about his hikes in the Alpine Lake Wilderness area. If this sounds kind of boring and event abstract, it was. And he could not handle any sort of interruption. Although I quickly lost a sense of what river basin he was in, or which ridge line he was following, he told these stories with a kind of urgency. It was a bit like listening to a lab rat narrate his passage through a maze. Only at the end there wasn’t cheese, but rather my father’s attempt to describe the view from a remote mountain crag.

Seattle is a Vortex

by Matt Briggs

I often stumble into a new part of Seattle. The smell of freshly poured concrete and sprayed paint creates a sensation like vertigo, like standing on top of the Aurora Bridge, staring down into the ship canal and realizing I’m standing on a shell of asphalt and concrete and steel wrapping the wind and current and muck. I might stand on a Seattle street with crowds milling around me next to a ten-story structure. Only three months ago that high-rise didn’t exist. Only twenty-years ago, the previous building didn’t even exist as a blueprint. A hundred and fifty years ago (a catnap in the life of most cities) Seattle didn’t exist at all. The shock of Seattle’s instant architecture makes me keenly aware that all of this asphalt, concrete, steel is just a by-product of something else. I’ve run into this sensation enough now since the building spree started when I was fifteen (and maybe it was like this before?) that the sensation no longer really causes a shock but merely a sense of movement, like stepping onto a bus. On a Seattle street, I expect to hear the keen of seagulls, smell Elliott Bay brine, and have this sense of architectural vertigo. I’ve stumbled into new skyscrapers. I’ve walked along the waterfront and realized I had somehow entered into a new convention center. I’ve spilled out of a movie theater crowd onto an oddly familiar street corner and realized I came out of a mall that stands where something else stood that I thought still existed even though I couldn’t quite recall what was there before.

Pacific Highway South: Best American Strip City

by Matt Briggs

Walking the Dog

I live across the street from a swampy vacant lot. Cottonwoods grow on the lot’s margins, and around the lot there are houses, apartment buildings, highways. There are a lot of people who never see one another.

A bird’s nest, empty most of the time except during the spring migration, clings to the cottonwood closest to my subdivision.

Fred Is Dead

by Matt Briggs Hhhh

My uncle was obsessed with being alive to the point where he didn’t live at all. He filled a cardboard box with free verse, a landfill with green bottles and a tin urn with his ashes. When I was first aware of him, he was growing things out, weird like Howard Hughes. Uncle Fred decided to grow a whisker under his chin as long as it would grow. It grew and grew like a long fishing line. I asked him if people stepped on his whisker. It was that long.

Flag Ceremony

by Matt Briggs

Sometime after I had been in my Army basic training unit long enough, I knew how to polish my boots until the surface held a thin, buffed glaze richer than the spay-on polish applied by the Drill Sergeants. The aerosol shine left a mucous sheen still shiny even after trail dirt and field dust coated their heels. I knew how to take my time stripping down the excess, black Kiwi wax and then applying a light touch and buffing the leather with my brush. My brush softened after hours of back and forth blows across the boots. I kept both pairs of my boots rotating on my feet unlike most of my more clever bunkmates. They kept one pair highly polished, ready-to-go. The other pair they wore. They could be instantly ready-to-go for inspection. The problem with this was that their polished, inspection ready-to-go pair remained unbroken. Their feet blistered just standing in line during inspection. And if they had to march in those boots, I didn’t want to be around when they peeled back their socks and their skin pulled away from the meat on their heels in white, fluid filled bubbles. I kept both pairs worn and ready and after some time they became more comfortable than tennis shoes. Weeks later after Basic Training when I finally put on the old pair of KEDs I’d worn to Fort Dix, the sneakers with their thin, faded canvas felt light and inconsequential, really. They were hardly on my feet compared to the bulk and weight and authority of my army boots. They felt as though I wore socks. I liked the additional height in the stacked, rubber heels of the army boots. I liked the sound they made on the crumbling cement walkway where we drilled.