Ephemeral Rift: A Book in Forty-Four Movements

A second-person portrait of a life, rendered across twenty-three chapters with forty-four short writings threaded throughout. At the center is a man of fifty-four, in Pennsylvania, who has been many things - a son, a husband, a father, a voice on the internet - and who has recently become a writer. The book walks backward and forward through his years, surfacing, at each turn, one of the forty-four: a line scratched under a classroom desk; a prayer rerouted by a single-letter typo; a sentence said once to a stranger on a bus; an inscription inside a wedding ring. Each of the forty-four arrives in a different way. Some are carved, some whispered, some cached by a smart device and returned later, some never written down at all. Together they form a life lived through accumulation rather than chronology - the residue a person leaves in the world where he was, for long stretches, trying not to be noticed. The book is quiet, restrained, and occasionally wry. Whether it is a work of literary fiction, an independent portrait, or something else, the book declines to say. That is left to you.