The Season of Falling

Act I

Paris in the winter of 1923 was a city that consumed people and then forgot they had existed. Jules Callahan knew this the way a man knows the difference between rain and drizzle — not intellectually, but in the way his clothes felt against his skin and the way his pen filled on paper that was too damp to hold ink properly.

He sat at the Cafe Select on Rue de Seine, the one with the yellow light and the floor that stuck to your shoes, and wrote a poem that he knew was bad. He wrote it because writing bad poems was the only thing he did that felt like work. The other things — drinking coffee, listening to Americans talk about their dreams in voices that were louder than their ideas, watching English women smile at him the way one smiles at a dog that has learned to sit — those were not work. Those were evasion.

The poem was about a river. Rivers were safe subjects. They moved in one direction and nobody asked them why. Jules wrote about the river in Ohio — the one that ran behind his childhood home, the one his father called "not worth looking at" and his mother called "beautiful in its own way" and he had called nothing at all because he did not know how to say what it made him feel, which was the feeling of standing at the edge of something that was going somewhere he was not.

He tore the poem in half and threw it in the ashtray.

A letter sat in his coat pocket. He had not opened it yet. It was from Thomas Ashworth — Tom, as Jules had called him when they were twelve and fifteen and eighteen and not anymore, because Tom was twenty-two now and twenty-two was an age that required new names. The letter was three sentences long. Jules could feel its weight through the paper of his coat: "I am well. Do not worry. Best, Tom."

Do not worry. In Jules's experience, these words meant the opposite of "I am well." They meant: I am not well. I am trying not to be not well. I am writing three sentences because four sentences would require an explanation and an explanation would require someone to care enough to hear it.

Jules put his hand on his coat pocket. He did not take out the letter. He ordered another coffee and waited for the feeling to pass. The feeling did not pass. It sat down next to him at the table and drank coffee and refused to leave.

Act II

Paris absorbed Jules the way the river absorbed the sky — not consciously, not intentionally, but by the simple fact of existing in the same space. He became part of the expatriate circuit: the parties on Rue Jacob where Americans drank wine and wrote poetry and told each other that they were the only ones who understood what art meant; the jazz clubs on Rue de Seine where a man named Coleman played a trumpet like he was trying to play his way out of his own skin; the bookshops on Rue de Fleurus where Gertrude Stein sat in a chair and told young writers that they were good when they were not and bad when they were, and nobody knew which was the compliment.

Jules wrote. He wrote terrible poems about Paris — about the light, about the way the Seine looked at dawn, about the women who loved Americans because Americans were tall and funny and disposable. He wrote better poems about Ohio — about the steel mill that was closed, about the river that was not worth looking at, about a boy named Tom who had served in a war that Jules had not been old enough to fight and who came home and stopped speaking entirely.

He sent letters to Tom every week. They were long letters — eight pages, sometimes ten — filled with descriptions of Paris that were honest about the beauty and dishonest about the emptiness. He wrote about the cafés and the galleries and the women and the men and the way the light fell on the buildings in the afternoon, turning stone into gold. He did not write about the nights when he sat alone in his room on Rue du Four and stared at the ceiling and felt the room shrink around him until he could not tell whether he was trapped inside it or it was trapped inside him.

Tom's replies got shorter. From two pages to one page to three sentences. From "Best, Tom" to "T." Jules understood the abbreviation. He understood it the way a man understands that a fever means something is burning inside him that he cannot see.

In the spring of 1924, at a party on Rue Jacob that went until dawn — dancing, drinking, a woman in a white dress who sang a song in French that Jules did not understand but understood perfectly — Jules made a decision. He stood on the balcony, looking out at the street below, and decided that he was going to go back to Ohio. He was going to find Tom. He was going to ask him why the letters had stopped. He was going to tell him something that he had not told him in twelve years of friendship: that he was afraid, that the war had taken something from Tom that Jules had also lost, not on the battlefield but in the years after, in the quiet, in the space between one sentence and the next.

He told no one. He packed a bag. He bought a ticket. He left Paris on a Thursday morning in May.

Act III

Ohio in May was the kind of beautiful that hurt. The grass was green in a way that Paris grass was never green — not the careful green of a city that watered its lawns, but the wild, untended green of a place that grew things because it had nothing else to grow. The sky was wider than Paris sky. The air was louder. Jules stood on the platform at the Youngstown station and felt the difference between a city that consumed you and a town that simply let you be invisible.

He found Tom in a hardware store on Main Street. Tom was behind the counter, arranging cans of paint by color, his hands moving with the deliberate slowness of a man who has learned that speed is dangerous. He was thinner than Jules remembered. His face had lost the softness of boyhood and taken on the angular quality of a man who has stopped taking care of himself. But he was alive. He was standing. He was arranging paint cans.

"Tom," Jules said.

Tom looked up. His face did something that Jules had seen in mirrors — it went blank for half a second and then filled in with a smile that was almost real. Almost.

"Jules."

They spent a week together. It was the best and worst week of Jules's life. Tom showed him the town — not the parts that were visible from the highway, but the parts that existed beneath it. The field where they had played football when they were twelve. The river, which was brown and slow-moving and smelled like old metal and was, Jules realized, beautiful in its own way. The hill behind the high school where they used to sit and watch the sunset and talk about things that were not football.

On the third day, Tom took him to a place outside of town — a field that was empty except for a single tree and a stretch of fence that had fallen over in a storm and never been fixed. Tom stood by the fence and looked at the field and said, in a voice that was so quiet Jules had to step closer to hear it: "This is where Eddie died."

Jules did not ask who Eddie was. He knew. Eddie was the friend Tom had not written about. Eddie was the reason the letters had stopped.

"It wasn't supposed to happen," Tom said. "We were supposed to come home together. That was the deal."

Jules looked at the field. The tree was old and its branches were bare even though it was May. The fence was fallen. The grass was green.

"I'm sorry," Jules said.

Tom looked at him. His eyes were dry. They had been dry for a long time. "You shouldn't be sorry. You weren't there."

"I wish I had been."

Tom was quiet for a long time. The wind moved through the tree. Somewhere in the distance, a train whistled — not a Paris train, which sounded like a machine, but an Ohio train, which sounded like a voice.

"Why did you come?" Tom asked.

Not "Why did you come back?" Not "I'm glad you're here." Just: "Why did you come?"

Jules opened his mouth. He closed it. He opened it again. He had an answer ready — the one he had rehearsed on the boat, on the train, in the hours before he bought the ticket: "Because you're my friend. Because I love you. Because I couldn't not come."

But standing in the field with Tom looking at him with those dry, empty eyes, Jules understood that those words were not the answer. The answer was something simpler and more shameful and more true:

"I came because I needed to know that someone in this whole damn world was real."

Tom nodded. He did not say anything. He put his hand on Jules's shoulder — a gesture so unfamiliar to both of them that it felt like a mistake — and they stood there for a while, two men in a field in Ohio, watching a fence that had fallen over and would never be fixed.

Act IV

Jules went back to Paris alone. He told no one he had been gone. He returned to his room on Rue du Four, which smelled the same — of old paper and dust and the faint trace of the woman who had lived there before him, a woman he had never met but who had left behind a single book on his shelf, a book of poems by a man named Eliot that he had not read and would now read for the first time.

He returned to the Cafe Select. He sat at the same table. He ordered the same coffee. He took out his notebook and wrote a poem.

It was not a good poem. It was not about Paris or beauty or the magic of the Seine. It was about a field in Ohio. It was about a man who sat on a porch and watched the snow and thought about his friend who could not sleep. It was about a fence that had fallen over and would never be fixed. It was about a word that had stopped being written in letters because the space between two sentences was too wide to cross.

He sent the poem to a small magazine in New York. The editor wrote back three weeks later: "We will publish this. It is not what we usually publish, but it is honest, and honesty is rare."

Jules read the magazine when it arrived. He sat in his room, alone, with a cup of coffee that had gone cold and a cigarette that had burned down to the filter. He read his poem. It was on page four, between an essay about cubism and a review of a play that had closed after one night.

It was not a good poem. But it was true.

He put the magazine down. He looked out the window at the street below — the women walking to the market, the men smoking on corners, the children running through the rain with no umbrellas and no one telling them not to. He thought about Tom in Ohio, standing in a hardware store, arranging paint cans by color. He thought about the field with the fallen fence. He thought about the question: "Why did you come?"

He did not have an answer. He opened his notebook. He began to write.

Author Note & Copyright:

2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG

Contact: datatorent@yeah.net

Author Note & Copyright: