Long Way Back to the End
by Paul B. Roth

Midnight Blue

           After snowy headlights blotch the hotel lobby’s ignored fica, fern and spider plant shadows and its elevator goes up before coming down, noise filled streets are muffled by slush swirling round the mushy hubs of the warm bus ride home at whose last stop you forgot to get off.

           Since sight itself’s become a sort of blindness, when let off, you walk as far and as fast as you can without once looking where you’re going. So embarrassed are you for missing what you never had.

           Late that night you’re discovered where an aqua tint of snow around your head sunk in a snowbank’s deep bootprint resembles the halo your long walk home had you hoping you would find.