Mike has been dead fourteen years, as I write this, and I would do anything to put off writing this introduction, because writing it means that I have to acknowledge two things that, on a very fundamental level, I do not wish to believe: He had been giving me Aspects, a few chapters at a time, for years: whenever we saw each other he would have another section printed out, or he would apologise for his slowness (his excuses were valid: he had, for example, had a kidney transplant) and he would promise one next time. He was forty-nine when he died, and it felt like he was only getting started. Mike died alone, taken by a sudden heart attack, in 2006, and it was devastating. He was mild-mannered, a description that normally is only applied to reporters who are secretly Superman, which seems appropriate, as all of Mike’s friends suspected him of secretly being, well, if not a Superman, then a different kind of human, one vastly smarter and wiser than the normal manner of person. As the years went by his eyebrows grew out, like insectile antennae, putting him in touch with the infinite. Ford was Mike to his friends, and I was fortunate enough to be able to count myself as one of his friends.

He wrote the entire thing, inspired by something I had once put into Sandman, a tossed-off jewel in an email about something else entirely. It’s the last stanza of a sestina, a form of poem in which the words that end the six lines repeat through each of six verses.

There is nothing that can hear you, in the dark. Holding tight to breath has worn your fingers raggedĪnd the earth comes up to meet you in a kiss. With the close of day there comes an end to screaming

The dragon waiting by john m ford