SKYLIGHTING

Charles Hansmann is an award-winning poet, the author of five poetry chapbooks. His fiction, poetry, haiku and haibun have appeared in publications in the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Austria (with German translation), India, Australia and New Zealand. A former New York attorney, he lives with his wife, Eileen Kennedy, in rural Wisconsin and coastal Florida.

“Hansmann’s Skylighting is a dreamy sphere of a novel written in lovely lucid prose.” —Mesha Maren, author of Shae and Perpetual West

“Skylighting is a delight—a moving, contemplative, and probing exploration of grief and identity, as musical and delicate as a meticulously-crafted composition for a chamber ensemble. The prose itself hooks you; the story delivers the poignant emotions.” —Mitchell James Kaplan, author of Rhapsody and By Fire, By Water

“Skylighting convincingly captures the liminal space of grief. These hallucinatory vignettes, half-asleep and half-awake, render even mundane encounters strange. Loss has knocked the world askew, and we’re left with the tilted visions. Hansmann’s novella is an astute, surprising journey.” —Erica Wright, author of Hollow Bones and Famous in Cedarville

“The quiet but haunting details in Charles Hansmann’s Skylighting create a puzzle that, when put together as a reader moves through the book, reveals a portrait of grief and disconnection that sheds light on life’s most important questions: what meaning can we find in our lives, in the sometimes-gentle and sometimes-cruel relationships we pursue with each other? Meaning, in this book, comes through in a gauzy, filtered way, delivered through beautiful language that rewards the reader again and again. There is as much importance in what’s between the lines as there is pleasure to be had in the story at hand. This book left me reeling, wanting to go back and read it all immediately again!” —Kelly Magee, author of The Neighborhood and A Guide to Strange Places

“Skylighting dramatizes the days and nights of a grief-stricken man who abandons all meaning. Without pressure to comprehend the significance of other people’s words or platitudes, he experiences a strangely alluring purity. Each scene portrays raw engagement— what it must be like to drift along with no concern for revelation or purpose. Every interaction becomes a plunge into stimulus. The result is not meaninglessness but alertness. Work, travel, attraction, tenderness, and all quotidian affairs become weirdly beautiful. From the first page onward, Hansmann’s narrator leaves deep wells of subtext. He doesn’t insist that we believe or disbelieve but allows readers to fall headlong into each moment’s energy. In this way, Skylighting is both artistic and gratifying. It should be widely read and loudly admired.” —John Mauk, author of Where All Things Flatten and Field Notes for the Earthbound

1. To what extent are the women Nick encounters psychological substitutes for his lost wife and estranged mother; to what extent is Nick aware of any such substitution? 
2. Does your opinion of Nick change when the girl he had sex with on the beach later tells him she’s underage; does your opinion change when you subsequently learn that the girl was not underage?  
3. To what extent do the people Nick encounters reflect Nick’s emotional and philosophical uncertainties; to what extent does he absorb theirs?  
4. Why does Nick decline a reconciliation with his mother; is his decision based on strength or weakness? 
5. To what extent does “serial living” free Nick for a greater openness toward his experiences; to what extent does it enable him to escape accountability for his behavior

I go over to the esplanade and sit on a bench. As I put my arm across the backrest a woman sits down and leans into it. She jumps up from the touch, as if I have groped her, and I stand up too, equally startled. We smile to acknowledge our mutual embarrassment, then she turns and walks off. It is merely an accident of timing.

Flip-flops and sandals: the sidewalk applauds. Since when has the esplanade drawn such crowds? I feel a gnawing at my innards as if my stomach were teething on an iron tine. It is beginning to feel like hamburger time. 

I go over to the Hab-or-Nab to have a quick bite. “What’ll it be, extraño?” I always sit at the bar and the barmaid always calls me that. 

“Medium rare, pepino solo.” My usual order, her usual grin at my high-school Spanish.

“And an order of rings,” the woman who sat beside me on the bench says as she takes the next stool. She starts fumbling through her purse. “They have a beer menu here but I can’t find my glasses. I was born farsighted, it isn’t from age. Are those for reading?”

She takes the dime-store specs from the neck of my shirt, a strand of brown hair slipping down to her dark brunette eyebrow. She blinks her green eyes. “Two point five,” she says, adjusting my glasses on her nose. “I’m an excellent judge of magnification.”

Our conversation is a series of overstrikes. By last call I feel imprinted in an old-fashioned way like paper slowly working through a typewriter. 

“Louise,” she says, “since you’ll want to know my name.” 

She takes me by the arm as if she were batting left-handed. “I knew you were nice when you jumped off that bench. I bet you open doors.”

An understanding has been reached; she simply comes with me. The night is a medley of crickets and frogs. They quiet as we approach and pick up again after we pass. 

We turn up my walk, and inside my apartment I drape a towel over the cage to keep the cockatiel quiet. She says she is thirsty, but that sounds like a line, and as I take a favorite glass down from the cupboard I wonder if she has to take a pill. 

She drinks the water in the bathroom, the only place in my apartment that is private. When she opens the door, dim light floats out toward the couch where I am waiting. She is naked except for the matching towel wrapped under her arms like a strapless dress. 

“I want to make love without taking it off. You don’t have to know why.” 

She pulls the bathroom door shut and goes over to the window to widen the blind. Partly blocked by the slats the streetlamp looks like a lunar eclipse. I keep my hands to myself as seems to be required.

“A moon like this,” she says, stroking the strands of shadow and light.