Page 23

By Jack Joseph Smith

1. When Clifton Doolin walked down the steep stone stairs with our lady of Fatama he was all gaze across the cobble rectangular street eyes settling on that other courtyard. He could hear SWISH. That's all. SWISH... The lady was lanky and forehead bound. Olive smooth. With her a frown wasn't a prison. But they were locked up across the fence. No guilt here. No vision. Just identity. For Clifton for now was just a child. SWISH... Singing. Tumbling the round globe. The ball sank. Waited in its strings. Then fell. But then not to touch its other spinning earth. But to be grabbed. Swiftly. With no recognition. Only given to belonging. The doors slamed shut. Clifton looked over his shoulder. But his glance was to late. The wire screen and the one way glass that favors the outside was all that was in his face. Clifton could recall the Montasouri nun. For he somehow still he felt her behavor. Not stilted. Just very tall. Reaching. Like a spring deep when watch- ing a big black bird flap. Off in the dream. There was a poem there. The cells that continue. Here at fourteen was a Jesuit athlete. The magic show was the best now called Sweetwater had ever seen. The curtain will surely come back. Vamped. No. That thick blood red; gone. Lived up. Laughing tooth in hand.

Original Scan

Page 23

AI Interpretation

GPT

Childhood perception flickers between courtyard play, religious image, confinement, identity, and stage magic.

The page is especially vivid about surfaces in motion: the ball, the strings, the shut doors, the curtain, and the red tooth in hand. Clifton Doolin is still a child here, but the setting already teaches him that beauty, captivity, and performance can occupy the same frame.


Claude

A new Clifton Doolin scene, hand-titled page 1, with Our Lady of Fatima on the stone stairs and the repeated SWISH of a basketball on a cobblestone courtyard opening into identity without guilt.