Something Furry

I was walking along a dark road at night when I spotted a small matchbox on the pavement at my feet.  There were soft mews and other plaintive little noises coming from this matchbox.  I knelt down and scooped the thing up in my hand.  There was a little clump of grey fur sticking out of the end of the box where the cardboard tray protruded slightly.  This clump of fur looked very dry and stiff and dead, but I could still hear the sounds coming from the box and feel a slight tremor from something moving around inside.  I began to carefully slide the tray out with the tip of my fingernail.

 

Doing this caused a great deal of agitation inside the matchbox, enough to knock it from my hands.  As it landed back on the pavement, I saw a dark little form skitter away from it.  It was just a shapeless lump of grey fur.  It was hissing angrily now, making sharp snorts and wet snarls.  It skittered all over the pavement and it kept circling around my feet in a way that was making me break into my own agitated dance there in the road, simultaneously trying to stamp on it with one foot while avoiding it with the other.  The thing latched onto my shoe and I could feel it scurry up under my pants.  I could feel the tickle of its feet moving up my ankle, and then the sharp sting of its teeth as it bit into my calf.

Pickets & Pitchforks

It was a quiet afternoon.  I was sitting in my chair watching TV when I heard an excited murmur outside.  I went to the window and peeled back the curtains and saw an angry mob of protesters filing down the long walk to my front steps.  They bore cardboard banners with all sorts of angry slogans; some of them even had their faces painted for war.  I met them at the front door, and the leader at the head of the herd just screamed a bunch of garbled noises in my face.  I shrugged and waved my hand through the door, inviting them all in.

I led them them through the front rooms to a door off the side of the kitchen which led down to the basement.  I pointed the way and told them they'd find the people responsible for all the problems of the world down there.  A forceful growl roared through my kitchen.  They all stamped their feet on the tiled floor, rattling the silverware in the drawers and the pots and pans hung over the stove.  The leader rallied them all to the cause and they all went stamping down the basement stairs behind him.  When the last one had gone through, I shut the door behind them and then propped one of the kitchen chairs up under the doorknob.  Then I went back to my chair to watch my TV.  I could still hear their angry rumbling in the basement, but it either faded away as time went on or I just eventually got used to it. 

Inscription

There was the briefest flicker of sleep, as brief as the intervals between the shafts of light passing through the barred windows of the boxcar as it rumbled along the tracks.  For a moment, the space was open around me and there was no one else in the boxcar except for an old man squatting down in the far corner, huddling close to himself and glaring up at me with one eye from under the brim of his dirty brown cap.  There was a glint of gold as he bared his teeth in the dark.  Then I was jolted awake by a sudden bump on the track, and again there was the tight crowd of bodies crammed into the boxcar all around me with barely room to stand, everyone dressed in rags and smelling of oil and diesel and sweat.

The train came to a stop with a screech and a scrape as the guards tore the doors open and everyone began to pour out.  We unloaded onto an open muddy field beside the tracks, and the ground rose to the gate of the camp far across the field.  The inscription over the gate was wrought in black iron against the grey sky, and my eyes rose to it like a beacon.  Work would keep me free.  Work would keep me alive.  I had to find work in this place.  The guards flanking the doors of the boxcar fired their guns into the air as a warning to urge us all to make our way up the hill.  People were crying and confused; a few slipped and fell into the mud never to rise again.  The guards hollered inarticulate noises at us, but we understood well enough that the next shots wouldn't be fired into the air.

We gathered together into a loose group and struggled through the mud up towards the gate.  A woman next to me was fiercely gripping a handful of the back of her husband's coat, trying to drag him up the hill with her.  He coughed and groaned, trying to keep up.  One of the guards fired a bullet squarely into his back.  He grunted and dropped to his knees and spit a mouthful of blood into his white beard.  The guard yelled at the woman to let go of the coat and keep moving.  In shock, she let go of her husband and his body dropped and everyone scurried over him, the soles of their shoes and boots smashing his face into the mud, until he was left in a heap behind us.  I kept my eyes on the gate and tried to stay focused.

There was a big open yard inside the gate.  I passed a cluster of sick inmates.  They were extremely emaciated and they were pale to the point of being white and they had purplish rings around their eyes and bloody gums and lips and teeth.  I covered my mouth with my hand and steered clear of them.  I wouldn't be able to work if I got sick.  Across the yard there was smoke from something burning, and as I came closer, I saw that it was a pile of burning bodies.  There were inmates with handkerchiefs over their faces shoveling up body parts that had fallen loose and tossing them back onto the pile to burn, severed arms and feet still wearing tattered shoes.  The smoke hung low over the yard, creating a fog that obscured its edges, and everywhere loose groups of guards and dejected inmates wandered in and out of the vapors.

Only a few feet from the burning pile, there was a long table that had been brought out and set up in the yard.  There were a number of young ladies sitting around this table attending to the camp's paperwork.  They all wore dark skirts and grey sweaters and they had short bobbed hair.  They looked like they were young students, perhaps.  They seemed indifferent, or maybe even unaware, of the burning pile of bodies or any of the general misery surrounding them only a few feet from where they sat, as though they were untouched by it, as though there was a wall between their lives and ours, as though it was all happening to creatures of an entirely different species than their own and they could simply look at it and shrug.

I approached this table with my hat in my hand and I asked about work.  A girl at the head of the table was filing index cards into a metal box.  She glanced up at me briefly with contempt and she called out to someone and then she went back to filing her cards without looking up again.  Another girl came out of a small barracks hut nearby, and she told the girl at the table to show me where the living quarters were at.  The girl flung the cards down on the table and yelled, "Come on!" at me as she got up and started away without looking to see if I was following.  I fixed my hat back onto my head and shuffled after her.

She led me down a gravel road to a large brick building near the fence line at the back of the camp.  It was getting dark now, and the yellow arc lights had turned on.  I could see the loops of barbed wire along the top of the fence.  The gravel road descended down a sharp slope as we came around the back of the building, and here the girl stopped and flipped her hand at the building and said, "Over there."  I hesitated for a moment, glancing between the girl and the brick wall before me.  I wondered if I should say something to her, reach out to her in some way, ask her for help, make some sort of human appeal to her.  She waited for a second, I suppose to see if I could manage the rest of the way, and then she grunted and rolled her eyes and turned and trudged back up the road away from me.

I circled around the back of the building and climbed up the hill on the other side.  There were two old men in rags sitting at the top.  They barely noticed me as I passed them.  They just stared at the grass and rocked back and forth clutching their stomachs.  There was a dark alleyway along the side of the building and I could see the stone steps that led up to the door down at the far end.  As I was crossing down the alley, I heard noises from within the building, things being knocked over and someone screaming and whimpering in pain.  I stopped with my hand on the door.  I didn't want to go in there, but I didn't know what else to do.

I cowered there in dark alley, not wanting to be seen, and listened to the beating going on inside.  The sound was moving from room to room, and I followed it back down to the other end of the alley.  There was a metal vent protruding from the corner of the wall there, and I came close to it to hear.  There was a sharp crack and a thump and this horrible wet hacking sound, and a sudden gush of blood and vomit dumped out of the vent and went all over me.  The two men from the hill rushed over and started ripping my coat off of me.  Once they had it off of me, they each took an end of it, and they started licking and sucking the vomit off of it, eagerly tugging the coat back and forth between them.

I backed away from them and ran back down the alley to the steps and the door to the building, no longer caring what was waiting for me in there.  Inside I found myself in a small dim room.  There were guards sitting around a table.  There was no light in the room aside from the arc lights outside shining through the window beside the door.  I froze for a second.  They all stared at me.  I felt like I might have gone through the wrong door, but there was no question of turning back and leaving.  So I told them that I wanted work.  They laughed, as though I had made a joke, but they consulted among themselves, and finally one of them told me to follow him up the stairs.

The stairs spiraled around and led to a door at the top.  The guard opened the door and put his hand on my back and pushed me roughly ahead of him into the room.  Inside there was a dark, low-ceilinged chamber, softly lit by a yellow night light plugged in near the floor.  There was a man sitting on the edge of the far side of the bed, getting dressed in a uniform.  He glanced back over his shoulder at us.  The yellow light gleamed at two small points in his eyes.  The guard who had pushed me into the room addressed the man as "Commandant", and he told him that I was there to be his new aide.

The Commandant indicated an armchair near the window and told me to sit and then paid no more attention to me.  He finished buttoning his sleeves and straightening his uniform and then he rushed out of the room with the guard and locked the door behind him.  I could hear them descending the spiral stairs.  I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do now.  They hadn't left me any instructions.  It was a nice room, though, comfortable and warm, high above the misery below.  There was a canopy around the bed decorated with moons and stars and there was a spiral rug on the floor with a discarded pair of slippers on it.  Down in the yard, music suddenly started pouring from the loudspeakers, faintly covering the crack of gunfire and scattered sounds of people screaming.  I came away from the window and started poking around the room.  The closet was stuffed with different suits and uniforms, and tucked away in the back was an old cigar box filled with discarded medals and other mementos.  I sat down cross-legged and laid each piece out on the floor.

The Bird Show

On a bright cool morning I went down to the city park with a small wooden table and a wooden chair under my arm.  There were already a few curious onlookers watching as I set up the table and chair at a spot where a couple of the foot paths came together, where I knew that a lot of people would pass by throughout the day.  I placed an old cracked coffee cup at the head of the table as I sat down in the chair.  There was a little show that I would put on here at the park every day.  The coffee cup was filled with black flower petals and I would dump them out and scatter them across the table.  Before long, a bird would land on the table and set to work picking up the petals one by one in its beak and dropping them back into the coffee cup until it was filled again.  Then it would turn to me, dancing back and both from one foot to the other, until I gave it a little piece of cracker from the inside pocket of my coat, and then it would fly back to the trees holding the cracker in its beak.  Then I would dump the coffee cup back out onto the table and go through the whole thing again.

People stopped throughout the day to watch.  They weren't expecting to see anything like this.  They would slow down and be drawn in as they went by.  Some of them would give me a few dollars.  Some would give me the change from their pockets.  Some just watched and nodded and moved on.  People with kids would always stop.  They would hold the kid back by the shoulder and they knew they all had to stay perfectly still so that they wouldn't spook the bird.  The kids would watch without blinking, holding their breath, peeking out from the tails of their mothers' coats.  The only real trick on my part was that I had developed a rapport with the birds here at the park.  I was always gentle with them and they had learned that I would never hurt them and possibly they had passed the word around to all the other birds.  It was always different birds that came and went.  I hadn't trained any of them, but they all somehow seemed to know.  The news had gotten around.

In the afternoon an older woman, passing by alone, stopped to watch.  She waited until the show was done and the bird had flown, and then she shook her head and said that that was amazing and that it reminded her of how she had met her husband.  When she was a child she had seen a bird outside her window picking up petals and fallen leaflets, just as my bird had done, and somehow she knew that this was an omen.  She knew that someday her future husband would be as careful and industrious as this bird had been at its work.  Years later, when she was a young woman, a violent storm had blown through her town.  She went to the house of some friends to take shelter, and the man she was dating was supposed to meet her there, but the hours went by and he never showed up.  She was worried about him, but she was angry too.  She stayed at the rain lashed window, watching for him, feeling her throat tighten as she saw the broken branches of a tree blow down the street. Finally, the storm began to subside and a few of her friends ventured from the house, and one of them came back telling her that they'd found her boyfriend.  He knew she was mad and he was afraid to come into the house.  She found him in the yard, standing sheepishly under a tree.  She started tearfully yelling at him, asking him where he had been, asking him how he could do this to her.  Suddenly, in this middle of her tirade, she noticed that he had perked up and he seemed to be looking at something just past her.  She turned and noticed that there was black bird on her shoulder, pecking at her sweater trying to get her attention.  It had stayed there all the while that she had been yelling.  She knew that this was the sign, and that this man was her future husband.

She was a bit teary eyed as she finished her story.  She gave me five dollars and patted me on the head and moved on.  I took up the coffee cup of petals again, gave it a little shake and then poured it out on the table.  It wasn't long before another bird came.  Sometimes the birds would even let me pet them, and I gave this one a little scratch on the back.  He was a tad smaller than some of the other birds and he had to perch on the handle of the cup to reach over the lip of it and drop the petals in.  As I watched him hop on and off the handle and gather the petals one by one, a cloud passed overhead and the day dimmed for a moment and brightened again as the cloud passed by.  A breeze blew through.  There was no one around.  The bird paused and jerked his head and turned his dark eye on me, regarding me as I watched him.

Just as he had hopped back onto the handle of the cup, a piercing squeal rang out behind me.  Two girls had come down the path, and when they saw the bird perched on the cup, one of them had let out the squeal because of how cute the bird looked.  The squeal threw the bird completely off balance.  He teetered a little bit on the handle, and as he flew off, he tipped the cup over and off the edge of the table.  The cup shattered into pieces as it hit the ground.  There were petals scattered among the broken pieces.  There were petals still scattered on the table.  There was a great deal of commotion and tweeting in the trees.  The news was getting around.

View from a New World

The Earth had exploded, and a new, smaller planet had formed in the solar system.  A small group of children and I were the only survivors, and we had managed to somehow migrate to this new planet.  We lived simply, in tents and around campfires.  All the skills of humanity would have to be relearned.  The oldest child was named Adam.  He had a bright smile and a dark face and curly hair.  I called him aside from the rest of the camp to show him the cosmos and our new place in it.  We could see it all laid out at our feet.  The sun was more distant than before, and the broken remnants of the Earth had formed into a halo of debris around it.  It was like an obscurely glowing bulb shaded in a cloud of dust.  

But the orbit of this new planet was more elliptical, almost like that of a comet, and as we gazed at the cosmos, we watched ourselves fall in towards the sun.  It brightened as we approached, and the sky lightened to blue and then almost white, and the trees around us shot suddenly into full bloom, ranging through the seasons in moments.  We could almost feel the planet shift under our feet, and the sun tilted in the sky, and then we were flung back out away into the darkness of the solar system.  The planet rolled on its axis and the dimming sun fell below the horizon.

Store Policy

My wife and I were in a store in the mall where you could have you own custom jewelry made.  I decided that it would be nice to have a necklace made for my wife.  She picked out several roughly cut jewels and crystals from bins scattered around the store, turquoise stones and jade and amber, as well as a couple of engraved metal pendants.  I took them to the counter where they made the jewelry, and I explained to the man and woman working there how I wanted the pieces strung onto the necklace.  I wanted them arranged so that there would be a metal pendant between each different jewel, separating them.

I handed the man all the jewels and pendants, and he cupped them carefully in the palm of his hand.  He put on a visor and an eyepiece and he fed the jewels and pendants into some greasy old contraption and bent intently over his work.  I figured that it would be a while, so I told him that we'd be out shopping at the other stores. He just shook his head without lifting it from his work.  He said that the necklace would be ready in only a minute or two.  He said that by the time we got up to the front counter, the necklace would be done and waiting for us.

The woman working with him escorted us up to the front.  She handed us a large shopping bag filled with pine cones.  This was apparently some complimentary gift that they gave to all of their customers with their purchases.  We weren't sure what we were supposed to do with a bag full of pine cones, and we were even a little embarrassed by our own confusion, caught in that intimidating moment of uncertainty you feel in a store that's above your class.  But we thanked the woman and I tucked the bag of pine cones under my arm and carried it awkwardly to the front.  Just as the man had promised, the cashier already had our necklace ready and bagged at the front counter.

We paid the cashier and went to leave, but my wife wanted to see the finished necklace and she was already opening the bag before we were even out of the store.  A confused wrinkle formed between her eyes as she pulled out a coat hanger that had a tiny pink sweater and a red scarf and bow combination arranged on it.  This wasn't a necklace.  We were about to take it back up to the counter to complain, when it occurred to me that the necklace may be concealed under the sweater and scarf, that maybe it had been packaged this way to give the customer some sense of what the necklace would look like when they were wearing it.  Like the pine cones, this was just another bewildering anomaly in foreign territory.  We didn't want to look like complete fools.

My wife rummaged around under the neckline of the sweater until she felt the loose edges of the jewels and pendants.  She pulled the necklace up and out over the scarf, and the dark stones gleamed in the store's soft lighting.  But she still wasn't sure that this cleared things up.  Maybe she had been given the sweater and scarf by mistake.  I suggested going back up to the counter and asking the cashier about it.  My wife nodded and agreed.  But when she got to the counter, instead of just asking the cashier outright, she proceeded on the assumption that the sweater and scarf were part of the packaging, and she framed her question as a complaint, saying, "I don't think that this is the right outfit to go with this necklace."

The cashier stared impassively at my wife until she was finished and then he picked up a radio that he had on the counter.  He held eye contact with her the whole time he spoke.  "I have a customer here requesting the urban presentation rather than the floral presentation."  He waited a beat for their response, which we couldn't hear, then he formed an acidic smile and told my wife, "It'll be just a moment."  We turned as a tall man from store security approached us.  The cashier explained that we were being taken into custody temporarily because we were suspected of stealing store merchandise.  By this, he meant the scarf and sweater.  Since we had just established that it wasn't the packaging that we preferred, by some strange logic this meant that we had just confessed to trying to steal it.

We protested vehemently, of course.  Loudly.  Passionately.  The cashier expressed every sympathy he could for our plight, but he told us that we would have to go to their holding area until the matter could be cleared up.  The tall man from store security took us to a room in the back where there were a number of mattresses laid out on the floor with people sitting on them or laying on them in clusters, their faces despondent and glum.  They didn't even look up as we came in.  They had given up any hope that anyone had come to retrieve them, that there had been any new progress in their cases.  The tall man walked us down to an empty mattress at the far end of the room.  He pointed to it and told us to wait there.

When he had left us, I took a seat on the mattress, but my wife stayed standing, ready to start pacing like a caged animal.  I asked her why she had handled things that way, why she had gotten us into this mess, why she hadn't tried to just clarify the facts instead of using them like blunt instruments from a psychological toolbox.  She had nothing to really say in her defense beyond the obvious point that she had no way of knowing that things were going to end up like this.  Fair enough.  I couldn't really argue with that.  I shook my head and sighed deeply and settled back on the mattress for the long, long wait.

Off the Runway

I had to catch a flight back home in the morning.  I stayed up all night the night before with some old friends of mine at their small cottage house.  We sat around the table in the kitchen drinking coffee and playing cards and telling all the old stories from childhood.  When the morning came, the rooms of the house led directly to the airport terminal.  I passed through a doorway and I was in the waiting area outside the gate.  There was a bank of chairs along the wall with a tall lamp beside them.  The last chair was open and I flopped down and opened a paperback book that I had with me.  But I had no real interest in the book, so I put it aside and reached over and clicked off the lamp and stretched out my legs and waited.

I had almost dozed off by the time they announced the boarding call.  I yawned and got up on stiff legs.  I was almost too tired to feel nervous about the flight.  That was why I had purposely stayed up all night anyway, really.  There was a moment, though, when I was seized with a sudden panic that rushed through me like a burst of flame.  I broke out in a sweat and I was suddenly wide awake.  My legs went rubbery and almost gave out beneath me.  The moment passed quickly, though.  I had to get home.  I had to take the plane and I knew I'd be fine.  I showed my ticket at the gate and made my way up the ramp.

I buckled myself into my seat, feeling tired again and ready to sleep through the whole flight.  I looked down the aisle and I realized that I could see all the way up to the cockpit from my seat.  There was a woman there at the controls with a headset on.  She was wearing a light blue uniform shirt with wings on the sleeves.  I didn't like that.  I didn't like being able to see the pilot in all of their human uncertainty.  I decided that this must be some second rate airline to put me on a plane where you could see the pilot.  I didn't like this at all.

But we were already starting away from the gate and moving towards the runway.  I checked my seatbelt again and squirmed a little in my seat.  When we got over to the runway, I braced myself and held on tight to the armrest.  That moment of takeoff, when the plane is picking up speed down the runway, is always the most anxious part of the flight for me.  That hard feeling of the ground.  That rush of acceleration.  But this was surprisingly mild.  The wheels felt fairly gentle rushing along the pavement.  There was even a second where we slowed down a little, like pumping the brakes.  There was a square, man-made pond just beyond the runway and we lifted up and soared out over the blue water.

But the pilot wasn't happy with the takeoff.  Even though we were in the air and clear, she wasn't satisfied with it.  I could see her up there shaking her head.  She came over the loudspeaker and told us that we had to turn back.  "We got to do that again.  We didn't get enough speed," she explained.  We were in the air, but we wouldn't be able to gain altitude.  She banked hard and circled back over the pond, back towards the runway.  Everyone groaned and grunted throughout the cabin.

As the wheels touched back down on the pavement, there was a sharp stutter as they made contact.  This sent us into a skid.  The plane slid sideways and the wheels gave out beneath it and it began to flip end over end.  People were tossed all over the cabin, and I heard a hard crunch as someone's head slammed against a wall.  When we finally came to a stop, people and seats were piled everywhere.  I was completely unhurt, though, as were most of the people around me.  Mostly there were just sighs of aggravation and exclamations of relief.  "Whew!  What a landing!", someone yelled.  The plane had broken up into pieces all around us.

It turned out that the all the trouble had been caused by a couple of people who had boarded the plane at the last minute.  That was that brief second of braking that I had felt on the runway.  The pilot had slowed down to let them on board, and the whole thing had completely thrown her off.  These last minute passengers had been arguing from the moment they got on board.  They were strangers who had gotten into a fight in the terminal over something and they had made each other late for the plane.  They argued as they got on the plane.  They yelled through the takeoff.  They bickered through the landing.  They complained through the crash.  They were even griping with each other now in the wreckage.  Somewhere across the cabin, someone climbed out from under a chair, dragging a broken leg, and they hollered down, "How about you just shut up already?"

The Passage

I found myself in an industrial facility in the far North, near the Arctic Circle.  It was a vast installation of steel beams, steaming pipes, and concrete tanks built on the icy shore of a dark waterway.  It was a station that had been established to keep the passage clear of ice for the ships passing through.  I went down to the water and watched the ships go by.  They chugged along against the smoldering red glow on the horizon, and I could see the cranes and claws and machinery hauling the ice floes out of their path.  It was an awesomely massive operation, slow and methodical, an automated process neglected at the end of the Earth, moving through its ceaseless cycles in the eternal twilight, somewhere far, far, away from the living world.

The facility itself was a labyrinth of cold steel and rust.  I wandered through it trying to see if there was anyone else around.  The snow crunched under my feet and more flakes swirled in out of the dark, carried on a biting wind.  I called out and heard my voice reverberate off the tanks.  I was about to mount a flight of metal stairs when someone emerged from the shadows beneath it.  It was large woman, much taller and broader than me, and she had on a thick parka with a fur lined hood.  She told me that she was the only one that worked at this facility.  She ran it all herself, tightening valves, checking gauges, keeping all of the machinery fueled. 

She explained that the passing ships never docked there, but she would sometimes have brief contact with them over the radio and she could hail them out there on the water with a flashing beacon and they would respond with a low bellow of their horn.  That was all the human contact that she had.  Even the occasional supplies that were brought to her were loaded onto a pallet and attached to one of the cranes by a hook and lifted right off the deck of the passing ship without the ship stopping or dropping anchor.  There was just that half hour of radio contact with the captain and then he would chug off again into the darkness and the static.

I asked her if she had things here to keep herself occupied.  She nodded abruptly and she said that she did, but I could see that she was lying.  I could see that she hadn't been prepared for the loneliness and the cold.  She couldn't have fathomed it beforehand.  She had brought nothing with her.  I could see that she slept there under the stairwell, under the light of a single bulb shining somewhere far above casting the long deep shadows that were all around us.  She slept there on the ground with her coat pulled tight around her against the cold.  I could see that that was all she had.  There was a twitch at the corner of her mouth.  She was getting to where she couldn't take it anymore.

So I decided to start bringing her things.  I brought her a music box the first time I came back, and the second time I brought some hardback books.  I never thought to ask her what she might want or need.  I'm not sure that she would have admitted to wanting or needing anything.  But she thanked me for everything that I brought and I saw the warmth returning to her face and her eyes.  I brought her a large book about the history of art, illustrated with pictures of famous paintings.  I brought her a hand knitted blanket.  I brought random photographs and postcards.  I brought records and a record player.  I brought anything that I could carry in my hands that I thought might brighten her life a little.

One day I brought her a coffee maker and a can of coffee, and she insisted that we have a cup of coffee together.  She took me to a little apartment that she had made for herself in the lower decks of the facility.  She wasn't sleeping in the dark stairwell anymore.  The door to the apartment was a metal hatch, but it was surprisingly homey inside.  It was warm and she was able to take off her coat.  I looked around at the books on the shelves and the little lamp with the stained glass shade by the chair and the picture frames propped up on the table under the lamp.  I heard the music coming from the record player, the soothing play of the piano keys.  I saw the lit candle mounted on the wall.  I hadn't realized that it had all amounted to this, that I had brought all this one piece at a time.  There was a porthole window at the far end of the room and I could see the ships passing out there on the water against the red horizon.

Stolen Glances

I was part of a cleaning crew that had been sent to clean a concession booth at a summer resort that was out in the middle of nowhere.  The concession booth was a small wooden shack.  It sat on a midway lined with other concession booths.  It was the off season and all the booths were closed, their metal shutters locked.  Dry leaves drifted across the pavement along the midway and there were a few faded red flyers scattered here and there, trampled under dirty shoe prints, advertising the live entertainment that had been booked for the past summer.  We all pulled up in the driveway alongside the booth.  We unloaded our cleaning supplies and we went in through the side door.

The booth was very bare inside.  All the equipment and supplies had been cleared out and the dusty shelves and cabinets were all empty.  We opened up the metal shutter over the concession window to let in some light and air, and we got to work cleaning.  There was one decorative touch that had been left behind and it caught my attention.  On the side of the wall near the concession window there was a small framed photograph.  It was a photo of a young woman with dark hair, turning away from a sunlit window to look into the camera.  Her expression suggested that she had been startled when the picture had been taken, and her piercing blue eyes stared out at us, troubled. 

I kept looking up at this photograph as I cleaned.  I found it a bit unsettling, as though the woman had been distracted from her pleasant reveries at the window by something in this dark empty booth, something that only she could see long after the rest of us were gone, as through she were caught forever in that moment in this lonely place.  As I glanced up at it again, one of my coworkers swept up beside me, leaning on his broom, and said, "We're not allowed to mess with any of the owner's personal effects," and it wasn't until he said that to me that I realized that I wanted to take that photograph off the wall and take it far away from here.

But I had to figure out how to get it down without my coworkers or the head of the cleaning crew seeing me and knowing that I was taking it.  I thought about this all day as I worked.  In the afternoon I walked down to a small country store about a half a mile down the road to grab something to eat for lunch.  The sun beat down along the deserted midway as I walked back.  The day had warmed up as the sun climbed high, and the light glared off the faded paint of the closed booths.  I stopped for a moment to consider a few small weeds struggling to grow up through a crack in the pavement under my foot and an idea occurred to me how to get the picture off the wall.

When I returned to the booth, the crew was finishing up and loading the equipment into their cars.  The woman who was the head of the cleaning crew had the keys to the booth in her hand and she was about to lock it up.  I told her that I had something I had left inside that I needed to grab.  I held my hand out for the keys.  She seemed reluctant to give them to me.  She studied my face, peering into my eyes.  I just kept my hand held out, holding it steady and keeping a blank, fixed expression on my face.  Finally, my firmness seemed to wear her down and she handed over the keys.  She hesitated as she got into her car, looking back at me, having a moment of doubt.  But it passed, and she and the rest of the crew got into their cars and drove off.

Afterwards I could never remember if I actually took the picture off the wall, whether I had left behind a clean square of space or whether the picture hangs there still.  I just remember sliding the key into the lock and the next thing I remember is driving off down the midway.  The time that passed in between, whatever had transpired when I was alone in the booth, was forgotten, missing.  I pulled out of the resort and onto the main road, and I realized then that I didn't know my way back.  We had all come down as a crew, and we were supposed to go back as a crew.  Only the head of the crew knew the way back and we were supposed to follow her.  But I had let them go, and they were long gone.  I had only the sun to navigate by.  It was low in the sky to the west, so I got onto the highway heading north.

The Marsh Pond

We lived in a country house on several acres of land, and there was a marsh pond towards the back of the property.  A couple came to visit us from the city, and I took them back to show them the pond.  It was late September and cool.  It was early in the evening, but it was already dark.  There were tall cattails and weeds on either side of the path that led down to the shore of the pond.  The ground was soft and wet there and my shoes made deep prints in the mud.  We could hear the bugs in the tall weeds and the frogs out on the pond.  It was a clear night and the golden moon was just above the water with a bright star beside it, its light flickering off the pond.

As I reached the edge of the water, I turned back to say something to the couple that had followed me, but I found now that there was a whole crowd behind me, families with tents and RVs setting up barbecues, their kids lingering about or running along the shore or hiding from each other in the cattails.  They all worked through the night, establishing their camps.  There was the soft ting of hammers driving tent stakes into the ground.  People shivered in light jackets and flashight beams played about in the sharp morning air.  Someone set up a covered pavilion with picnic tables beneath it and we all gathered there for breakfast as the sun rose over the tall weeds.  Some of the kids went out to swim in the pond first thing in the morning and someone put a tin pot over a campfire to make coffee.

More and more people arrived as the day wore on.  They came in trucks and campers, setting up tents on the outskirts of the growing camp.  The day was warm for being so late in the season.  By the late afternoon, the kids had gotten drowsy and there were only a few of them floating lazily out in the pond.  Their parents called them up for dinner under the pavilion as the setting sun glared low over the water.  After dinner, someone made one last pot of coffee as the sun dipped below the horizon and the evening grew cooler.  It got harder to see each other's faces as it grew dark and people started turning in for the night, climbing into their tents and campers to sleep.  Some of the smaller kids cried, because they were tired or they didn't want the day to end or both.  Their parents hushed them and the hush fell over the whole camp and the bugs and the frogs took up their song again.  I took a folding lawn chair down to the edge of the water and planted it's legs there in the mud, and I sat down to finish my coffee and stare out at the crescent moon over the pond.

Roadside Assistance

I was driving along a desolate stretch of freeway in the dim, early morning mist.  My car started to buckle and hiss and clunk and shake.  The word "emergency" started flashing in red on the display in the middle of the dashboard.  I pulled off onto the shoulder and looked to the display for more information about what went wrong.  The display showed the graphic of an engine with a spinning fan on the front of it, and the fan seized up, the blades going all twisted and crooked, and smoke rose from the graphic of the engine.  After a few puffs of smoke, cobwebs appeared all around the engine along with a few curvy tendrils that represented tall grass.  As the graphic of the engine began to shake and sputter and sink into the ground, sharply outlined birds flew from it in all directions.

Once the birds had flown from the screen and the engine had sank completely out of sight, only the lines representing the grass remained.  They seemed to waver in the wind.  And then, from the right of the display, a graphic of four horses came galloping, drawing a covered wagon behind them.  A skeleton sat at the head of the wagon, whipping the horses and driving them on.  It turned its head to look at me, the skull grinning, the teeth gnashing.  Then it drove the horses and wagon off the left side of the screen, and there was just a graphic of a puff of dust left in their wake.  This puff of dust stayed on the screen, pulsating and flashing red.  I wasn't sure what any of this meant, but it definitely didn't seem good.  It was pretty clear that I needed to call a tow truck.

Cover Art

I was hired to participate in a photography session.  They were taking pictures for a book cover.  A bunch of us showed up for the session, and they put us all in a large hotel suite.  They told us to just act natural, have conversations with each other, sit at a table eating a bowl of cereal, whatever, while a cameraman buzzed around the room filming everyone.  They were taking a cinema verite' type of approach.  The idea was that the cameraman would record hours and hours of footage, and then they would look back through it all and find the single frame that struck the photographer as the most "real" and the one that best captured the essence of what the book cover was supposed to express.

I didn't like this way of doing things at all.  I argued that the image quality wouldn't be as good as it would be with a single, properly lit, high gloss photograph.  I argued that they wouldn't get the stylized look needed for a book cover by just sifting through frames of random footage.  I argued that their pretensions of things being "natural" and "real" were pointless because the setting itself was already staged.  We had all just been put into this room and paid to act "normal." The more they strove for some ideal of truth, the more the whole thing became a lie.

I suggested doing things differently.  I suggested that we should all gather for a normal group portrait, or maybe we could all be arranged in a tableaux of some sort.  I imagined us all dressed in period clothes, arranged in a cluster at the center of the photograph, with our backs to one another, fascinated by the decorative iconography that would frame the photograph once it was placed on the cover.  We would be peering up though monocles at sketched cherubs and harps; some of us would be tentatively reaching for quills and stars.  These sketches would be gilded and laced with flourishes and streaming Latin banners, while we would be rendered in the middle in black and white, as though our images had been cut from the newspaper and framed in gold.

The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that this was the right cover for the book, that this, in fact, was the only possible cover for the book.  I even became convinced that there was no question that this was how the book's author and publisher wanted it.  It had to be this.  Once I saw it so clearly, so vividly, in my mind, there was no other way.  I yelled at the cameraman.  I protested and stamped my foot, almost to the point of tears.  But none of them would listen.  The cameraman just kept circling me, filming my outburst from every angle,  still looking for that single moment, that one frame of undeniable truth.

Death of an Author

I was sent to live with this writer, William Mason, when I was still very young.  He was a distant uncle on either my mother or father's side of the family.  I wasn't clear which one.  He wasn't known as a famous writer back then.  None of his work was published until after his death, when the managers of his estate collected all of his voluminous notes and scattered manuscripts, and some sharp editor went to work trying to wrestle it all into some more consumable form.  During his lifetime, however, he lived off a substantial inheritance that he had received at some point and he lived quite comfortably without being published or making any money off of his writing.

In fact, it was probably in light of his secure financial position that I was sent to live with him.  The day I arrived, a driver in an old black Hudson picked me up from the bus station and dropped me at the curb in front of his house.  It was just beginning to rain.  As I got out and stared up at the Gothic house brooding among a yard of dark trees, my uncle's manservant promptly appeared with an umbrella over my head, and he followed me up the walk with it.  He was very tall and he had to bend deeply to keep the umbrella near my head.  All the while, the rain pattered against his own back, and he maintained the same grave and silent frown on his face.

I was taken directly to my uncle's library, where he spent most of his time working on his writing.  It was a dark, stuffy chamber.  There were bookshelves along every wall and the shelves reached high up into the darkness farther than I could see.  The only light was from a dim desk lamp on a desk in the middle of the room.  There my uncle sat huddled in this little pool of light, writing something with a fountain pen.  I could tell from the cramped way that he held his hand that he was writing something in a tiny, tedious script.  He would spent hours every day filling each page with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny, tedious words, outpouring the feverish machinery of his relentless train of thought, and then he would hold each page briefly up to the light before blowing on it softly and then setting it aside to let the ink dry.

He rolled back from his desk, and I could see that he was in a wheelchair.  His grey hair was long and ratty in places and balding in others.  He took a pair of spectacles from his desk and put them on as he wheeled over towards me and he perched them on the edge of his nose as he leaned forward to study me as though I were an exhibit of some sort.  There was a long, awkward moment of silence.  I wasn't sure if I needed to say something.  Finally he made a grunt as though he were satisfied by what he saw and said, "You must be hungry," before wheeling back to his desk and leaving his manservant to attend to me.

He continued to be just as cold in all the years that I lived with him, growing up.  We rarely ever had normal, casual conversations.  Instead he would impart "lessons" or offer "instruction" meant to be edifying for my "constitution" and beneficial in reinforcing the fiber of my character.  His lower lip would always seem to protrude petulantly when he used these words and he would pat the stomach of his dark blue vest and roll away with an immense air of self satisfaction.  Once, I was sitting on the floor at his feet listening to one of these lectures of his, and he managed to roll over my fingers as he started away.  There was a sharp snap and I cried out.  "The floor is no place for civilized people to keep their hands," was all that he had to say.

He made efforts to get his work published.  He didn't need the money, but he wanted the prestige, the validation.  Sometimes, behind the closed door of his office, I could hear him having long, one sided arguments with his manservant, who also managed his professional affairs, contacting publishers and submitting his work to different markets.  The argument was always the same.  He was convinced that the manservant wasn't doing enough, wasn't going about things the right way, wasn't contacting the right people.  The manservant bore these harangues in silence and, I imagine, with the same stiff frown that he always wore on his face. 

As a result of his lack of publication, my uncle's family looked on his writing with condescending amusement.  To them, it was just some eccentric pastime that he puttered away at, something to keep a rich old man from feeling useless.  They would come by the house and find him in his office, and they would smirk and shake their heads and refuse to take him seriously.  "For Heaven's sake, you should let some light in here," they would tell him.  He would just scowl and try to dismiss them, insisting that he was busy working, but they refused to respect that and instead went on about getting lighter drapes and window fixtures for his gloomy office.  Even the lilting cadence of their voices seemed to shed unwanted light about the house.  My uncle seemed smaller, sillier, when they were around and I know that he burned with resentment at every minute that he had to endure in their presence.

Sometimes he would take this resentment out on me.  He began to taunt me with the fact that my parents had abandoned me to his care.  I had come there under the impression that my parents had died and that I had come to stay with him as an orphan.  He forcefully disabused me of this notion.  He showed me letters that they had written to him.  They went on and on about their happy, carefree lives.  They described beaches, sunsets, warm tropical places where they basked in childless luxury.  He read page after spiteful page of these letters.  I tried to defend them.  I had been sick often as a child and they hadn't known what to do; they hadn't been prepared to take care of me; they would have been there if they could.  But he brushed aside each of these excuses with a slow, triumphant shake of his head until there was nothing left but the pitiless fact that they just didn't care enough to raise their child.

So I grew up like this.  When I was about sixteen, my uncle became seriously ill.  Some sickness that he had harbored in his chest for years finally caught up with him and he took to his bed.  The manservant called in the doctors and there were grim, whispered consultations in the hallway.  Finally I was told that he wanted to see me one last time.  His eyes followed me intently as I came to the side of his bed, and he reached out his hand to me and struggled to speak.  He wanted me to get rid of all the manuscripts stored in his desk in the library.  "Burn them," he said.  "I was too hard.  There was no forgiveness there for anyone.  People want passion.  They want life and entertainment.  I gave them ... I gave them ..." He clutched my arm and pulled himself up, his eyes wide and wild, "I gave them nothing!" And he fell back against the pillow, all the breath and life gone out of him, his eyes staring ahead empty.

It was his most human moment.  It was the closest that we had ever been, and I noticed for the first time how bright and blue his eyes were.  I had never really looked into his eyes before.  I knew then that I couldn't do what he asked.  I couldn't burn his books.  I couldn't throw away all those years of work. I knew then that he was wrong.  He had to be.  I could see it there in his eyes.  I knew that there was something there, something in all those pages of cramped, urgent writing.  We just had to find it.

The Seats of Judgment

A contest had been arranged between the President and the Pope.  All of their mistakes and misdeeds had been legally documented on paper, and they would both sit on chairs side by side as stacks of this paperwork grew from beneath them and lifted them to enormous heights.  Whichever one of them was lifted the highest would be declared the winner.  A large, stately manor had been chosen as the venue for the contest.  The two chairs were placed at the foot of the grand staircase in the main hall of the manor.  I was part of a small group of spectators brought in the witness the event.  It was a pleasant, sunny afternoon and we were all dressed in our best suits and ties.  We stood around in front of these empty chairs, waiting for the Pope and the President to arrive so that the contest could begin.

Someone saw the cars pull up outside and they ran in to tell us.  We all perked up and looked towards the door.  Cameras flashed all around as the President and the Pope came into the room.  The President smiled and made a huge wave, as though there were a large crowd gathered instead of just a small group of spectators.  This gesture itself seemed to swell our numbers and there was a loud roar of applause and excitement.  I think we were all mostly rooting for the President to win.  The Pope's entrance was more solemn.  He was accompanied by a cardinal in red robes.  His head was bowed and weak.  He tried to lift his hand to give some kind of blessing, but his old withered fingers trembled and he abandoned the effort and dropped his hand back to his side.  He made his way to his appointed chair with slow, struggling steps, and he had to brace himself on the arm of the cardinal as he carefully lowered himself down onto the seat.

Having taken their positions, the two men nodded to each other as a show of sportsmanship.  The President had a bit of a smirk on his face.  He knew he had the old man beat.  The Pope just turned away and hunched forward, studying the floor around his chair as though he wasn't quite certain where he was and what was going on.  An official came forward with a silver whistle and a pocket watch on a chain.  He stood with the whistle poised between his lips as he stared down at the pocket watch, waiting for the right second to begin.  Everything was perfectly still except for the ticking of the watch.

The whistle blew and the contest began.  The paperwork quickly piled up under the President's chair and he soared up high over the Pope.  He was still smirking at the Pope down below.  But then, to everyone's surprise, there was a sudden rush of paperwork under the Pope and he began to catch up with the President.  The President looked over in alarm as the piling paperwork brought them nearly side by side again.  The spectators below had to lift their heads higher and higher to see the two men soaring up to the vaulted ceiling of the main hall.

When it became clear that they were going to break through the ceiling and take this contest to literally higher levels, I felt a sudden need to know which one of them was going to win, and so I took off running up the grand staircase, trying to beat them to next floor above.  The grand staircase gave way to a smaller staircase that turned several corners and wound through darkly paneled corridors.  As I came to a landing lit by a small window, I heard the crunch of plaster and wood as they punched through the ceiling of one floor and flew right on up through the ceiling of the next floor.  I could see chalky dust and haze through the door of the small room down the hall where they had punched through.  Papers that had fallen loose from both piles blew about in the debris, as though there were sins to spare in the reckoning of either man's failures.

I mounted floor after floor, trying to get above them.  Finally, I came to what should have been the attic of the manor.  There was a trapdoor in the floor just above me.  But when I opened it and raced up though, I found myself in a sun room in what appeared to be some annex across the grounds from the main house of the manor.  There were oil painting portraits on the wall and there was a large window along one side of the room that looked out onto a sunny garden courtyard.  Things were much quieter here than they had been in the floors below.  There was a small group of women all in black dresses sitting on chairs and couches clustered around the center of the room.  They had tea cups poised in mid air and they looked over at me and considered the impropriety of my sudden arrival with a vast sense of scorn.

I was just about to say something to explain myself, when the ground below started to rumble.  The tea cups began to chatter against their saucers and the women in the black dresses began to look more and more alarmed.  They look at one another with wide eyes.  I knew that either the President or the Pope was about to come bursting through the floor at any second, right up under the coffee table.  There was no need to explain it now.  I just leaned against bookshelf across the room and folded my arms and smiled and waited to see which one of them it would be.

Fire Watch

I had two children, a daughter and a son.  We were living in a small house out in the woods, more of a shack really, with only a front room and a back bedroom and a rough kitchen.  It was the middle of winter.  The trees were bare and there were deep snowdrifts on the ground outside.  There was a desk against the wall in the front room and there was a glowing fire burning on the hardwood floor under the desk.  The couches in the front room had been pushed from their normal places and into a circle around the desk in order to be closer to the warmth from the fire.  The moonlight in the windows and the glow from the fire provided the only light in the room.

I was very tired and I stretched out on one of the couches under a flannel blanket.  The children were over by the desk.  The boy sat on the floor beside the fire, playing with a toy semi truck, driving it up to the edge of the fire and then driving it away, as though he were making deliveries to the fire.  The girl stood beside the fire, poking at it cautiously with a stick and trying to be careful not to let the flames catch on the hem of her night dress.  I called the girl over.  I told her that she needed to keep an eye on the fire while I slept.  She had to make sure that it didn't spread out of control and burn down the whole shack.  It was dangerous enough having it burn on the wood floor and under the wooden desk.

The girl seemed angry at being given the responsibility.  She stood beside the couch, pouting and fidgeting and glaring resentfully at the fire.  I reminded her that she was the oldest, that I could trust her to take care of the fire better than her brother.  I grew more and more drowsy, mumbling on and on, trying to reassure her.  I couldn't keep my eyes open for another second.  Just as I was about to drift off completely, I realized that I hadn't told her what to do if the fire started to spread.  I hadn't shown her how to put it out.  But I couldn't stay awake, and so I fell asleep, hoping she'd figure out what to do.

My Getaway

I went to visit a friend of mine who lived down in the city.  He said he had something that he wanted to show me in his basement, something I might be interested in buying.  He took me down to look at it so that we could settle on a price.  As we descended the dark, narrow stairs and made our way to the back corner of the basement through piles of dusty, overturned chairs and duct taped boxes, I noticed that something looked strange and out of place.  The back wall seemed a little closer than I remembered.  The ceiling slanted sharply there, and I even bumped my head against it.  I looked closer and saw that someone had nailed a few sheets of drywall together to form a roughly improvised partition.  It looked like it had all been done very recently. 

I turned to my friend and asked him about it.  "Something's different here.  There used to be a door here where you go could straight out to the back yard.  It's all been covered over.  Everything's been boarded up for some reason.  When did this happen?" He just shrugged like he had no idea what I was talking about.  There was a long moment of silence.  My friend seemed uneasy.  He brushed the sweat from his forehead and wiped it against the leg of his pants, pressing his hand a little too roughly against the fabric.  I could hear him breathing heavy in the close, stifling air.  Then I heard a soft thump behind the partition.  I saw my friend's hand twitch, but his face showed no sign that he had heard anything.  I knew then that something was up.

I scrambled back up the stairs and my friend scrambled up after me.  The kitchen was up at the head of the house, and the house sat on the corner of two city streets.  From the kitchen window I could see along both streets.  I looked out at the cars parked along the curb.  Most of the cars were empty and I could clearly see that there was no one in them.  But further down, about fifty yards from the house, I saw an orange and white van that had curtains drawn across the windows in the back.  I could just barely make out the grey smoke curling up from the tailpipe behind the van.  That was it.  They were watching, waiting in that van.

I just shook my head at my friend for betraying me, and then I ran for the door on the other side of the house.  I burst out into an alley between the houses, and I could already hear the scrape of the van door opening and the frantic voices of the cops piling out.  I climbed a fence into the neighbor's back yard and then over another fence and another until I came out onto the street on the other side of the block.  The cops were swarming in from all directions.  I crossed the street and took off running down the sidewalk, knowing that they were close behind.

I turned a corner and I stopped to catch my breath in front of a tall grey house.  I had eluded them for a moment, and I took a second to collect my thoughts and think about my predicament.  I hadn't done anything.  I hadn't bought whatever it was my friend was trying to sell me to set me up.  I had nothing incriminating on me.  I fumbled through my pockets.  The only thing I had was a disk, and I knew that the only thing on it was the rough draft and the final draft of a paper I had written for college.  I could hear the footsteps of the cops on all sides.  They had figured out where I was.  I stayed still and waited for them to come. 

I had the disk in my hand, and for some reason, just as one of the cops came around the corner and came into view, I tossed it away from me and it landed in the grass somewhere on front lawn of the grey house.  I wasn't exactly sure why I did it.  I wasn't sure if it had been a reflex, or whether I had done it to deliberately mislead them.  But the cop had seen me, and the mere act of throwing the thing away had given it an incriminating importance.  The other cops showed up, and some of them hunted around in the grass for the disk while the others handcuffed me and loaded me into a squad car.

Later, the disk would become a great point of contention for the police.  There had to be some reason I had thrown it away.  There had to be something on it.  There had to be something about it.  For lack of anything else to analyze, they scrutinized the two versions of the college paper that were saved on the disk, looking for clues.  They decided that the secret lay in the discrepancies between the rough draft and the final draft, that these differences must form some kind of code.  They brought in all the experts, all the specialists.  And all the while, the days went by, and I sat there in a cell, forgotten, wondering when it would all end.

After the Fireworks

The fireworks had just ended, and we were all left in the dark.  I could still smell the smoke.  There were cars parked along the side of the road where the ground sloped off into the ditch.  There were voices all around, and people would emerge laughing in groups and pairs from the tall grass on all sides and join the crowd of people slowly making their way down the road.  The moon shone down, casting our long shadows on the pavement ahead of us as we moved along at even paces from one another.  People lugged folding chairs and coolers and held their kid's hands or carried them as they slept against their shoulders.

Around dawn we came to a field with a short wooden fence around it.  There was an open gate in the fence and the crowd was flowing in through the gate.  There was a woman there with a clipboard, and she was checking names from a list as people came through.  She stopped me as I came up, and she couldn't find my name on the list.  I explained to her that I didn't live around here, that my brother did, and that he would be able to vouch for me.  People continued to pour in through the gate behind me as the woman flipped through the papers attached to her clipboard, looking for my brother's name.  Finally, she decided to let me pass.  I explained to her that my wife was somewhere in the crowd behind me, that we had gotten separated out on the road.  She nodded and said she'd keep an eye out as she turned her attention back to her clipboard and her list.

I followed some of the people who had passed through the gate, and further on we came into a narrow yard with a ranch house on one side and a barn on the other.  There were fruit trees and taller shade trees in the yard.  There was a door standing wide open in the shadows on the side of the house that faced away from the rising sun.  I ducked into this doorway as the rest of the people kept trudging past.  I found myself in a small unlit room and it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark.  There was a bed just beside the door, and my brother was sleeping in it.  I imagined that he liked to drift off to sleep with the door open so that he could see the view and feel the breeze from outside.  There was a fireplace across the room with the last crackling embers of a fire burning in it.  A wooden chair had been placed in front of the fire, and I saw my cat curled up on it.  He perked up as I came in, and his eyes shined in the light.

My wife shushed me from the corner of the room.  I couldn't see her, but I knew she was there.  She had come in ahead of me.  She didn't want me to wake my brother.  He had a few hours to sleep yet.  He snorted and rolled over the other way like he had heard us.  It began to rain a little as the morning sun crept into the yard, and the rain pattered softly against the open doorway.  I went to another room of the ranch house and watched from the window.  The rain passed just as quickly as it had started and the drops of water gleamed off the fruit in the trees.

The Time

At a family picnic, I was talking to my aunt and I told her that I was thinking about getting a big clock face tattooed in the middle of my back.  I told her that there was a special ink that they could use for the hands so that they could be set for the right time and then they would move and tick along like a normal clock.  The hands could only be set once, and the setting would be as permanent as the tattoo itself, but once set right, the clock would always keep accurate time.  It would never lose a second here or there over the years.  And I would always know what time it was, because I would be able to feel it on my back.  If I was working with someone and they said, "Man, it sure feels like it should be noon already," I could just stand up straight, arch my back to get a sense of the position of the hands, and say, "Nope.  It feels exactly like it's quarter to ten."

My aunt responded to this with a wry smile and a roll of her eyes.  She pointed out that there were some cases where you might not always want to know the time.  I had to admit that that was true.  Sometimes, on a long shift, the worst thing you could do was to keep looking at the clock.  The minutes would just crawl by.  Other times you just wanted to stay in a moment, not caring when and if it would ever end.  I thought about having that clock on my back, feeling every minute portioned out equally, every moment of my life punctuated with that slow inky tick.  I rubbed the back of my neck, feeling like there was an itch I couldn't reach.     

Getting Together

My mother was having everyone in the family over to her apartment for Christmas Eve.  My wife and I were riding over with my old girlfriend and her boyfriend.  We were all close friends.  On the way we stopped off at a gas station for a case of beer.  There was tinsel and lights strung up around the door and the clerk sat behind the lonely counter watching some televised Christmas pageant on a little portable TV, while the snow fell in thick wet flakes all around.  My wife and I sat in the back seat of the car as we headed back out through the slushy streets.  The boyfriend drove, silent and serious, trying to peer through the headlights past the falling snow.  The old girlfriend was in the passenger seat and she turned back to us and laughed and snorted about some nickname I used to call her.  I blushed.  But everything was fine.  We were all together.

We pulled up outside my mother's apartment complex.  We got out and stood around in the dim, yellowed lights and the falling snow, and the boyfriend said something about having to check the rear brakes on his car before we went in.  I was about to get into a whole conversation with him about bleeding his brake lines, when I noticed that my old girlfriend was already starting down the walk towards my mother's building.  She didn't feel like standing around and waiting for the rest of us.  I wondered what my mother would think, having my old girlfriend show up on her doorstep, by herself and without any explanation.  She had never liked the girl.  She certainly wouldn't start liking her now.

But when the rest of us got up to my mother's apartment, we found my old girlfriend sitting in the corner of the living room in a plush chair beside the Christmas tree, sipping a cup of coffee.  My mother had welcomed her warmly into her home, and she came and took the rest of our coats and we all settled in on the couches.  There were carols playing on the radio and the tree flashed its scattered patterns of colored light.  I got up and went to put the case of beer in the refrigerator.  When I got back, the rest of the family had arrived, and everyone was packed into the small warm room.  I saw that the chair in the corner was empty.  I looked around.  My old girlfriend had slipped out and she was gone.  I knew I'd never see her again, and I knew it had to be that way.  I sat down on the arm of the couch and watched as the kids crawled around under the tree looking for their presents.      

A Close Shave

I was in the locker room of this shop where I worked, getting changed into my uniform before my shift.  I was about to head out to work with the rest of the crew, when I heard a sharp grunt of anger somewhere behind me.  The locker room was filled with clouds of steam from the showers, but I made my way through the steam until I came upon one of my co-workers holding a pair of electric clippers in one hand and brushing his other hand across a spot just above his ear.  I looked close and I could see that he had nicked himself with the clippers and taken out a big chunk of hair above his ear.  I told him that the only thing he could really do to fix it was to shave the rest of his head.

He made a hard frown and a curse, but he acknowledged what I said and he headed over to one of the mirrors above the sinks on the other side of the locker room.  But things got confused in the cloud of steam and suddenly it was me holding the clippers and walking towards the mirror.  It was me that had to shave my head now.  The steam had fogged up the mirror.  I tried to clear the fog away with my hand, smoothing out a clear circle in the middle of the mirror, but as soon as I had that hole cleared and I tried to see myself so that I could shave my head, the mirror would just instantly fog over again.  I tried to just shave my head without being able to see what I was doing, plowing long even strips up one side and then the other.  But when I pulled the clippers away and felt my head to see if I'd gotten everything, I would always feel thick patches of hair that I had missed.  I would never be able to do this without being able to see myself.

There was a room upstairs above the shop, where I thought I might find a mirror and maybe a little pair of scissors to get a closer trim.  The room was a brightly lit bedroom with a low ceiling and a big four posted bed with thick, darkly laquered, wooden posts. There was a matching wooden dresser across the room.  It sat beneath the front window which looked out on the grey day outside and the quiet residential street below.  I rifled through the drawers of the dresser, trying to find the mirror and the scissors, but there was nothing but old bracelets and earings and little plastic figurines and loose red and white dice misplaced from some board games.  

I finally found a little pair of nail trimming scissors in one of the bottom drawers, but still no mirror.  I looked out the window and I saw someone in a heavy winter coat passing on the sidewalk below.  I could ask them!  They could trim my hair.  They could see what they were doing.  I fumbled with the latch on the window, trying to get it open so that I could call down to the person on the sidewalk and ask for their help before they slipped away.

Total Eclipse

It was a nice, spring evening, and I was driving eastward through town when I noticed the clouds begin to clear in the sky ahead.  As the clouds drew back, I could see that there were stars behind them.  It was still too early for the stars to be out, and I knew immediately that this had to mean that there was a solar eclipse taking place in the sky behind me.  I began to panic.  I was afraid that I would be irresistibly drawn to look at the eclipse and that I would end up damaging my eyes.  I pulled into the parking lot of the local library.  I kept my head down as I got out of the car, but I couldn't resist making a quick sidelong glance at the sun.  I only got a glimpse.  I saw the massive dark disk slowly sliding into position.  I saw the huge interlocking mechanisms of nature momentarily exposed beyond the limit of what human eyes can bear.  I kept my head down and went looking for shelter.

I went inside the library.  There was a reading room in the basement, and there were other people taking shelter there. It was quiet and still and everyone was hunched down as though holding their breath and waiting, their eyes all raised towards the ceiling, trying to stay perfectly still until this terrifying alignment of celestial bodies had run its course in the world above.  A number of people had even piled into a closet.  They were all crammed in there with hardly room to move or breathe.  One of them, a small child with a smudged face, stared into my eyes, shaking and trembling.  The sight of them all cowering in the closet made me reconsider my fears.  I had never seen an eclipse, and I might never see one again.  As long as I didn't look directly at the sun, I'd be alright.

I decided to go back out.  I climbed the stairs, back up to the main doors of the library, eager to get back outside.  But when I opened the doors, there was just a huge grey gust of wind sweeping past.  I stepped out and found the sky completely clouded over and darkened and grey.  There were a few inches of snow on the ground and there was thick snow swirling in the air.  The bright spring evening had been swept aside by the eclipse.  The sun and the moon were out there beyond the clouds, conspiring to leave us in the dark and the bitter cold.

Resting in the Fields

I was living out of an old van.  Most of the time I kept it parked in an open wheat field, and in the evenings I would sit with the doors open and let the breeze blow through as I listened to my programs on a little TV that I had set up on some wooden crates.  I had to listen to the shows instead of watching them because the picture tube was blown out on the TV.  Somehow it was better that way.  There was a drama that was set in a hospital that I especially liked.  I would sit back with my eyes half closed, seeing the scenes in my head and getting a glimpse between my fluttering eyelids of the golden waves of evening light rustling out there in the wheat with each passing breeze.  My friend would come by sometimes with a few cans of food to cook over the fire after the sun went down, and he would find me there in the back of the van, smiling and about to doze off.

The Station House

I was a rookie cop, and it was my first day on the job.  I reported to the police station that morning.  The station was located in an old house.  The large kitchen had been made into a break room.  Cardboard boxes filled with files from old cases were piled up in one of the back bedrooms, and the hall closets were stuffed with uniforms and supplies.  It was a simple, laid back place and it seemed like most of the cops just sat around the station all day.  There were card games going in the break room, there was steam in the air from people using the shower upstairs, and some of the cops kicked their feet up on the coffee table and sat on the brown couches reading magazines out in the common area that used to be a living room.  There was a lot of talk about what it meant to be a cop, what a tough break and a rough deal it was, and how they put their lives on the line, but no one ever seemed to leave the station to go out and do any real police work.

I started to get kind of anxious.  It was one of those jobs where you're expected to look like you're keeping busy, but no one really gives you anything to do.  My training officer was sitting in on the card game, and she hadn't told me much of anything since I'd reported for duty that morning.  I wandered from room to room, not quite sure what to do with myself.  I didn't feel right about plopping down on the couch and reading a magazine, so I would go to the window and look out at the birds splashing around in the stone birdbath and perching on the old clothesline still strung up between two rusted poles in the backyard.  Then I would wander down the hall to the kitchen to look at my training officer's cards over her shoulder, and I would stand there awkwardly for a while until that got old, then I'd head back down the hall to the window to look out and see what the birds were up to.  I looked at my watch, and there was still another six and a half hours to go till the end of my shift.

I really started to feel awkward when this woman in a grey suit showed up with this grim and aggravated look on her face.  Someone whispered to me that this was the police commissioner.  She looked at everyone lounging around, and she didn't seem too happy.  Two men followed her wherever she went, scribbling things down on yellow legal pads.  She barked orders at officers as she passed them.  She snapped her fingers and a cup of coffee was brought to her. I tried my best to look busy.  I pointlessly sorted through some paperwork at the main desk, and she walked by without noticing me.  This was driving me nuts.  I couldn't spend all day trying to look busy when I had nothing to do.

After the commissioner was gone, one of the other rookies came up to me.  He had been feeling a bit anxious and bored too, and he suggested that we head out in one of the patrol cars and see what was going on around the town.  This sounded like a great idea, and I jumped at it.  It was sunny and a little cool outside.  We took one of the patrol cars that were parked out along the front curb under the shade of a large maple tree.  It felt good to get out and get some fresh air and really be doing something.  The other rookie told me that he had a hot lead on something and he knew just where to go.  I nodded and we drove off.

We pulled up outside a jewelry store in town.  The other rookie cast a few quick glances up and down the street as we got out of the patrol car.  He fidgeted with something on his gun in his holster, and I wasn't sure what he was doing.  I was starting to get nervous about the whole thing.  As soon as we came through the door and the electric door chime sounded, the rookie pulled his gun and started yelling at the people behind the counter to put their hands up.  It took me a second to realize that he was robbing the place.  I started to say something and he turned to look over at me, and just as he did, one of the owners grabbed a gun from under the counter and started firing wildly in our direction.  I dove for cover behind one of the display cases, and as I looked up, I could see the other rookie flailing about as he got riddled with bullets.  Blood and glass rained down everywhere as I tucked my head in and curled up behind the display case.  I never should have taken this job.

Robot Parts

I was visiting this elderly couple that I knew.  I was helping them go through some old junk that they had stored in a large overstuffed closet upstairs.  We carried some wooden chairs up from the kitchen and we sat half-buried in the brown suits and dresses hung up around us as we sorted through boxes of old papers and photographs.  There were papers from the old man's war service, along with metals and citations.  There were letters that the old woman had kept, correspondences from friends and relatives who had passed away.

In one of the boxes I found a bunch of small, loose, mechanical parts.  I wasn't sure what they were.  The old man explained that he had patented the design for a toy robot many years ago.  The parts were from the prototype that he had made.  He had taken it apart and stored it up in the closet.  He had forgotten all about it.  He reached out eagerly for the box.  He wanted to show me how the whole thing fit together.  Then we could wind it up with the brass key and watch it hobble around on the hardwood floor.

As I went to hand him the box, I noticed that there was some kind of green goop on my hands.  I sniffed at it.  It smelled rotten and sweet and foul.  The old man told me that some of the battery acid must have leaked out from the battery compartment after sitting in storage for so long.  I could feel it burning on my hands.  The old man tried to tell me not to panic.  But the more I tried to wipe the acid off, the more of a mess I made.  I had spread it to my arms and there was even some on my face.  I felt it burning in my throat, and I felt like I couldn't breathe.  I got all tangled up in the hanging clothes trying to get out of the closet.  I felt around for the doorknob and I burst out the door and ran down the hall clawing at my skin.

From the Bridge

It was in the middle of a winter night and my car broke down on an icy bridge over the freeway.  I got out of the car and the car disappeared.  The night was perfectly still and quiet and there was a strange comfort in standing there in the open.  There was no traffic on the bridge; no traffic on the highway below the bridge; no lights from the town nearby.  It was just dark and quiet; just my breath steaming in the frozen air.  Everything was shut down.  Everything was done for the night.  Everyone was asleep everywhere, curled up somewhere warm, wishing all their silent wishes and dreaming all their silent dreams, and the stars twinkled in the sky above without the moon or the city contending for their light.  There was nothing there on the bridge but the cold crystal radiance of the cosmos and the rising clouds of my breath as I stood there amazed by it all.      

Outside Line

We got home and the house was dark.  This teenage kid from down the street had knocked out all the phone lines and power lines in the neighborhood.  There was trouble at home with his parents and he was upset about it.  His mother had gotten a letter in the mail informing her that she had a cancerous growth on her right eyelid.  She didn't want to talk about it and she had thrown away the letter, but the father ended up finding it in the trash.  They avoided one another after that, the mother in denial, the father not knowing how to approach the subject.  He stopped halfway down the stairs one morning, and through the bannister and the crack in the bathroom door, he could see see her in the shower.  She caught him looking at her, her right eyelid drooping noticeably and uncomfortably, and she turned away so he wouldn't see.  The father just stood there in his blue pajamas halfway down the stairs, not knowing which way to go or what to do.  I guess the kid figured that if his parents weren't going to communicate, no one else in the neighborhood was going to either.

I felt bad for the kid, for his parents, for his family, but I was still mad that he had knocked out the phone lines.  I gave up and slammed the dead phone down on the hook.  My wife suggested trying our old answering machine that was built into the phone.  We could at least pick up our messages.  I shrugged and figured it was worth a try.  There was only one message on there.  It was from my daughter's old high school principal.  He was droning on and on about something, making endless digressions that began with, "When I was your age," trying to make it clear that he sympathized and understood.  I was about to erase the message, but my daughter said that she wanted to hear it.  She said that everyone always got a kick out of the principal's long boring stories.  I handed her the phone and she put it to her ear and listened, laughing from time to time.    

The Ballroom

There was a party of some sort, a formal occasion.  I was dressed in my black suit, sitting at a round table laid out with glistening silverware, surrounded by other guests chatting and sipping from champagne glasses.  The women wore satin dresses and leaned affectionately against their dates as they laughed.  Our table was in the middle of a vast ballroom, the ceiling vaulted far above and murals of grape vineyards painted high on the walls.  Candles flickered at every table and the evening light shone down from the windows, casting a soft haze about the room as though this were all already taking place in a memory.  People got up here and there to dance, and the brass band up on the stage would launch into another number with a sharp blast of their instruments.

A fat, balding man in a white suit and a bow tie, some local big shot, came in with a brunette draped on his arm.  There was a blonde in a glittering dress at the bar.  Her face fell when she turned and saw the fat man walking in with the brunette.  The blonde was apparently the man's wife and the brunette was his mistress, or perhaps it was the other way around.  At any rate, a huge screaming fight broke out between the two of them with the fat man in the middle hanging his head in shame.  The blonde and brunette sniped and clawed the air at each other, while the bartender stood by, not saying a word and hoping that none of his glasses or bottles would end up broken.  Over at our table we raised our glasses and whistled and yelled as someone proposed a toast to all of them.  They stopped and stared over at us.  The blonde sneered with disgust.  We didn't care.  We all laughed.  The music started up again, the drummer rattling the cymbals, the trumpets and trombones piercing the air.

The music was still pounding in my ears after the event was over and we started hitting the town in a long black hearse that had been converted into a limousine.  The back of the hearse, where they used to keep the caskets, had been made into a small lounge with a bench that wrapped around the sides and windows that still had the little pleated white curtains hung over them.  We all crammed onto this bench, smoking cigarillos and passing bottles around till morning.  I peeled back the curtain and looked out the window over someone's shoulder and I could see that we were parked outside of a convenient store somewhere, rocking the vehicle around on its springs, and I felt the flush of normal, sober life come back to me.  I started thinking about getting home.  Everyone else was still half drunk, and they argued over who would drive the hearse.

Someone took the wheel and started weaving their way towards my house.  About a mile from the house there was a point where the driver almost veered off of a cliff and I had to lunge up front and grab the wheel.  I looked around the car at everyone laughing, and I realized that they were all on this drug that made everything seem like a cartoon.  Either the driver hadn't seen the cliff, or they had all thought that some cartoon physics would come into play if we went over the edge.  Maybe they'd been on the drug all night.  Maybe I was on it too and didn't realize it.  I asked them to let me off at the curb.  Faces and hands popped from every window as they all yelled and waved and the hearse drove away.

At the Street Corner

It was a very dark night.  I was sitting on the front steps of a brick building in the city, hidden in the shadow of a doorway.  I could see a man coming up the street with his little daughter walking beside him.  He had on a tan overcoat and a hat and tie.  He looked like a businessman of some sort, as solid as they come.  The little girl clutched one of her father's fingers, and she kept dragging her heels, pointing at something back the way they came.  She kept going on about a puppy she had seen.  The man turned and crouched down, resting a gentle hand on her shoulder.  "We'll have to talk to mommy about it, okay?"  The girl nodded, pressing a finger to her chin and looking back uncertainly.

I smiled at this interaction, but as they started away, the girl kept on about the dog, pleading and pouting, and the father's manner began to change, devolving right in front of me.  He began to snap at the girl, yelling at her in a spiteful, ugly way.  "You're never getting a dog.  Just shut up about it!"  He jerked roughly at her arm, dragging her with him.  As they came under the beam of the streetlight at the corner, I could see that even his clothes had changed.  His overcoat was ratty and wrinkled and full of holes.  His hat was even gone now somehow, and his hair looked like he had just woken up.  He teetered about drunkenly on wobbly legs.  My whole sense of the girl's safety and security vanished in an instant.

But yet, somehow she finally got him to agree to go back and see the puppy.  She was leading him now, still clutching his finger, and he stumbled along, listlessly inebriated, all the fight gone out of him.  And I watched them head back the way they came, and I had a feeling the girl would be alright.  I could picture her back at the house where they'd seen the puppies, giggling and kneeling down in a warmly lit room and picking her favorite one.  They would take to each other immediately, and the puppy would grow up big and strong.  He'd growl when the father lost his temper like that.  He'd get between them, baring his teeth.  He'd look out for this girl in his simple, loyal way and things would be different.  He'd keep her safe.

Drawing Flies

My wife and I were trying to find our way around this apartment complex.  There was a unit we wanted to look at.  We had the number, but we couldn't figure out which building it was in.  A bright eyed little boy appointed himself as our guide.  He waved his hand back at us, signaling for us to follow him.  He led us down a winding sidewalk, passing through a series of arches and doorways, always looking back to see if we were keeping up and making impatient little hops in place whenever we fell behind.

As we went along, I compared the number I'd written down on a scrap of paper to the numbers of the buildings we passed, and I began to figure out the layout of the complex, and I realized that the boy was leading us the wrong way.  There was another winding sidewalk just across the way from the one we were on and there was just a little plot of grass between them.  I caught up with the boy and pointed out that we could just cut across the grass and head the other direction on the other sidewalk to get to the building.  I could even see a shaft of sunlight breaking through and shining down on this other stretch of sidewalk as though it were especially provided to light our way.

The boy just shook his head and pointed along the same path that we had been traveling.  He said that this was the only way he knew.  He said that there would be seven doors to pass through and then the sidewalk would loop around and join up with the other sidewalk across the way and take us to where we wanted to go.  I tried to explain that we could get to the other sidewalk right now, that it was just over there, and we just had to cut across the grass.  It seemed like a needless detour to go all the way around.  I appealed to my wife on this, but she just shrugged and said, "Well this is the only way he knows."

So we followed him.  Finally we came to the last of the seven doors.  This one led to the apartment's laundry room.   Before he opened it, the boy shushed us with his finger, explaining that his mother was sleeping inside.  As he quietly slid the door open, I could see the figure of a woman with dark hair sitting in the shadows across the room.  There were an inordinate number of flies buzzing around this figure.  It's mouth gaped open and showed that most of the teeth had fallen out.  One eye stared, still and dead, while the other festered with a swarm of maggots.

We had to pass through this laundry room to get the door on the other side and continue along the sidewalk.  It was the only way to go.  My wife crept forward, trying to be careful not to bump into the boy's mother and knock any loose rotting parts off of her.  I kept my head down and my mouth shut tight.  I didn't want to accidentally swallow any of the flies that had been feasting on the corpse.