Part of the Family

I was watching a gangster movie on TV. It opened on a residential street lined with matching bungalows painted in a variety of bright pastels, their yards enclosed with picket fences and landscaped with flower bushes blossoming in colors that complimented the houses. A paper boy flung a paper into one of the yards, and then rode out of frame ringing his bell. All the telltale signs of a nice suburban neighborhood. The movie then cut to an interior shot of a man sleeping in his upstairs bedroom beside his wife, the sounds of birds and the occasional passing car drifting in through the open window.

The man woke up groggy eyed and smacking his lips, and then he jolted awake when he noticed the mob boss standing at the foot of his bed. He went to reach for his glasses on the bedside table, but two of the mob boss's goons grabbed him by the ankles. The wife woke up then and started screaming, and the man was shouting and reaching for her as he got dragged past the foot of the bed. The mob boss and his goons got the man on the floor, and they were kicking at him and spitting at him and yelling. And all the quiet of the morning was shattered in the commotion.

More goons appeared at the window, staring into the room and grinning. The goons in the bedroom hoisted the man up and fed him through the window to the goons outside on the balcony, and they took him out over the railing of the balcony and down into the front yard. All the while, the man and his wife were urgently yelling things at each other, final goodbyes, last minute details of their lives that they needed to relay to one another, since they both knew he wouldn't be coming back. The goons just kept kicking at the man, telling them both to shut their mouths as they carried the man away.

The goons got the man out onto the front walk and even as they carried him off down the street, he was still shouting things back up to his wife where she had poked her head out from the upstairs window. The mob boss came strolling out of the house behind his men with a big satisfied grin on his face. He stopped under a tree in the front yard to light the stub of a cigar that he pulled from his pocket. He looked up and down the street and nodded, as though he were contemplating buying a house in the neighborhood.

A few houses down he noticed an old lady standing on her front walk, clutching her white robe closed at her chest and staring off down the street in the direction that the goons had taken her neighbor. She turned to the mob boss as he strolled over to her, and she lifted a shaking finger at him to ask what was going on. But before she could say anything, he pulled a wad of money from the pocket of his shirt. He laid the money in her bewildered hands, telling her, "Get yourself a new pair of slippers. Alright, sweetheart?" The woman just looked at the money and then down at her bare feet, and then she turned and went back into her house, shaking her head.

The mob boss's son was actually there on the couch next to me, watching the movie along with me. I jolted when I looked over and noticed him there. I told him that he was in the movie too, and I pointed out a scene that he was in. He was just a boy then, and there was a shot of him sitting at a table by himself at a garden party outdoors. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the boy was dressed in his suit that he had worn to church. People were slow dancing on the stone patio and mingling among the rose bushes, and the boy just looked around from person to person, blinking his eyes.

Now that he saw himself in the movie, the mob boss's son perked up and took a renewed interest in it. He even moved closer to the edge of his seat. This was like lost footage of his family's life that had been edited out of his childhood. He never knew about any of this. He saw his father brutally torturing and disfiguring a man, and then he saw him literally come walking into the next room with the kindest smile in the world on his face. And in the son's memory there was only his father walking into that room smiling as the boy had looked up with his birthday hat on just as he was about to blow out the candles on his cake. These missing pieces were an unsettling revelation.

I saw that the movie had piqued the son's interest, and I started to enthusiastically tell him how and why I liked the movie so much. I talked about how it engendered this constant, unnerving feeling that something bad was just about to happen. But I was still just thinking of it all as a movie and evaluating its merits on those grounds alone. He was looking at it differently. He just responded to what I was telling him with a few distracted nods. His whole mind, his ego and his identity, were recalibrating around this new information. The rapid shifting of his eyes and a few sharp twitches of his jaws betrayed all the cogs and wheels that were cranking away inside.

Fan Contract

The first day of class, the teacher had us all sign a paper saying that we waived our right to complain about the fan. The contract was one page, with the terms of the agreement printed in a few brief lines at the top and more than enough lines for all of us to sign underneath. None of us knew exactly what "the fan" was, but we all signed nevertheless. We were concerned that we wouldn't be able to take the class otherwise. Once he had all of our signatures, the teacher taped this paper to the side of a portable box fan, reminding us of our agreement.

He kept the fan on his desk, facing out towards the class. He would turn it at various angles from time to time, so that at one time or another, everyone had the experience of having this fan blowing at them. Needless to say, it was irritating. It would dry out our eyes and blow dust into our faces, and it would blow our pencils and papers off our desks. Sometimes the teacher would carry the fan by the handle, and he would walk around the class with it as he gave his lecture. He would stop to make some point or another, and he would stand there with the fan propped up on the top of someone's desk, blowing directly at them, and he would look around at the class and go on talking, not acknowledging the fan at all, pretending like he didn't notice that he was holding it right in someone's face.

There were two girls who sat right in front of his desk that really got the worst of it. Nearly every class, one of them would finally break and throw her pencil down and ask, "Do you have to have that fan blowing on us all the time? Can you please just turn it off!?" And he would reply, "No, you signed the contract. Anyone else have any questions?" He always said it that way, the sentence already half crumpled up and thrown in the waste basket before immediately moving on to other things. Maybe this was supposed to be a lesson to us to be careful what we signed. Maybe he liked getting on our nerves. Maybe he just really liked his fan. He never did say.

The Other Lane

I was up along the lake front of Lake Erie, driving around a sleepy small town there with its shady yards and closely packed colonial houses and its patchwork streets of brick and asphalt and stone. I was cutting down a particularly narrow side street, and there was a garbage truck sitting along the curb on the other side of the street, and the garbage men had jumped down and they were collecting the bags and cans that had been left out on the curb for them. As I approached the spot where the garbage truck was sitting, an old red pickup truck came growling out from behind the garbage truck, and it was running straight at me in my lane. I had to swerve off the road and run aground on someone's front lawn to avoid the collision.

I started pounding on the horn with my fist and flipping the man off, waving my hand out the window and high in the air like a declaration of war. The truck slammed to an abrupt stop as it came alongside where I had wiped out in the yard. A man with a grizzly white beard shoved his face out the window and started screaming at me. He told me that he was a house painter for something and sons company or whatever, as if that excused his actions, as if to say that he was someone important in this town and he could drive in whatever lane he wanted and whichever direction he wanted. I yelled back that he had almost hit me, that he had made me wreck my car. I pointed to the double yellow line that ran down the center of the street, clearly indicating that passing wasn't allowed. None of this made the slightest difference to the man. He just huffed and gripped his steering wheel like he was going to tear it off the dashboard and hurl it at me.

People all around began to appear, in doorways, up on balconies, from around the back of their garages. They all stared at me with the same hostility as the old painter in the truck, and I saw that they were all with him. I guess he actually was considered someone important in the town. They all began to gather on the scene. But I wasn't worried. I could just put the car back into drive, hit the gas, and be clear of the situation in a matter of seconds, spraying mud and grass from the turfed up yard in my wake.

But just as I went to do exactly that, I found that my hand reaching for the gear shift was grabbing at nothing but air. The car had disappeared out from under me. Now I was on foot. Now I was in trouble. All the angry town's people were closing on me. Even the garbage men had left their cans laying all over the yard and were coming down the street towards me. I faked this way and then that, and then I sprinted towards an opening where I saw sunlight down at the end of a shady boulevard of trees. Everyone fell in behind me, chasing me as a group, sweeping more people into their mob as they went along by the sheer gravity of their anger and their energy.

I came to a busier section of town and I ducked into a cramped little town store that sold cigarettes and lottery tickets and beer. The man behind the counter was alarmed at the way that I rushed in, and he started yelling something, but I was already out another door on the other side of the store before he managed to get out much more than an couple of loud grunts and angry noises. The other door let out onto a park of some sort where there was a sloping field with a grove of trees, and past that, running for it with all my strength, I could see the beach and the waves and the boats riding the thin blue line where the lake met the sky.

Clock Workers

I woke up and there was a crew of workers in my bedroom, cleaning and fixing and dismantling everything. One of them had taken the light bulb out of the bedside lamp. He was wearing black gloves, and he held the light bulb by the base in one hand while he used a feather duster to lightly dust it with the other. He held it up, contemplating its inner filament as though the bulb contained a miniature world of industry waiting to be illuminated. Another man had taken the back off of the alarm clock, and he was studying the gears inside with an eyepiece and poking at its inner mechanisms with a set of picks and tweezers designed for small, delicate work.

Across the room, by the window, there were two other men. One of them sat on the edge of the bed in front of a cart with a carousel slide projector on it, holding the trigger that advanced the slides, and the other stared out the window at the view, scratching his chin and thinking. Every time the man working the slide projector clicked the trigger, the scene outside the window would change. Summer, spring, fall. Mountains and pastures and rainy city streets. And the man at the window took his time considering each one. The thing he seemed to find the most important was how thoughtful the light cast back through the window from each scene made him look. He would draw himself up in various poses and attitudes, and when these failed to satisfy him, he would gesture to the man at the projector to advance to the next slide.

None of them had noticed yet that I had woken up, and when I yelled, "Hey!" they all stopped and looked at me. "You don't need to do any of this. It's fine," I told them. They all looked at one another, knowing smirks spreading across their faces. They kept nodding to each other and repeating what I had said, "You don't need to do any of this. It's fine," as though this were a source of sly amusement that I couldn't comprehend. Finally another worker came forward, one that I hadn't noticed before in the room. He swapped out the pillows that lay behind me against the headboard and replaced them with fresh ones. Then he placed his hand on my shoulder and eased me back down onto the bed, shushing me as I drifted back. This had the intended effect, and I got very tired, and I faded back off to sleep before I even felt my head come to rest against the pillows.

Bringing the Wolves

I came across a wedding taking place in a clearing deep in the woods under the open grey sky. The white chairs for the guests were set up in a semi-circle. It was late in the year and the ground was covered in crunching snow and dead leaves, and there were colored lights strung up in the bare branches of the trees around the clearing. About a third of the chairs were filled with guests, and the guests were all sitting in groups and clusters, talking amongst themselves and paying no real attention to the bride and the groom and the preacher, who were all standing under a tree at one corner of the clearing. Most of the guests weren't even looking in that direction.

And all the while, the bride, the groom, and the preacher stood in their places saying nothing. The couple just gazed at one another, beaming with sublime joy, and the preacher stared down at the Bible open in his hands, occasionally smoothing his fingers over a passage on the page that he seemed eager to read aloud. They were either waiting for someone or something to arrive so that they could begin the ceremony, or they were simply going to stand there all day as a decorative centerpiece to the general celebration of their matrimony. In fact, some of the guests had already wandered over to the table with the punch bowl and refreshments that was set up in the back behind the chairs, and a band was already playing light, festive music over by the tree line at the other end of the clearing. There was no sense that the guests were waiting for anything. It just looked like this was how they planned to spend the day.

As I wandered through the rows of chairs, I noticed that many of the children of the guests were sniffling and coughing, and some of them even looked pale and feverish. One boy glanced up at me as I passed by, and he pouted as he wiped his nose across his sleeve. I started thinking that it was inconsiderate for the bride and the groom to make everyone bring their sick kids deep out into the cold woods for their wedding. I took a wool cap that the boy was holding in his hands and popped it up onto his head and patted him on the back. The brim of the cap just dropped forward as the boy stared down at his cold empty fingers, balling them into little red fists to keep them warm.

I thought that maybe the thing to do would be to start a fire. I figured that I could get a small group of the guests together, and we could gather sticks and fallen branches from the woods and get a nice size fire going in a back corner of the clearing that wasn't being used. I looked around at the scattered guests. The largest group was in the middle section of the chairs. They all seemed to be clustered closely around a woman at the middle of the group who was cradling a bundle in her arms. Some strained to lean forward over the backs of the chairs in front of them, while others were turned around with their knees on their seats. They were all smiling and pointing at the bundle.

As I came closer, I saw that it was something wrapped in a coat, and as I leaned in, I saw the furry nose of a small wolf cub peek up from behind a fold of the coat's hood. I was immediately as enchanted as everyone else was. I brought a finger up and tickled the air a little in front of the cub's nose. He nipped at it with his sharp teeth, and I snatched my finger back, and everyone laughed. I did it again and snatched it back just in time. He stared up at me from his warm bundle, the sky and the shadows of some of the taller-reaching trees showing in the darker portions of his eye.

Ever so softly, I began to let out a low howl, fainter than the winter wind, trying to entice something in the wolf cub's newborn spirit. I let the sound of it trail off and fade on the air, and I smiled to see the cub perk up and lift itself up off the woman's lap. I pursed my lips, preparing to howl again, but the woman gave me a pointed but quiet hiss and told me to stop. "You can't be doing that. You'll bring the other wolves." And I looked around and saw that everyone else was staring at me, stern and serious. Someone at the back of the group slowly shook their head.

But somehow I couldn't bring myself to stop, or maybe I just didn't care to heed these admonitions. I threw my head back and let out a loud, piercing howl that rang across the clearing. I caught my breath, and then did it again. And then again. And then yet again. I scanned the faces of the crowd with a grin on my face, but no one else was laughing. Everyone was looking away from me in all directions, towards the edge of the clearing on all sides. The bride and the groom were clinging to to each other, and the preacher was turning to look over his shoulder. The band had stopped playing abruptly. The accordian let out a long whine as it slowly collapsed in the accordian player's hands. The fiddle player stopped with his bow in mid-stroke. I turned around to see what they were all staring at, and the grin died on my face. There on the edge of the woods all around us stood the wolves, evenly spaced, their eyes narrow and hot and hungry in the raw air.

The Laundromat

I was walking through the vacant parking lot of a dark office building. Dry powdered snow blew in swirls across the pavement, and little pellets of ice spit in the air. The clouds hung low and black, and the only light was from a thin break far off along the edge of the horizon behind me. I walked over to my car parked in the first row along the curb, the only car parked in the lot, and I saw that there was something piled in a loose heap on the top of the trunk. As I got closer, I saw that it was a thick cotton blanket. I knew this blanket. It kept showing up in my life. Someone kept leaving it behind for me in different places, wanting me to take it. They left it on tables and chairs with a note bearing my name attached to it. They left it on my desk at work. I found it at the bottom of gift boxes. I found it on beds next to my coat as I was leaving parties.

And now here it was, left on the trunk of my car. By leaving it here, they were insisting that I take it. This was a final gesture of exasperation. They had dumped it there on the trunk as if to say that they were done with it, that it was my blanket now and I could do what I wanted with it as long as it was out of their sight. I grabbed a handful of it and pulled an end of it up to look at it. It was heavy and damp and growing stiff from the cold. It was colored in patterns of orange and red and blue, but it had grown ratty and old and all the colors had faded and blended into a dull pink.

I was standing there still holding the edge of this blanket, wrinkling my nose at it, when a married couple came jogging across the parking lot. As they passed by, I called out to them, "I guess someone really wants me to have this blanket." As I said this, the woman broke off from her husband and she came jogging over to me. She grabbed two corners of the blanket and she held it up to look at it. She said that it looked like a fine blanket. But I complained that it was wet and cold and it had been left outside picking up who knows what sorts of germs. I couldn't imagine using it on my bed at home.

The woman assured me that that wouldn't be a problem. She rolled the blanket up and tucked it under her arm, and I followed her as she rounded the corner of the office building. When we came around, the light flicked on in one of the windows on the first floor. I saw that it was the light of a storefront window. It was the only window that was lit in the whole dark building. There were letters on the glass that said "Laundromat", and the shadows of the letters were elongated and written across the frozen ground. There was a neon sign saying that they were open 24 hours. The place seemed to have just appeared there for our benefit.

We went inside, and I dug in my pockets for some loose change, and we washed the blanket in one of the washing machines and dried it one of the dryers. There was a coffee pot brewing with free coffee for the customers. I drank a few cups while I waited, and I thumbed through some of the old magazines that were left scattered on the tables beside the chairs in the waiting area. When the blanket was done drying, the woman folded it neatly on the counter and she presented it to me with a bright smile. "See, it's just fine," she told me. The blanket was warm and clean and it smelled like fabric softener. I held it close and nodded. Outside, beyond the storefront window, the snow was beginning to fall in thicker, wetter flakes.

Waiting for an Elevator

I saw an old professor of mine across a crowded train station. He was standing by a bank of elevators, waiting for one to take him to a higher floor. I called out to him, waving my hand high in the air, and I started to hobble over to him with my injured left leg. The light glared off the lenses of his glasses for a moment as he glanced over, and then he quickly looked away, lurching slightly at the elevator doors, as though he could will them to open and make his escape. I could tell that he didn't want to see me, but I still made my way over to him, propelled by the momentum of my efforts to get across the floor. It was the holiday season, and everyone had on heavy coats. Everyone was headed home. I pushed my way through the crowd, still waving my hand in the air.

When I got over to him, he glanced down at my injured leg. He seemed to be disgusted by it, or else he was just revolted by me in general and the leg was just a larger part of it. I held out my hand to him, and I launched right into a conversation about something he had discussed in class. But I hardly got two words out before he cut me off, saying, "I've been waiting forever for this stupid elevator." He pointed up at the arrow moving across the semi-circle dial that indicated the floor that the elevator was on. "I can't keep wasting my time standing here. I think I'm going to take the stairs, and you can wait here for the elevator, and I'll meet you up on the third level."

I knew that this was a ruse to get away from me. He could see that I couldn't take the stairs with my injured leg, and he was using that to his advantage. But he tried to make it look convincing; he tried to make it look like he was really going to wait for me. As a show of good faith, he even handed me his brown briefcase and his plum colored umbrella, both wet from the melted snow. He would get these things back from me when we met above. But I could feel that the briefcase was empty, and I could see that there was no actual mechanism to open the umbrella. They were just props, cleverly employed for these exact sorts of situations.

He pressed these items into my hands, and then he backed away towards the stairs, almost stumbling against the bottom step in his hurry to get away. He kept reminding me that he would meet me on the third floor, maintaining the pretense that this actually mattered. I nodded and played along, the fake umbrella and the empty briefcase cradled in my arms. And then he was up the stairs and gone. As soon as he had slipped out of sight, the elevator bell dinged and the doors slid open. The elevator was empty. A florescent light in the ceiling flickered for a moment and then burned out and then the elevator was dark inside. There was no one aboard, and I knew there was no one waiting for me on the floors above.

Pieces of a Horse

I went to visit a farmer that I knew. When I got there, I found him out in his garage, all excited about a wooden crate that had come in the mail. He was prying the lid off the crate with a crowbar when I walked up. I heard the crack of wood and the creak of the nails wrenching free. The crate was packed with straw, and the farmer dug around a bit and pulled out the leg of a horse. He brushed the leg clean of a few loose pieces of straw, and he held it gripped with both hands, satisfied with the length and the weight and the feel of it. It was a rich brown with small patches of white. "Look at that shoe!" he told me, flipping the leg around so that the hoof faced me. The smoothest, shiniest silver horseshoe was fixed to the hoof, looking like it had never taken the slightest step on dirty ground.

He explained to me that this was the last piece he needed to make a horse. He'd ordered it all through the mail, one piece at a time, and crate after crate had been delivered to the farm over the last three months. I was baffled by what he was telling me. I pointed out that a horse was a living creature, born of its mother, and growing bigger and stronger with time. It wasn't something that you could order in pieces through the mail and assemble together. But the farmer, he just laughed at my ignorance and gave me a little wink.

I followed him out to the barn. There was a large open area in the front, and he told me to wait there while he went in the back where the stalls were. I sat down on a bale of hay and gazed up at a large gap in the boards of the roof where the faded light of the cloudy day shone through. I rolled my eyes at the thought that the farmer was somewhere in the back, putting together a horse. But twenty minutes later, I heard that unmistakable snort and I looked up to see a brown and white horse come trotting through the doorway that led to the back of the barn. It looked over at me with its large dark eyes, and then it swung its head low and trotted past me out of the barn, out into the open field. As it passed into the light, I caught the gleam of silver off its hoof. It had on that same, perfectly clean shoe.

But all the same, I figured the farmer was pulling some kind of prank on me. Maybe this was a common joke among farmers. The old assembled horse routine. I figured I'd find him in the back, standing in the empty stall where the whole horse had been all along, still holding the horse leg that had come in the mail, laughing until there were tears in his eyes. But when I went in the back, there was no one there. I called out the farmer's name, but no one answered. It was cool and quiet and dark, and all the stalls were empty.

The door to the last stall was open, and I found all of the farmer's clothes in a heap on the floor inside the stall. I looked at the clothes and I looked back down at the doorway that the horse had went through, and I started to put it all together. The pieces of the horse were like a suit that the farmer had put on. He had put the torso of the horse around his midsection, slid the hind legs on like boots and the fore legs on like gloves, slipped the horse head over his own head, and fixed the tail to his own hind end. Doing so, he had actually become the horse. Not just wearing the horse, he was changed somewhere in the heart of the horse's being. I realized that this was how all horses came to be, born out of some unique sense of freedom that only a horse could offer someone willing to order one piece by piece through the mail.

There was a soft rumble of thunder and the rain began to pour outside. I went back out to stand in the open doorway of the barn, just enough inside to still be clear of the rain, and I saw the horse out there in the field. It was getting agitated by the rain and a little spooked by the thunder. It trotted around in an uncertain circle, not sure of what to do or where to go. Finally, it sought shelter under a tree that stood alone on a small hill, and I watched as it reached up and picked apples from the tree with its teeth and stood eating them, perfectly content.

By the Jailhouse

As I was strolling down a boulevard, enjoying the spring air and admiring the small trees that had been planted every few feet along the sidewalk, I came upon the stone building that served as the county jail. I happened to glance over as I was passing the front steps of the building, and I noticed a woman with curly, bleached blonde hair across the street, crouched down and hiding behind a hedge. Her eyes were just over the top of the hedge, and she was staring intently at the front doors of the jailhouse. This struck me as strange, almost comical, and I was curious about why the woman was there. So, when I got to the corner, I spent a few moments pretending to contemplate the bronze statue of the town's founder that looked out over the five point intersection, and then I casually turned around and went back the way that I had come, so that I could cross by the woman once more.

As I passed by the jailhouse again, there was a young man wearing sunglasses and a grey jacket, hustling down the steps. His shoulder bumped into mine, nearly knocking me to the ground, but he didn't stop to acknowledge me there. He didn't even seem to notice that he had ran into me. He just stopped at the curb, glanced quickly up the street, and then hurried across to the blonde woman hiding behind the hedge. She came out to meet him with her arms wide to embrace him, her black heels clicking against the pavement as she shuffled her feet, and a shopping bag dangling from her left hand. I shook my head, thinking that it had been silly for her to hide like that, as though this had been a carefully orchestrated jailbreak rather than a legitimately scheduled release, as though all dealings of any kind with the county jail required skulking about and hiding behind bushes.

The young man was clearly the blonde woman's boyfriend, and even he asked her what she was doing over there in the bushes. But he didn't really bother waiting for an answer; he just shook his head. He snatched the shopping bag from her hand and peered down into it. "What the hell is this?" he asked her, his raised voice carrying across the street. He drew a blue sequinned dress up out of the bag, holding the price tag for her to see. She fidgited in place and fumbled in her pockets for a cigarette, and they both immediately launched into what seemed like an old, old argument about money.

I started to move on, feeling too conspicuous standing there and watching this couple argue. I could hear the blonde woman behind me in tears, her high-pitched voice carrying over her boyfriend's low grumbles. She told him about all the places that she wanted them to go, fancy restaurants and nice stores, maybe even plays and art galleries. Somehow the sequinned dress was some necessary component of these fantasies, the key to the whole thing. She wanted them to have a new life, glossy and brightly colored, smooth and elegant. "And now you've ruined it, ruined everything!" she told him, stamping her heel on the sidewalk. Things were supposed to go a certain way when he got out of jail, when he came out and saw the dress, and already, from the very first scene, he had deviated from that long reel of celluloid images that she had hoped to see unwinding far into their future.

I heard the paper crinkle of the dress going back into the bag, and I glanced back to see the boyfriend put his hand on her arm to calm her, to comfort her, to tell her that he was sorry. But she had her head down, stubbornly refusing to be consoled. Their new life would be just like their old life, that picture perfect moment in the candlelight with the waiter holding the bottle of wine would always be just beyond their reach, always belonging to someone else, somewhere else. But they started away together down the boulevard, her sullenness subsiding as she rested her head on his shoulder. I just shrugged and turned the corner onto another sunny street.

Mirror Image

There was an important job interview that I had to go to. I went in the bathroom to get ready, and as I flipped on the light, I was shocked by the face that confronted me in the mirror. I saw myself, looking frayed and frazzled and malnourished. There was a large purple bruise across my right eye, and the bones of my jaw stood out sharply, and the corners of my mouth kept twitching, seeming to form various cackles of mania and pale expressions of distress and extreme anxiety of their own accord. Strangest of all, there were several large, festering black sores protruding from my face and forehead.

As I leaned forward, I saw that the sores were actually the blossoms of some unknown variety of black flower that had somehow taken root in my skin. The petals looked like something burnt, like they would turn to ashes at the touch. But I tugged at one of the petals and it held firm. I started to panic a little, thinking about the job interview, trying to figure out how to clean myself up. But my panic only drove the face in the mirror to cackle and twist and twitch even more, making it all that much more grotesque. I grabbed at the black flower on my forehead, and as I tried to tear it off, I saw my left eye pull shut as I winced from the pain.

The Broom

One cold winter morning the guards led me out to a snow-covered field where a massive stone chopping block and an executioner with a heavy wooden axe were waiting for me. I was part of a large family that had ruled the kingdom for ages. But now the family had been overthrown and all the other family members had been eliminated. I was the last one that they had left to deal with. The young prince of the new ruling family stood beside the executioner as a witness, his pale face hard and petulant, his arms folded across his chest, his right fist flexing and cracking the leather of his black glove.

As the guards were lowering me to my knees before the chopping block, the prince put up his hand to stop them. He gave them a short nod, indicating that he wanted a second to speak to me, to indulge his curiosity. Then he asked me the simplest question of all. He asked me if I was angry. I laughed at the question. I told him that the magnitude of what was happening was far beyond the possibility of anger. I looked up at the snow beginning to swirl in the grey sky above, and I told him that I felt like a bird that was about to fly away and vanish forever. How could I be angry? What good would it do me?

The prince still had his hand held up as he took a moment to consider my answer. Then he flipped his palm over and gestured for the guards to help me to my feet, and I knew then that I had been spared. "From now on, you will be just another commoner," he told me. "Your family name will be stripped of any significance that it once had. Any thought that you might have of regaining power will be like trying to grasp at the air. There will be nothing there for you. You will be no one." He told me that I would become the caretaker of the castle, serving the new ruling family. And in a briefly improvised ceremony, a broom was brought out from a stable nearby and placed into my hands as a coronation of my new position. I nodded eagerly. I accepted everything gladly. I clutched the cold wooden handle. There were chunks of snow and ice in the bristles.

And so I stayed on, sweeping the halls of the castle clean in the winters, and tending to the gardens outside in the summers. And that feeling of being a vanishing bird carried me through the rest of my life. I felt it whenever I passed by a window and saw the clouds in the blue sky, whenever I paused in my sweeping to look at the portraits hung in the main gallery, whenever the midday shadows fell deep along the stone walls, whenever I heard the bells toll the birth of a new royal child, or the marriage of the princess, or the crowning of the prince. I swept down through all these moments, days scattered by the handful, only ever touching down slightly, grazing them barely, like things dreamt of or already remembered, beautiful, beautiful things of no consequence whatsoever.

Stars on the Water

A young woman in a white dress was leading me through the woods to a spot that she wanted to show me. It was very early in the morning and still dark out and it was hard to see the path in front of me, but she seemed to know every step of the way. So I followed close behind her, and it was easy to see her white dress even in the dark. She knew the common as well as the Latin names of every tree and flower that we passed, and she called them back to me in a hushed voice and waved her hand at them as we went by. Whenever there was a break in the trees and we could see the stars, she would tell me the names of the constellations that she could make out. Cassiopeia, Pegasus, the big dipper and the little. She had a very prim and proper way of speaking, like reciting a lesson, or giving one.

I trudged along behind her, listening and nodding, grabbing at branches to hoist myself up at steep spots in the path. It occurred to me that a more cynical person might find her irritating, might think that she was spilling forth all this knowledge to show off, to make herself look smarter than everyone else. But I could tell that her enthusiasm came from a genuine place. She was simply excited about everything, about life, about the world, and so she had learned the given names of the things that interested her. I thought about all the people that probably gave her a hard time for this, that made her feel like she was doing something wrong out of their own sense of inadaquacy, that made her feel apart from everyone else. I watched her slipping between the shadows up ahead. I lost sight of her and then I found her again by the sound of her voice. And so we moved along the twists and turns in the path, her reciting the names of the flowers and the trees, and me contemplating the loneliness of her life.

I heard the sound of flowing water somewhere nearby, growing stronger as we went, and as it began to get lighter out, I was able to discern through a break in the trees that there was a small stream running alongside the path, the ground sloping down towards it on our right. The path had led us down to the stream and it turned to follow along the course that the water had cut through the mud and the rocks and the smoothed stones. The path dipped down to the bank in spots, and then it would shy away and climb back up the hill away from the bank, and in these meadering places the young woman would dig in her heels and hike up the hem of her dress, spotted here and there with brown speckles of dirt and mud. At the top she would wave me on as the day broke through and the leaves and grass showed a brighter green around her.

Finally, we came to a spot where the stream emptied into a small pond. There was an opening in the trees along the east bank of this pond and the sun rose in this opening, showing the trees and the sky again in the surface of the water, clearer and calmer still than their orginals. We sat down in some tall grass beside the pond, and the young woman produced a small silver teapot that she had brought with her. She lifted the lid just a little ways and she held it up for me to see inside. I peered down into the teapot and I saw five little jewels of light, like stars, floating on the dark water within. The light from these stars shimmered against the metal insides of the teapot.

The young woman explained that she had come to the pond in the middle of the night and she had gathered up some of the stars that had been reflected in the water. She had taken these relected stars home and then, with a great deal of deliberation and patience, she had used a spoon to arrange the stars into a constellation of her own devising. Now she had brought the stars back to release them into the wild. She crawled down to the edge of the water and she carefully poured the teapot back into the pond. She came back and sat beside me in the grass. She said that now we just had to wait the day through, for the sun to climb overhead and finally set somewhere behind the trees on the far side of the pond, for the birds and the bugs to sing through the long heat of the afternoon, until finally it would be dark again and the stars would be out again, those five newly configured points of light rejoining them on the water and in the sky above.

The Red Convertible

I was flipping through the channels when some news footage from the local traffic helicopter caught my attention. I saw myself, driving down the highway in my white car in the middle of rush hour traffic. The camera panned back to focus on a red convertible sports car that was speeding along, weaving from lane to lane, whipping around all the other cars like they were standing still. The camera tracked this red convertible until it came flying up behind my car, nearly hitting me. The car swooped around me into an opening in the lane to the left of me, and then it shot back into the lane in front of me in the narrowing gap between the front of my car and the rear end of a car in the lane ahead of it. It was only by grace of the fact that I slammed on my brakes that the car was able to get in front of me without taking out a huge chunk of my fender.

The news footage highlighted this encounter. It showed it again in slow motion, this time freezing on the moment that the car slipped in front of me and drawing a big circle on the monitor at the point where our cars nearly collided. A pair of commentators discussed this event as though it were the game winning touchdown. One of them drew an arrow on the monitor pointing to my brake lights, rightly giving me credit for preventing the accident. I remembered this incident. At the time it had just been a passing annoyance, forgotten five minutes after it happened. But now, having seen a broader view of the incident, having seen what a general menace the red convertible had been to everyone on the road, and not just me, and also just feeling generally impressed that the news had considered the incident important enough to commit an entire prime time segment to it, I felt much more righteously outraged about the whole thing.

I felt the need to vent this outrage somehow. Whenever anyone came over, I tried to show them the footage. But they would get fidgety and say that they had to leave. I took the TV with me when I went to visit friends. But as soon as I went to plug it in, they would start making excuses. They had to get up in the morning. They weren't feeling well. Someone had to walk the dog. And so on. No one cared about seeing the footage. They didn't care that this reckless maniac was still out there. They didn't care that I had almost gotten into an accident. They didn't even care that the event had been convered by the news! I was just left holding the plug, watching as a series of increasingly indifferent people left the room.

The frustration of not being able to show anyone this footage started to wear me down. I let myself go. I stopped showering. I stopped trimming my hair and my beard. I lost my job. I got kicked out of my home. I started to spend all my time riding the city bus with the TV in my lap. Whenever someone sat across from me, I would tap on the blank screen of the unplugged TV, grumbling and mumbling, "See there? He didn't even care that he almost hit me! He didn't even slow down." Eventually, the person across from me would nod, look this way and that, and then get up and find another seat. I would just hug the TV close and go on mumbling to it.

One day at dusk, I was down at the dump, picking through the trash heaps there, looking for scraps of food or for something I could sell or salvage. I had my TV with me, tucked under one arm, and I sorted through the garbage with my free hand. I saw some birds circling in the darkening sky a few heaps away. I figured that they must have found something good. I started to make my way over there, climbing to the top of the heap that I had been picking through. I was just about to scramble over the top when the loose cord of the TV caught on a wooden pallet that was lying on the heap. The stuck cord jerked me back and it yanked the TV out from under my arm. I tried to grab it, but it tumbled down the heap and hit the ground with a hard punch, shattering into pieces.

My heart gripped. My mouth and jaw worked without sound for a moment as I looked down at the wreckage. And then a terrible sick moan issued from the pit of my stomach and filled the dumping grounds. I clambered down, scooping up the broken pieces of glass and metal in my gnarled hands. I just kept crying, "No! No!" as I tried to cram the TV back into being by grinding the pieces between my fists. But then I looked up at the birds, still circling. A tear cooled on my cheek. I began to laugh and laugh. It was over! I was free.

Losing Blood

My wife and I were invited to a high society party at a penthouse in the city. The guests were all elegantly dressed and the air was ignited with an evening glow as the setting sun broke between the buildings along the city skyline. The host tapped his glass and got up to make a speech. Everyone turned to listen and I strained on the tips of my toes to look out over everyone's heads so that I could see the man. He wore a tuxedo and his thick, salt and pepper hair was swept back in a wave. He held up a martini glass as he spoke. He had such a free and easy way of speaking, like a musical harmony of words. It was impressive. It sounded like something from a movie. I'd never heard anything so polished in real life. And I thought that this was why the man was rich; this was why he had all this; this was why there were all these people at his party. He had made his fortune on that voice, on his suave and easy demeanor. He could convince anyone of anything.

Later, when all the guests were mingling, we ran into him in the hallway. He was still holding his martini glass. He thanked us for coming, and as I shook his hand, I had a moment where I realized that I had met him before. I had a sudden flash of his face, that same face, in another place and time. He had been sitting in an arm chair beside a window wearing an overcoat. The colors were faded in memory, and his face had looked somehow older in that quieter setting and in the cold light that had shone on him through the window. But it was him. He'd had that same smile. My wife and I had had bags packed, and we were about to go somewhere. We were moving away, starting new lives. I remembered that we had been joking with him about something, and then he had unexpectedly reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a check that he had already made out to us. I remembered that he had insisted that we take it. I remembered his warm smile. I remembered thanking him.

My wife and I were a bit starstruck, impressed that we knew someone so charming and important. We nodded to each other. In what seemed to be one fluid motion with life choreographing itself smoothly under his every move, the man discarded his empty martini glass onto a passing tray and waved for us to follow him with a casual sweep of two ringed fingers. He said that he wanted to show us something. He led us to a room down the hall, where a woman was lying in a hospital bed. The man explained that this was his wife. He told us that she desperately needed a blood transfusion. He didn't ask me outright, but I understood and I nodded. I felt that I owed him something for the money he had given us.

I was taken to an empty room next door. It was like an examination room in a doctor's office. The same equipment and white cabinets and jars of cotton swabs and tongue depressors. I took off my dinner jacket and sat down on a stool and rolled up my sleeve. A doctor came in and everything was set up for the procedure. They found a vein to tap and the blood began to flow out of me. The doctor left the room and left me alone. I had a moment where I thought that this was taking too long, that I was losing too much blood. I thought about calling out, but I couldn't seem to muster up the strength. Everything in the room started to seem like it was very far away. And then all the weight seemed suddenly lifted from my head, and I passed out.

It was cold when I woke up. The needle was still in my arm, but the line was dry. There were papers and scattered refuse on the floor. The light was different. The air felt different. I wondered how long I had been out. I was a little dizzy as I first got up, but my strength came back to me in fits and surges. I went back out to the hallway. There were holes in the ceiling there, and the daylight shone through. There were half-dried puddles on the floor where the rain had come through the holes. I passed down the hall through patches of light and darkness. All the party guests were long gone, and the house looked like it had been deserted for a long time.

I came to a room where a small group of people were fighting over a ripped up couch. They were dirty and wild and clearly just squatting in the penthouse. Two of them, a man and woman, were tugging one of the cushions back and forth between them until it ripped along a seam and the moldy stuffing flew out everywhere. They both tumbled backwards, cursing and laughing. I passed the doorway without entering the room or engaging in their dispute.

The elevator wasn't working, and I had to take the stairs all the way to the ground floor. The rest of the building was quiet and deserted as well, and there were more holes and places where the daylight shone through. There was no traffic out in the streets, and the few cars I saw were broken down on the side of the road, stripped, some with campfires burning in them. I saw people pass by dressed in rags, pushing their belongings in rusty shopping carts. They just glanced glumly at me as they passed and trudged on.

I couldn't understand what had happened. Where had everyone gone? Where was I? I looked up the face of the building to the penthouse far above. The party, the people, they had all faded off like a mist. I looked down at my arm. I could still see the pin prick from the needle. Had they taken that place, that world out of me somehow, extracted it with my blood? I had no idea how to get back. I turned and stared down the street. I passed some people huddled around a garbage can, fighting over some scraps of rotten meat that they had found at the bottom.

Problem Solved

I was told to go see someone who could help me. I followed the address I was given, and it led me to a cottage on a small, narrow side street. There were flowers in flower pots all around the railing of the porch, and just beside the door there were wind chimes that chimed softly as I came up the steps. I knocked at the door and an older woman in a flowery house dress flung the door open and stared up at me inquisitively. She reached up and clutched the door frame with her hand, as though to bar the way, and I saw her long black fingernails digging into the white paint. She made an insistent jerk of her head and shoulders and pressed her face forward, waiting for me to explain myself.

I started to tell her who had sent me and why, but she cut me off saying, "Yes, yes, yes," and she turned back into the house, impatiently waving for me to follow her. She led me into her cluttered living room, where there were a variety of old clocks and framed pictures crammed together on all the walls. She went to get something from the hallway closet, and she came back with a thick bundle of rope. She held the coils of rope draped over her outstretched hand. She held the rope up to me, expecting me to understand the significance of it. "You see? You see?" she said, punctuating each sentence by thrusting the rope towards me. I shook my head.

She sighed with abundant exasperation, waving her free hand about and rolling her eyes at the ceiling as though there were spirits there that could grant her the patience to deal with me. She decided that she would have to demonstrate. She held a finger up to me, and then she began paying out long lengths of the rope which gathered into a loose pile of the floor. She tied one of the ends of the rope into a lasso. She twirled it around like a rodeo performer, and then she tossed it out into the empty space in the middle of the room.

To my amazement, the lasso seemed to catch around something invisible in the empty air. I drew up and leaned forward, blinking my eyes. She gave the rope a slight tug, and I actually saw it begin to tighten on this invisible presence. She nodded at me significantly, knowing that I could see now. And as I looked, I began to see a little round man with a long beard caught in the lasso. It was as if the pantomime of the rope had suggested his presence so convincingly that now I was able to see him there. I held up my finger and came forward, wanting to touch the apparition, but the woman slapped my hand away and pushed me back. Her nostrils flared and she scolded me with a shake of her head.

"This is a problem," she explained, pointing at the round man. He scrunched up his face like a resentful child that has been caught misbehaving. "We all have these problems. Everyone's life, filled with problems." She waved expansively at the air. "You understand?" I nodded. "They are simple enough to deal with. You get the rope around them, as you see, and then you loop the rope around them five times. Five," she repeated, holding her hand up with all five fingers extended, stressing the importance of this specific number. Again, I nodded.

She circled the round man, looping the rope around him five times. On each pass of the rope around his head, the round man watched with interest, but he did nothing to struggle or try to break free. He seemed as curious as I was about what was going to happen next. He even glanced at me once, blinking his eyes. He seemed a little shy and embarrassed by his predicament. The woman just kept slowly working her circles around him, holding the rope up as high as her arm could stretch and coiling it in nice even loops around the man's chest and midsection.

Finally, when she had all five loops laid down, she stepped back from him with a satisfied shrug of her shoulders. She held the end of the rope loose in her hand. "When you put the rope around him five times, exactly five, when you have the rope around the man, you have to give it a quick snap." And before I realized that she was actually going to do it, she gave the rope a nice hard snap, just as she had said. The round man's eyes went wide as the coils squeezed around him. The rope tightened like a fist around the round man's chest, and his head and shoulders swelled up like a balloon. There was a look of fear and distress on his widening face, and then he just burst with a loud pop.

The coils of rope fell to the floor in a heap, and the round man was gone. The woman was shaking slightly as she gathered the rope up off the floor and began to loop it neatly over her hand. I could see that this ordeal drained her more than her casual demeanor would suggest. A few loose strands of her black and gray hair even clung to the sweat on her forehead. Once she had neatly coiled up all the rope, she presented it to me, meaning for me to take it. I thanked her and tucked it under my arm. She tilted her head and gazed up at me with a searching, concerned look. "You see how simple it is," she said.

An Abandoned City

I was leaving the zoo, and I walked out to the parking lot which sat on a high ridge looking out over the city. I could see all the buildings along the horizon, and I noticed that most of them were completely deserted and falling into ruin. There were great cracks along their stone foundations and huge holes torn in the brick where their windows had once been. It was raining, and rank brown water flowed from these holes, sweeping out rust and dirt and debris. Here and there among the ruins, there were a few buildings that were still intact, and I could see the people within in the lit offices in shirts and ties shuffling papers and files, trading them back and forth pointlessly with each other. I wondered why they even bothered. I wondered why they didn't just clear out, so that the city could officially and completely be declared abandoned, so that this wreckage could all be wiped clean and something new erected in it's place. I bowed my head and hustled across the parking lot in the rain towards my car. It was the only one there, parked all the way in the last row.