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.

Exit Ramp

I was probably about four or five years old, riding in the back seat of a station wagon on a long trip.  It was late in the afternoon in the middle of summer and we were headed north across three contiguous states out west somewhere.  We were caught in holiday traffic, cars bumper to bumper, blaring their horns on all sides.  I had cousins next to me on the seat and more cousins in the back, all of them yelling and and grabbing and fighting and bouncing around on the upholstery.  I was keeping to myself, scribbling in a coloring book in the middle of all this heat and noise under the glaring sun.

As we inched along, I could see that the highway passed under a bridge up ahead, and there was an exit ramp there to get off the freeway.  No one seemed to be getting off at this ramp, but I had an urge to see what was off the exit.  As though prompted by my curiosity, I found myself propelled forward, flying free at the speed of sight. Off the ramp there was just a little local gas station there with the old ticking numbers on the pumps and an attendant that stared out from a dirty window as the traffic passed on the highway all day.  I slipped along the vacant roads of the little town.  It was sad and quiet so late in the day.  I came to crossroads after crossroads with nothing but posts and tufts of grass.  A few pickup trucks rattled by.  People lived around here and they were headed home and the world was so unbearably big and lonely.

I got turned around in a gravel lot somewhere that was decorated with strands of colored flags fluttering in the breeze like they were having a sale, but the lot was empty and the building there was boarded up and there was no one around selling anything.  I felt lost to myself, disembodied and haunting my way along these back roads.  I wanted to cry.  I wanted my coloring book.  I wanted my place in the seat in the middle of all the jumping cousins.  And then I came to another crossroads, and I took another turn, and I found myself back on the bridge that passed over the highway, and I could see all the gridlocked cars stretching out of sight in either direction.

On the Borderline

My brother was staying at a hotel to the east of here on the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania.  I went to see him one night and I sat in a chair pulled away from the table and we talked and watched TV and drank from the mini-fridge.  When the sun was just coming up in the morning, I could see that the place was right on the lake.  From the window I could see across the parking-lot to the metal railing where the land dropped off at the ridge and the seagulls circled in the clear sky.  I could see people getting up and heading out to their cars under the shadows of strange trees, maybe something tropical, maybe just elms.  It was hard to tell in the dim light.  I decided that this was where I wanted my wife and I to come before we moved.  This is where I wanted us to spend our last few days in Ohio.  The place just had that perfect feeling, like you were on your way somewhere, like you had left all your troubles behind and you had nothing but the birds and the clear blue sky ahead of you.  It was a way station, unburdened and free.

The Good Book

On a neglected shelf in the back of a store, I spotted a thick book with an unpolished wooden cover and a black silk bookmark hanging from the middle of its pages.  I thought that the book was an empty journal, and I was already coming up with thoughts and schemes to fill it with as I brushed past a large woman who stood rooted in place between me and the shelf.  But when I got to the book and picked it up, I was disappointed to discover that its pages were already filled, printed in a rough typeface that filled every page with no room for margins and no breaks for paragraphs, not even spaces between the words.  I couldn't make out what any of it said.  It just looked like random letters stamped to the paper with ink and madness.

 

But then I looked back at the woman that had blocked my way.  She was dressed in her Sunday best, a dress of blue with white polka dots and a pair of long white satin gloves.  And there were men standing behind the shelf where I had found the book.  They wore suits and their grey beards were trimmed and their hair was combed back.  They all stood still and they all faced towards the front of the store like they were listening to someone, and it was then that I finally heard the preacher speaking from far in the front.  I flipped again through the book and realized now that it was a Bible, printed by the unskilled hands of an amateur on some backwoods home press.  This amateur had probably even cut down the tree that had provided the wood for the cover.  I looked around, wanting to slip out.  But I had the book in my hand now.  I couldn't seem to put it down.  I couldn't seem to leave.  They had drawn me back into religion.