I Went Skydiving

It's funny, I wasn't even all that scared.  I just made sure I had my hand on the ripcord before I jumped and I clutched at it as hard as I could.  I hung there at the door of the plane, looking out at the cloudless sky and the perfectly cut squares of farmland plowed so neatly.  Before I hardly even knew what had happened someone had given me a little push, or the plane had hit a bump in the airstream, and I was out, falling free.  My hand had slipped from the ripcord in the confusion, but I found it again easy enough.  I pulled it and the chute unfurled and caught the air with a snap, suddenly pulling me up into a much gentler descent.

I drifted down and landed on the grassy median in the middle of the freeway.  The draft from a passing semi drew at my chute, threatening to pull me out onto the road.  I fumbled around, frantically trying to undo the latches.  I got the thing off and I watched it as the wind caught it and carried it across the sky and out of sight. 

I turned and there was a tall, portentous, man with white hair walking across the field towards me.  He wore a suit and he seemed very professional and determined, completely mindless of the cars zipping by on either side of the field.  He was apparently supposed to be my boss.  I had a moment of awkward confusion because I realized that I had missed work and now he had caught me.  He came up and took an appraising look down his nose at me.  He inquired about my health as I tried to sheepishly throw together an answer.  But then he just gave me a pat on my shoulder and told me to enjoy my vacation, and I remembered with a sigh of relief that I had legitimately taken this time off.  I looked up and saw the long trail left by the plane I had jumped from.  Everything was going to be alright.  There was nothing to worry about.    

Ulterior Motives

The owner's wife stopped by to take a tour of our shop one day.  Just as the boss was bringing her over by the press that I was running, my knife slipped out of my hand and I caught the blade awkwardly, cutting my finger.  After my finger was bandaged up, a meeting was convened in the human resources office up front to discuss the incident.

It was a large corner office with the blinds drawn against the evening light.  There were loose files piled all over the tables and cabinets.  A couple of my co-workers lounged on leather sofas across the room, while my boss and I sat before the HR woman's desk.  My boss insisted that I had cut my finger on purpose because the owner's wife had been there.  My co-workers across the room grumbled in agreement.  I wasn't sure why I would do that or what I would gain by cutting my finger in front of her - a point that I tried to argue in my favor - but again, they just insisted that I was playing dumb in order to appear innocent.

We went around like this for awhile, every argument I made they twisted around as more evidence of my guilt and my shady motives.  Finally I couldn't take it anymore.  I stood up, declared that I quit, gave my boss the finger, and left the room.  I could already hear them behind me twisting this latest turn.  They said that this was just a ploy to make it look like I was telling the truth.  The funny thing is that they were actually right about this.  They had kept at me until I started to feel the I really was guilty of something, and I really had just quit to make my point.

But I hadn't cut my finger on purpose, and I had given up on trying to make them see that.  The HR woman caught up with me in the parking-lot, asking me to come back.  Of course, I had counted on someone coming after me, but now I didn't really care.  I told her, "There's no way I can defend myself.  They do this all the time.  They always look for the absolute worse in everyone.  I'm done.", and I turned and walked off.

Room in the Clouds

My mother lived in a rather strange house.  It was a tall house, composed of three apartments stacked on top of each other, and there was a staircase that spiraled around the outside of the house like a corkscrew, each flight taking you up to the next apartment.  My mother occupied the middle apartment, and my aunt had the one at the very top.

One day my mother sent me up to my aunt's place to borrow something.  After climbing the dizzy heights along the open staircase, her apartment felt like a cramped, dim, collection of rooms in the sky.  But it was a lively place.  A bunch of my family were there, laughing and talking.  I settled in for a pleasant visit, and that's when someone mentioned the attic room.  There was something stored away up there that my cousin wanted to get.  I laughed and told her how I always had dreams about an attic room, tucked away in a closet just like this one, the same lonely switchback stairs.  I told her that it always creeped me out, but I wasn't sure why because there was never anything up there.

But everyone's smiles quickly faded, everything grew hushed and sober, and it dawned on me that this was one of my dreams.  That's why the attic room was here.  It was like a marker or a talisman.  I would only ever find it in a dream.  That's why it always troubled me.  It signified the dream state, like a dissonant cue.  They were all watching me now.  They seemed to be waiting for me to go up there.

Far Off Angels

My daughter was much younger at the time, and we lived in a different house then.  It was the last house at the end of a short street.  The ground sloped off beyond the trees at the end of the road, leaving the house situated at the top of a high hill with a nice view of the town's twinkling lights.  Amid these other lights, there was a beacon composed of three red lights that had particularly caught my daughter's interest.  Because the lights formed the three points of an upside-down triangle, my daughter somehow got it into her head that this beacon was an angel watching over the town.  Whenever we pulled out of the driveway that winter, she would brush the frost off the back window of the car and watch the beacon as we drove away.

As the months rolled by, I fell into a kind of slump, a listless stretch of grey afternoons passing without motivation.  As the weather began to warm up and the days were growing longer, I decided that it might lift my spirits if I took my daughter out to find her angel.  So I took her little hand and we went for a walk, navigating through different neighborhoods and side streets.  We passed kids playing in dusty front yards while their parents smoked and talked on porches, heard ragged mufflers and car radios fade into the distance, all the lonely, drowsy, sadness of a summer evening in a strange part of town.

It was nearly dusk when we finally arrived at the source of the beacon.  The lights were mounted on a tall metal tower that sat in the middle of a muddy clearing.  The sun was scorching, low and bright at the edge of this clearing.  We shaded our eyes and stumbled down a rocky embankment.  I was just about to point the tower out to my daughter, so that in my fatherly, almost spiteful, way I could disillusion her, show her the truth about her "angel", that it was just a plain metal tower in a dirty field.  But as we stood at the base of it, and I craned my neck to look up, I noticed that the scaffolding which supported the lights actually looked a little like a pair of wings.  I almost chuckled, but yet there was something about the way the light hit it at that hour and the white puffs of clouds in the sky above, that made me stop, that made everything stop, quiet and wonderful, and for a moment, even I believed.

An Affair to Forget

It was a rainy night.  I was talking to my wife before heading out the door for work.  I told her that a co-worker of mine had mentioned someone she might know, some guy named Greg Roland who delivered food to some restaurant that she used to work at.  She said that she didn't know the guy, but I could see that she had gotten this wistful, dreamy smile on her face when I had mentioned his name.  I knew she was lying.  I pressed her on it, but she kept denying it.

I had to get to work.  I was running late, so I figured that we'd pick up the conversation later.  But just as I was about to head out the door, my brother popped up out of nowhere.  He asked if anything was wrong.  I told him that there wasn't, but he insisted that he knew better.  "What, were you listening at the door?", I asked him.  He confessed that he had been, so I broke down and explained the situation to him.  We went to one of the back rooms of the house, where for some reason I had an old copy of this Greg's journal packed away.  We flipped through it, looking for some kind of evidence.  I found an entry from a few years back.  He spoke of a woman; he used a different name, but somehow I knew that he was talking about my wife.

I took the journal to show it to my wife.  I found her in the living room, talking on the phone.  I asked her who she was talking to, and she said, "That was Greg!  He's coming over to pick me up."  And before I even had a chance to ask any questions, she ran out of the house and into the rain.  I stood on the porch and watched her go.  The rain dripped from the gutters.  It was the worst night of my life.

I don't know if I called him or he called me, but somehow I ended up on the phone with this Greg.  At first I tried to be calm and reasonable about the whole thing.  I told him that I understood that my wife was free to make her own choices, and if this was what she thought would make her happy...  Then he cut me off and said, "I guess it's nice to have religion, dude." in the most cocky, patronizing, smart-ass voice that you could ever imagine.  From there it was just one button pushed after another.  I ended up telling him that if I ever got a hold of him I was going to reach up his asshole and tear his throat out.  I was screaming at the top of my lungs at that point, and all red in the face.  I'm pretty sure he hung up after that, leaving me holding the phone.  What was I going to do now?