"You ever wonder what it would be like to be dead?" she asked, her voice thick and heavy with dope.
I was sitting in a small, cramped apartment in downtown Chicago, near Boystown, the city’s famous rainbow flag-lined gay district. It was her apartment, the stoned girl lying languidly on a cat hair and cocaine dust-coated black futon, a wisp of marijuana smoke forming a perverse joke of a halo around her head.
The acrid smell from the multi-colored glass pipe she took a hit from every few minutes tickled the back of my throat and burned my red-tinged eyes. I was blinking constantly and had to remove my glasses to rub them more than once.
As I sat in the dim single-bulb light watching my friend get wasted, a solitary thought continuously ran through my mind, like a hamster spinning his wheel in a futile effort to escape his cold, metal prison: I drove five-hundred miles for this?
We met in high school, Amy and I, through our intertwined circles of friends, toward the beginning of my senior year. She was a sophomore, but most of her friends were older, so she was never hassled by school security for being on the wrong side of the building. They simply assumed she belonged there.
I don't remember the first time we spoke, or what we talked about. Trivial high school nothings, I'm sure. Our first date was a concert at a local club, a real shithole of a dive, one of Omaha's finest, a smoke-filled bar-slash-bowling alley filled with horny chain-smoking teenagers wearing flannel shirts or black goth fetish gear in a painful attempt to look cool.
We had been eying each other for a couple weeks, flirting in our group's usual way, an innocent ass grab or poke of a boob, when I found myself with an extra ticket to the show. With a feigned casualness that I hoped masked my sweaty palms and racing heart, I asked her if she wanted to go.
I don't think she cared what bands were going to be performing. The important thing was that it gave us our first opportunity to be alone together. We stayed for the first band that played, and maybe the second, exchanging meaningful glances throughout (as meaningful as they can be at that age, anyway), the whole time the bass pounding through our bodies like constant waves crashing against the shore. Neither of us cared to hear the headlining band.
I don't know how long we made out in my car, parked in her father's driveway. At the time, it seemed like hours, to which to fog that clung to the inside of the car's windows could attest. All I know for sure is that by the time I left, after one last furtive kiss, I had a new girlfriend.
"Wanna go shopping?" she chirped, alert and bubbly, as if the haze that had been clouding her mind had suddenly lifted.
I glanced up from Amy's battered copy of Catcher in the Rye, which I had found on her bookshelf. She was sitting up on the futon now, taking one last hit from her oft-used pipe. Her dark brown hair, once long and soft, cool to the touch, was now a short, stringy mess. The hazel eyes that used to look at me with warmth and affection were dull and lifeless, streaked with crimson. She was looking at me, but she might as well have been looking through me.
"Uh, sure," I said, thinking the fresh air might do her some good. "What do you wanna buy?"
"Movies," she replied, stretching her thin arms over her head, which caused her rumpled shirt to rise up slightly, revealing an unfamiliarly gaunt belly.
"Okay," I said, replacing Holden Caulfield's struggle toward adulthood on the bookshelf. "And maybe we can grab a bite to eat while we’re out?" When I had gotten to Amy’s apartment earlier that afternoon, I did a cursory examination of the kitchen, the cupboards and refrigerator, and found nothing but empty cereal boxes and bottles of wine cooler.
Amy stood up and sort of sashayed toward the bathroom, swaying back and forth, as she walked. I wanted to jump up and steady her, but I knew she'd bat me away with a swipe of her arm. I just sat on the floor beside the bookshelf and watched.
"I'm just gonna hop in the shower real quick," she said.
"Don't forget to brush your teeth," I mumbled under my breath, frightened by what I might smell on hers.
She whirled around and caught hold of the doorframe.
"What?"
I shrugged and shook my head.
Amy glared at me for almost a minute before backing into the bathroom and closing the door. “Out in a minute,” she called. I heard the squeak and rattle of the building's old water pipes before a steady, if weak, stream started flowing from the showerhead.
I sighed and leaned my head back against the bookshelf. I closed my eyes and waited for the water to stop.
The door opened some time later, twenty minutes, maybe a half hour. Amy walked out in a rush of steam, wrapped in a threadbare green towel, her wet hair hanging down over her eyes. She looked better, was moving more steadily. Across from the futon, which doubled as her bed, was a stocky wooden dresser. I can't deny feeling a twitch in my jeans when she bent down to open the drawer that contained her bras and panties, the thin towel riding up her backside, revealing a still-curvy bottom.
She glanced over her shoulder and caught me watching. "Like the show?" she laughed, wiggling her rear at me.
I shifted uncomfortably against the bookshelf, self-consciously resting my hands in my lap. "It's not like it isn't anything I haven't seen before," I replied.
"True," she said as she let the towel fall around her ankles.
I sat there and watched her get dressed. Then we went shopping.
Amy only cheated on me once while we dated; at least, once that I know of. I had been sitting in the commons between classes and heard some friends talking about her. At the sound of her name, I piped up and asked what they were talking about.
"Sorry, Jeff, we didn't see you sittin' there," said Milo, whose lanky frame was curled over a deck of "Magic" cards. He and Benny were comparing and organizing their collections.
"What were you sayin' about Amy?" I asked, leaning forward with my hands clasped under my chin.
Milo and Benny first looked at each other, then the floor, then the wall, anywhere but at me.
"Nothin', man. Just a, you know, a rumor or whatever. It's probably nothin'," stammered Benny as he shuffled through his own deck of cards.
"Guys, what is it?" I asked, quickly growing tired of their evasions.
Milo sighed, set his cards down and tried to look me right in the eye, but his gaze kept darting around my head, to my nose, my ears, my forehead. I hadn't seen him this nervous since the time he tried to ask out the uber-popular (and way out of his league) Stacy Kingman when we were freshmen.
"I saw Amy hanging around with Tim the other day."
"And?" My eyebrows rose expectantly.
"They were, um, kinda makin' out a little," Milo said in a rush, eager to end the line of questioning so he could get back to his cards.
My heart began to thud in my chest. I stood up and walked outside into the crisp autumn air. I took a deep breath in a vain attempt to clear my head, but it didn't work. I was ruined for the rest of the day, unable to stop thinking about Amy, wondering what I had done wrong.
I confronted Tim that night, at a park near school where kids from my school would hang out, smoke and drink. He was a big fella, at least half a foot taller than my five-foot-ten, if not more. When I got to the park, he was standing in a circle of kids, holding court over this or that.
I didn't know what I was going to say to him as I walked down the gentle slope from the parking lot toward the park. I thought about the past couple months with Amy, the time we spent together, what she told me about her parents, her mother in particular, and I knew that getting angry wasn't the way to go. This girl has been through enough, I thought, and she doesn't need me complicating things. I walked up to Tim and asked if I could talk to him for a minute.
"I thought you were gonna try and pick a fight that night," he'd later tell me. Fighting, however, was the furthest thing from my mind; for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he could wipe the floor with me.
"This is her choice," I told him. "Not mine. Not yours, either. Whoever she wants to be with, it's up to her, okay? Take care of her."
Tim said he would with a bemused expression on his face. We shook hands and I walked back to my car, content in the delusion that Amy was gone from my life, that she was someone else's problem now.
We rode the 'L' train in silence. Amy listened to her iPod while I covertly watched the other passengers, silently wondering what their stories were, the haggard mother of three rambunctious children, or the shaggy-looking, unshaven man wearing an old, worn military jacket and clutching to his chest a bottle wrapped inside a paper bag as though it were a life-preserver. I glanced at Amy as she sat with eyes closed, calm and peaceful in her drug-induced haze, and felt bizarrely proud with the certainty that their histories couldn't come close to that of the girl sitting beside me.
The train slowed at our stop and we disembarked. We walked along the graffiti-decorated platform and out into the cool night air. There was a Best Buy a couple blocks from the station. When it was in sight, Amy pointed at the big yellow sign and said, "Mmooovies."
After Amy and I had been dating for a couple weeks, she told me about her parents.
"They met in a mental hospital," she said one night as we lay cuddling on the beat-up, old, dog-gnawed couch in my parents' basement. I was lying on my back with my head propped up on some pillows and she was on top of me, her head resting on her hands, which she clasped over my heart. I held her against me, my hands gently caressing her lower back underneath her treasured Kurt Cobain T-shirt. Her skin felt warm, comforting, like a soft flannel blanket on an icy winter night.
We had been watching some stupid "reality" show on MTV because, as Amy told me, "it's great, it's like watching a car wreck in slow motion." At the end of the show, one of the roommates, a bleach blond valley girl whose bra size was bigger than her IQ, tearfully confessed to having cheated on her boyfriend back home by sleeping with some yutz she met at a bar the night before. Amy chuckled, her body quivering against mine.
It's not that she delighted in other people's misfortunes or miseries. I think she instead held herself up to them, as though their lives were a mirror against which she measured herself and defiantly stated that she had survived worse.
She turned her face away from the television and looked at me, still smiling from the banality of the show. Her breath smelled of mint, with a hint of tomato sauce from the pizza we had shared earlier. Her eyes flickered from light brown to green and back again in the shimmering light of the television.
"A mental hospital," I repeated quizzically, squinting my eyes and furrowing my brow while searching her face for some clue as to whether she was kidding or not.
"Mmhmm," she said, lifting her head slightly in order to free one of her hands so she could mute the TV with the remote that sat on the coffee table in front of the sofa and tuck a few stray strands of long brown hair behind her ear. Before she set her head back down, she inched forward and gave me a quick kiss on the lips.
I licked my lips and tasted her chapstick. "Seriously?" I asked, still incredulous. After all, my friends and I had been joking for years that our parents were nuts, when, of course, none of them actually were.
"My mother was a patient. My dad, you know how I told you he's a drug rep, a door-to-door salesman for some pharmaceutical company? Well, one day he knocked on the door of the place my mother was in."
"What was she in for? I mean, why..."
Amy turned her head again, this time toward the back of the couch, resting her cheek on her hands.
"Depression," she said quietly. "She'd tried to kill herself a couple times. You know, her wrists, and maybe pills once, I don’t remember."
I didn't know what to say. I wanted to say, "Wow, that's pretty fucked up," but instead I swallowed the words and continued to rub her back. I was pretty sure she knew how fucked up it was and didn't need me reminding her.
She grinned slightly, to herself, and let out a little chuckle.
"What're you smilin' about, missy?"
She turned back to me and stared for a minute or two, as if trying to pierce my soul through my eyes.
Amy smiled softly again, and laid her head back on her hands, facing the back of the couch. "The only person I've ever told about my parents is Rachel, and I really only told her because she's my best friend and she was around when...when..." Her voice cracked, just barely, and I felt her choke back a lump in her throat. Her heart was like a jackhammer against my stomach.
"Hey, it's okay," I said, pulling one of my hands free of her shirt. I started to stroke her hair. "Whatever it is, you don't have to..."
She cut me off. "No, I do. I want to." She looked at me again and her eyes and cheeks were wet. "I don't know why, but you...you help. Just being around you, you make me feel better."
I gently placed my thumb on her cheek and wiped away the tears. "And I'm not goin' anywhere. I'll always be here."
She gave me a wan smile. "Promise?"
I leaned forward, kissed her and tasted the salt of her tears on her skin. "I promise."
Amy seemed to take comfort in my clumsy high-school-romance platitude. Her heart stopped racing and her body relaxed against mine. She rested her head on her hands again and when she spoke, it was with a certainty that hadn't been there moments earlier.
"When I was ten, I found my mother slumped over the steering wheel of her car. I didn't know what was going on, y'know? I just slapped the button next to the door to open the garage door. I don't know how long she’d been there, but she survived."
"God, that's horrible, sweetie," I said, unable to stop myself.
"Oh, I'm not done yet," she half-laughed. "A few years later, I guess I was thirteen, maybe not quite thirteen, I found her again. She was sprawled out on the floor of the bathroom, random pills scattered around her like she had dropped an open bag of Skittles."
Amy shuddered at the memory and I felt her body tense against mine. It must have been five minutes before she spoke again.
"That's when I started cutting myself," she said softly. "I mean, what was I supposed to do, y'know? There's no instruction guide for something like that. So I stole one of my dad's razor blades and just..."
I stayed quiet, unsure of how to respond.
"You probably think I'm a freak now." Her voice wavered. I had never seen anyone so vulnerable before. I wanted to hold her in my arms until the pain stopped, even if it took forever.
"No, no, no," I said, my mind racing, searching for the right words that might magically make everything okay again. "I, uh, I've always thought you were kind of a freak. That's why I like you."
Amy looked at me for a moment, her wet eyes glistening in the light from the TV. It started slowly, a low rumble in her belly. She tried to stifle it, tried to keep looking at me with a straight face, but it was a losing battle. Amy burst into laughter, her body convulsing with every breath she took. It was contagious and before I knew it, I was laughing right along with her.
She wiped her eyes free of tears, these ones from laughing so hard, and playfully punched me in the stomach. "Jerk," she managed between guffaws. The waves of laughter started to subside and she rested her head back on my chest, an occasional spasm of giggles rippling through her.
"I probably looked like a half-wrapped mummy at Mom’s funeral," Amy said when her breathing finally returned to normal, "because of all the bandages." This image in her head brought on a whole new round of mild laughter.
"I was, you know, all dressed in black except where you could see my arms and legs," she said. "It helped, kind of. The cutting. Took my mind off...everything else." She shifted her head and peeked at me from under droopy eyelids. "But now I have you for that."
I hugged Amy close to me, wrapping my arms around her prone body, and, smiling, said, "That's what I'm here for, sweetie."
Amy wandered aimlessly, it seemed, through the store, stopping occasionally to pick up a DVD, glance at its packaging and replace it, giggling to herself all the while. She was still high, of course. I lagged behind her slightly, watching her, and wondered if anyone else could tell.
"'Tombstone!'" she squealed. She ran up to me holding a DVD in front of her face. "I have two guns," she drawled, quoting Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday from the movie, "one for each of you."
She giggled and clutched the movie to her chest. "I love this movie," she said in a singsong voice. "We're going to watch this movie."
"Okay," I said. I couldn't help but laugh. Her enthusiasm was infectious, even if her preferred method of attaining it was not.
When we got back to the apartment, she handed me the DVD and told me to unwrap it. She went to the dresser and pulled something out, hiding it from view. "I'll be out in a sec," she said, heading toward the bathroom.
I set our Chinese take-out on the low table in front of the futon, then cut the plastic wrapping off the movie and placed the DVD in the player that sat atop the television. I grabbed the remote and settled onto the futon. I opened a container of orange chicken and wondered what was taking Amy so long.
She finally emerged from the bathroom about ten minutes later, a calm smile planted squarely on her face. She walked with a looseness I couldn't place, as if all the muscles in her body had gone slack. She was holding a hand to the inside of her elbow, gently fingering a small red dot of skin as she plopped down beside me. She was so relaxed she practically oozed against me, melting into me, her head resting on my shoulder. I put my arm around her and pressed PLAY on the remote.
"This is nice," she said dreamily, her voice leaden with sleep. Soon she was snoring gently, lost in her drug-fueled dreams.
"Yeah," I sighed, pulling a blanket around us. "Real nice."
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
...Chasing Amy?
"You ever wonder what it would be like to be dead?"
I was sitting in a small, cramped apartment in downtown Chicago, near Boystown, the city’s famous rainbow flag-lined gay district. It was her apartment, the stoned girl lying languidly on a cat hair and cocaine dust-coated black futon, a wisp of marijuana smoke forming a perverse joke of a halo around her head.
The acrid smell from the multi-colored glass pipe she took a hit from every few minutes tickled the back of my throat and burned my eyes. I was blinking constantly and had to remove my glasses to rub my red-tinged eyes more than once.
As I sat in the dim single-bulb light watching my friend get wasted, a solitary thought continuously ran through my mind, like a hamster spinning his wheel in a futile effort to escape his cold, metal prison: I drove five-hundred miles for this?
We met in high school, Amy and I, through our intertwined circles of friends, toward the beginning of my senior year. She was a sophomore, but most of her friends were older, so she was never hassled by school security for being on the wrong side of the building. They simply assumed she belonged there.
I don't remember the first time we spoke, or what we talked about. Trivial high school nothings, I’m sure. Our first date was a concert at a local club, a real shithole of a dive, one of Omaha’s finest, a smoke-filled bar-slash-bowling alley filled with horny chain-smoking teenagers wearing flannel shirts or black goth fetish gear in a painful attempt to look cool.
We had been eying each other for a couple weeks, flirting in the usual way that was common to our group, an innocent ass grab or poke of a boob, when I found myself with an extra ticket to the show. With a feigned casualness that I hoped masked my sweaty palms and racing heart, I asked her if she wanted to go.
I don't think she cared what bands were going to be performing. The important thing was that it gave us our first opportunity to be alone together. We stayed for the first band that played, and maybe the second, exchanging meaningful glances throughout (as meaningful as they can be at that age, anyway), the whole time the bass pounding through our bodies like constant waves crashing against the shore. Neither of us cared to hear the headlining band.
I don't know how long we made out in my car, parked in her parents' driveway. At the time, it seemed like hours, to which to fog that clung to the inside of the car's windows could attest. All I know for sure is that by the time I left, after one last furtive kiss, I had a new girlfriend.
"Wanna go shopping?"
I glanced up from Amy's battered copy of Catcher in the Rye, which I had found on her bookshelf. She was sitting up on the futon now, taking one last hit from her oft-used pipe. Her dark brown hair, once long and soft, cool to the touch, was now a short, stringy mess. The hazel eyes that used to look at me with warmth and affection were dull and lifeless, streaked with crimson. She was looking at me, but she might as well have been looking through me.
"Uh, sure," I said, thinking the fresh air might do her some good. "What do you wanna buy?"
"Movies," she replied, stretching her thin arms over her head, which caused her rumpled shirt to rise up slightly, revealing an unfamiliar gaunt belly.
"Okay," I said, replacing Holden Caulfield's struggle toward adulthood on the bookshelf. "And maybe we can grab a bite to eat while we’re out?" When I got to Amy's apartment earlier that afternoon, I did a cursory examination of the kitchen, the cupboards and refrigerator, and found nothing but empty cereal boxes and bottles of wine cooler.
Amy stood up and sort of sashayed toward the bathroom, swaying back and forth, as she walked. I wanted to jump up and steady her, but I knew she’d bat me away with a swipe of her arm. I just sat on the floor beside the bookshelf and watched.
"I’m just gonna hop in the shower real quick," she said.
"Don't forget to brush your teeth," I mumbled under my breath, frightened by what I might smell on hers.
She whirled around and caught hold of the doorframe.
"What?"
I shrugged and shook my head.
Amy glared at me for almost a minute before backing into the bathroom and closing the door. "Out in a minute," she called. I heard the squeak and rattle of the building's old water pipes before a steady, if weak, stream started flowing from the showerhead.
I sighed and leaned my head back against the bookshelf. I closed my eyes and waited for the water to stop.
The door opened some time later, twenty minutes, maybe a half hour. Amy walked out in a rush of steam, wrapped in a threadbare green towel, her wet hair hanging down over her eyes. She looked better, was moving more steadily. Across from the futon, which also doubled as her bed, I would later learn, was a stocky wooden dresser. I can’t deny feeling a twitch in my jeans when she bent down to open the drawer that contained her bras and panties, the thin towel riding up her backside, revealing a still-curvy bottom.
She glanced over her shoulder and caught me watching. "Like the show?" she laughed.
I shifted uncomfortably against the bookshelf, self-consciously resting my hands in my lap. "It’s not like it isn't anything I haven't seen before," I replied.
"True," she said as she let the towel fall around her ankles.
I sat there and watched her get dressed. Then we went shopping.
Amy only cheated on me once while we dated. At least, once that I know of. I was sitting in the commons between classes and heard some friends talking about her. At the sound of her name, I piped up, asked what they were talking about. A friend of a friend had seen Amy kissing this other kid whose clique circumnavigated our own. I was crushed, heartbroken, but strangely not mad. I felt peaceful, like I had been expecting this to happen, the other shoe to drop.
I confronted this other kid that night, at a park near school where kids from my school would hang out, smoke and drink. He was a big fella, at least half a foot taller than my five-foot-ten, if not more. When I got to the park, he was standing in a circle of kids, holding court over this or that. I walked up to him and asked if I could talk to him for a minute.
"I thought you were gonna try and pick a fight that night," he’d later tell me. Fighting, however, was the furthest thing from my mind; for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he could wipe the floor with me.
"This is her choice," I told him. "Not mine. Not yours, either. Whoever she wants to be with, who am I to stop her? Take care of her."
He said he would. He was surprised, I think, by my tone, my...civility. We shook hands and I walked back to my car, content in the delusion that Amy was gone from my life, that she was someone else’s problem now.
We rode the 'L' train in silence, Amy listening to her iPod, I covertly watching the other passengers, silently wondering what their stories were, bizarrely proud with the certainty that their histories couldn’t come close to that of the girl sitting beside me.
The train slowed at our stop and we disembarked. We walked along the graffiti-decorated platform and out into the cool night air. There was a Best Buy a couple blocks from the station. When it was in sight, Amy pointed at the big yellow sign and said, "Mmooovies."
She wandered aimlessly, it seemed, through the store, stopping occasionally to pick up a DVD and glance at its packaging. She was still high, of course. I lagged behind her slightly, watching her, and wondered if anyone could tell.
"Tombstone!" she squealed. She ran up to me holding a DVD in front of her face. "I have two guns," she drawled, quoting Val Kilmer’s Doc Holiday from the movie, "one for each of you."
She giggled and clutched the movie to her chest. "I love this movie," she said in a singsong voice. "We're going to watch this movie."
"Okay," I said. I couldn't help but laugh. Her enthusiasm was infectious, even if her preferred method of attaining it was not.
When we got back to the apartment, she handed me the DVD and told me to unwrap it. She went to the dresser and pulled something out, hiding it from view. "I’ll be out in a sec," she said, heading toward the bathroom.
I cut the plastic wrapping off the movie and placed the DVD in the player that sat atop the television. I grabbed the remote and settled onto the futon, wondering what was taking Amy so long.
She finally emerged from the bathroom, a smile planted squarely on her face. She walked with a looseness I couldn’t place, as if all the muscles in her body had gone slack. She was holding a hand to where her arm where it bends at the elbow as she plopped down beside me. She was so relaxed she practically oozed against me, melting into me, with her head resting on my shoulder. I put my arm around her and pressed PLAY on the remote.
"This is nice," she said dreamily, her voice heavy with sleep. Soon she was snoring gently, lost in her drug-fueled dreams.
"Yeah," I said, pulling a blanket around us. "Real nice."
I was sitting in a small, cramped apartment in downtown Chicago, near Boystown, the city’s famous rainbow flag-lined gay district. It was her apartment, the stoned girl lying languidly on a cat hair and cocaine dust-coated black futon, a wisp of marijuana smoke forming a perverse joke of a halo around her head.
The acrid smell from the multi-colored glass pipe she took a hit from every few minutes tickled the back of my throat and burned my eyes. I was blinking constantly and had to remove my glasses to rub my red-tinged eyes more than once.
As I sat in the dim single-bulb light watching my friend get wasted, a solitary thought continuously ran through my mind, like a hamster spinning his wheel in a futile effort to escape his cold, metal prison: I drove five-hundred miles for this?
We met in high school, Amy and I, through our intertwined circles of friends, toward the beginning of my senior year. She was a sophomore, but most of her friends were older, so she was never hassled by school security for being on the wrong side of the building. They simply assumed she belonged there.
I don't remember the first time we spoke, or what we talked about. Trivial high school nothings, I’m sure. Our first date was a concert at a local club, a real shithole of a dive, one of Omaha’s finest, a smoke-filled bar-slash-bowling alley filled with horny chain-smoking teenagers wearing flannel shirts or black goth fetish gear in a painful attempt to look cool.
We had been eying each other for a couple weeks, flirting in the usual way that was common to our group, an innocent ass grab or poke of a boob, when I found myself with an extra ticket to the show. With a feigned casualness that I hoped masked my sweaty palms and racing heart, I asked her if she wanted to go.
I don't think she cared what bands were going to be performing. The important thing was that it gave us our first opportunity to be alone together. We stayed for the first band that played, and maybe the second, exchanging meaningful glances throughout (as meaningful as they can be at that age, anyway), the whole time the bass pounding through our bodies like constant waves crashing against the shore. Neither of us cared to hear the headlining band.
I don't know how long we made out in my car, parked in her parents' driveway. At the time, it seemed like hours, to which to fog that clung to the inside of the car's windows could attest. All I know for sure is that by the time I left, after one last furtive kiss, I had a new girlfriend.
"Wanna go shopping?"
I glanced up from Amy's battered copy of Catcher in the Rye, which I had found on her bookshelf. She was sitting up on the futon now, taking one last hit from her oft-used pipe. Her dark brown hair, once long and soft, cool to the touch, was now a short, stringy mess. The hazel eyes that used to look at me with warmth and affection were dull and lifeless, streaked with crimson. She was looking at me, but she might as well have been looking through me.
"Uh, sure," I said, thinking the fresh air might do her some good. "What do you wanna buy?"
"Movies," she replied, stretching her thin arms over her head, which caused her rumpled shirt to rise up slightly, revealing an unfamiliar gaunt belly.
"Okay," I said, replacing Holden Caulfield's struggle toward adulthood on the bookshelf. "And maybe we can grab a bite to eat while we’re out?" When I got to Amy's apartment earlier that afternoon, I did a cursory examination of the kitchen, the cupboards and refrigerator, and found nothing but empty cereal boxes and bottles of wine cooler.
Amy stood up and sort of sashayed toward the bathroom, swaying back and forth, as she walked. I wanted to jump up and steady her, but I knew she’d bat me away with a swipe of her arm. I just sat on the floor beside the bookshelf and watched.
"I’m just gonna hop in the shower real quick," she said.
"Don't forget to brush your teeth," I mumbled under my breath, frightened by what I might smell on hers.
She whirled around and caught hold of the doorframe.
"What?"
I shrugged and shook my head.
Amy glared at me for almost a minute before backing into the bathroom and closing the door. "Out in a minute," she called. I heard the squeak and rattle of the building's old water pipes before a steady, if weak, stream started flowing from the showerhead.
I sighed and leaned my head back against the bookshelf. I closed my eyes and waited for the water to stop.
The door opened some time later, twenty minutes, maybe a half hour. Amy walked out in a rush of steam, wrapped in a threadbare green towel, her wet hair hanging down over her eyes. She looked better, was moving more steadily. Across from the futon, which also doubled as her bed, I would later learn, was a stocky wooden dresser. I can’t deny feeling a twitch in my jeans when she bent down to open the drawer that contained her bras and panties, the thin towel riding up her backside, revealing a still-curvy bottom.
She glanced over her shoulder and caught me watching. "Like the show?" she laughed.
I shifted uncomfortably against the bookshelf, self-consciously resting my hands in my lap. "It’s not like it isn't anything I haven't seen before," I replied.
"True," she said as she let the towel fall around her ankles.
I sat there and watched her get dressed. Then we went shopping.
Amy only cheated on me once while we dated. At least, once that I know of. I was sitting in the commons between classes and heard some friends talking about her. At the sound of her name, I piped up, asked what they were talking about. A friend of a friend had seen Amy kissing this other kid whose clique circumnavigated our own. I was crushed, heartbroken, but strangely not mad. I felt peaceful, like I had been expecting this to happen, the other shoe to drop.
I confronted this other kid that night, at a park near school where kids from my school would hang out, smoke and drink. He was a big fella, at least half a foot taller than my five-foot-ten, if not more. When I got to the park, he was standing in a circle of kids, holding court over this or that. I walked up to him and asked if I could talk to him for a minute.
"I thought you were gonna try and pick a fight that night," he’d later tell me. Fighting, however, was the furthest thing from my mind; for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he could wipe the floor with me.
"This is her choice," I told him. "Not mine. Not yours, either. Whoever she wants to be with, who am I to stop her? Take care of her."
He said he would. He was surprised, I think, by my tone, my...civility. We shook hands and I walked back to my car, content in the delusion that Amy was gone from my life, that she was someone else’s problem now.
We rode the 'L' train in silence, Amy listening to her iPod, I covertly watching the other passengers, silently wondering what their stories were, bizarrely proud with the certainty that their histories couldn’t come close to that of the girl sitting beside me.
The train slowed at our stop and we disembarked. We walked along the graffiti-decorated platform and out into the cool night air. There was a Best Buy a couple blocks from the station. When it was in sight, Amy pointed at the big yellow sign and said, "Mmooovies."
She wandered aimlessly, it seemed, through the store, stopping occasionally to pick up a DVD and glance at its packaging. She was still high, of course. I lagged behind her slightly, watching her, and wondered if anyone could tell.
"Tombstone!" she squealed. She ran up to me holding a DVD in front of her face. "I have two guns," she drawled, quoting Val Kilmer’s Doc Holiday from the movie, "one for each of you."
She giggled and clutched the movie to her chest. "I love this movie," she said in a singsong voice. "We're going to watch this movie."
"Okay," I said. I couldn't help but laugh. Her enthusiasm was infectious, even if her preferred method of attaining it was not.
When we got back to the apartment, she handed me the DVD and told me to unwrap it. She went to the dresser and pulled something out, hiding it from view. "I’ll be out in a sec," she said, heading toward the bathroom.
I cut the plastic wrapping off the movie and placed the DVD in the player that sat atop the television. I grabbed the remote and settled onto the futon, wondering what was taking Amy so long.
She finally emerged from the bathroom, a smile planted squarely on her face. She walked with a looseness I couldn’t place, as if all the muscles in her body had gone slack. She was holding a hand to where her arm where it bends at the elbow as she plopped down beside me. She was so relaxed she practically oozed against me, melting into me, with her head resting on my shoulder. I put my arm around her and pressed PLAY on the remote.
"This is nice," she said dreamily, her voice heavy with sleep. Soon she was snoring gently, lost in her drug-fueled dreams.
"Yeah," I said, pulling a blanket around us. "Real nice."
The Morning After
Warren woke with a muffled start, his face buried in a cheerful yellow-clad pillow. When it was decided that she would move in, Maya had declared his apartment too drab and dreary, a "geek’s hovel," in her words, and she went about purchasing things, or bringing them over from her old room at her parents, little knickknacks, to "give the place a woman’s touch." The bedroom was one of the first places she touched ("since we’ll be spending so much time in there," she giggled), draping the bed with blindingly yellow sheets and pillowcases.
"Maya," Warren spoke into the pillow, "honey, what time is it?"
There was no answer.
Warren untangled his right arm from the sheets trapped beneath his contorted body and patted the Maya-shaped vacuum beside him, his fingers outstretched as he grasped nothing but air and rumpled canary-colored fabric, cool to the touch. "Maya?"
He lifted his head and saw what his fingers had discovered, that he was alone. Warren rolled over and stretched with a groan, extending his arms and legs as far as they would go in every direction, from one side of the bed to the other, reclaiming territory that had once been only his.
After his morning piss, Warren shuffled out of the bathroom and headed toward his hovel’s small kitchen. He stopped midway through the living room and looked at the movie posters tacked to the wall with care. Maya had wanted him to get rid of them. She said they were "childish," that a grown man shouldn’t wallpaper his home with "fantasies." Warren had stood firm and the posters stayed. Shortly after that discussion, however, a small table appeared beneath the posters, adorned with wooden and crystal ponies and unicorns. More of that "woman’s touch" Maya mentioned.
Warren picked up one of the small, carved figurines and held it close to his face. "And she says I’m childish," he whispered, squinting at it as if trying to discern its secrets.
He replaced the wooden horsie and continued to the kitchen. If Maya were here she’d no doubt be concocting some experimental breakfast for him, Eggs Benedict or some kind of strange omelet or burrito stuffed with tofu or shrimp, some recipe she’d come across in one of the magazines that started appearing at his address about a week after she’d moved in.
Warren shuddered at the thought as he pulled a bowl down from a cabinet and filled it with Fruit Loops from the box on the counter. He yanked open the refrigerator and looked for the carton of milk, finding it behind Maya’s diet soda and iced tea.
Warren settled down in his favorite chair and flicked the television on with the remote. The familiar Sportscenter theme song blared from the speakers as he contentedly crunched his cereal-shaped sugar and watched last night’s highlights.
That’s where Maya found him when she came home later that afternoon.
"Hi, honey, you’re home," Warren sing-songed from the chair. "Where’ve you been all day?" he asked without diverting his eyes from the television.
Maya grimaced as she gingerly shucked her coat and hung it by the door. She was grasping a small, white prescription bag from the local pharmacy.
"Out," she said, clutching a hand to her barren stomach. "Just out."
"Maya," Warren spoke into the pillow, "honey, what time is it?"
There was no answer.
Warren untangled his right arm from the sheets trapped beneath his contorted body and patted the Maya-shaped vacuum beside him, his fingers outstretched as he grasped nothing but air and rumpled canary-colored fabric, cool to the touch. "Maya?"
He lifted his head and saw what his fingers had discovered, that he was alone. Warren rolled over and stretched with a groan, extending his arms and legs as far as they would go in every direction, from one side of the bed to the other, reclaiming territory that had once been only his.
After his morning piss, Warren shuffled out of the bathroom and headed toward his hovel’s small kitchen. He stopped midway through the living room and looked at the movie posters tacked to the wall with care. Maya had wanted him to get rid of them. She said they were "childish," that a grown man shouldn’t wallpaper his home with "fantasies." Warren had stood firm and the posters stayed. Shortly after that discussion, however, a small table appeared beneath the posters, adorned with wooden and crystal ponies and unicorns. More of that "woman’s touch" Maya mentioned.
Warren picked up one of the small, carved figurines and held it close to his face. "And she says I’m childish," he whispered, squinting at it as if trying to discern its secrets.
He replaced the wooden horsie and continued to the kitchen. If Maya were here she’d no doubt be concocting some experimental breakfast for him, Eggs Benedict or some kind of strange omelet or burrito stuffed with tofu or shrimp, some recipe she’d come across in one of the magazines that started appearing at his address about a week after she’d moved in.
Warren shuddered at the thought as he pulled a bowl down from a cabinet and filled it with Fruit Loops from the box on the counter. He yanked open the refrigerator and looked for the carton of milk, finding it behind Maya’s diet soda and iced tea.
Warren settled down in his favorite chair and flicked the television on with the remote. The familiar Sportscenter theme song blared from the speakers as he contentedly crunched his cereal-shaped sugar and watched last night’s highlights.
That’s where Maya found him when she came home later that afternoon.
"Hi, honey, you’re home," Warren sing-songed from the chair. "Where’ve you been all day?" he asked without diverting his eyes from the television.
Maya grimaced as she gingerly shucked her coat and hung it by the door. She was grasping a small, white prescription bag from the local pharmacy.
"Out," she said, clutching a hand to her barren stomach. "Just out."
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
The Decision
"I'm pregnant."
The words hung in the air like a pungent odor, thick and stifling. Warren slowly looked up from his newspaper, its pages ruffling quietly as his hands began to tremble ever so slightly.
"You’re...what?" he choked out, his throat suddenly feeling tight and constricted.
Maya wouldn't look at him. She gazed out the window into the darkening twilight. Red and gold sunlight streamed through branches of the tree that stood tall and crooked outside their second-floor apartment, casting the room in a crisscross pattern of shadow and light.
"Pregnant," she said, wistfully, as though imagining how wonderful life would be with a child. Maya didn’t have any brothers or sisters of her own. Her mother had raised her after her father left them before Maya was born. Growing up, she never envied the other kids who had siblings at home, waiting to pick on them and call them names. No, Maya was content to be the only object of her mother’s affection and attention. Now she was going to be a mother to a child of her own.
Warren folded the newspaper and set it on the scratched, stubby coffee table in front of him. He ran his hands through his hair before burying his face in them. "Pregnant," he repeated, his voice muffled and distorted.
He spread his fingers and looked at Maya through the narrow slits. She was still just sitting there, on his favorite chair, a beat-up, old, red recliner with cracked and peeling leather that his mother had given him when he moved out, legs folded beneath herself, looking out the window, looking as though she didn’t have a care in the world.
Warren lowered his hands, clasping them under his chin, elbows resting on his knees. "What, uh, what are we, I mean, what do you want to..." he trailed off, unsure of what he wanted to say.
Maya turned her emerald eyes toward him, her short auburn hair glinting in the fading sunlight. Her voice, when she spoke, was carefully bottled anger, quiet and dangerous. "What do you mean, what do I want to do? It's our child, War. Yours and mine."
Her gaze made Warren’s blood run cold. He hated when she looked at him like that, icy and unemotional. He averted his eyes and shifted in his seat, crossing and uncrossing his legs, before stiffly standing up. He started pacing around the room like a caged beast. He examined the ceiling, the cheap, stained carpet, the curling movie posters on his "Wall of Shame," he looked everywhere but at Maya.
"I, uh, you know..." Warren sputtered as he looked at his Plan 9 from Outer Space poster. He heard Maya's legs unfurling, the denim of her jeans rustling as she stood up. "We've only been together for a...a few months, is all, and..."
"Look at me," Maya whispered in his ear. She was close enough that the fruity scent of her shampoo tickled his nostrils. She smelled clean, fresh, like a newborn.
Warren inhaled slowly and counted to five before exhaling. He turned around. Maya was standing with her arms crossed gently beneath her breasts, her head tilted slightly to one side, grinning impishly.
"Kidding," Maya said. "I'm only kidding. I just wanted to see how you’d react." She quickly wrapped her arms around him, resting her head on his shoulder so he couldn't see her stifling back tears.
The words hung in the air like a pungent odor, thick and stifling. Warren slowly looked up from his newspaper, its pages ruffling quietly as his hands began to tremble ever so slightly.
"You’re...what?" he choked out, his throat suddenly feeling tight and constricted.
Maya wouldn't look at him. She gazed out the window into the darkening twilight. Red and gold sunlight streamed through branches of the tree that stood tall and crooked outside their second-floor apartment, casting the room in a crisscross pattern of shadow and light.
"Pregnant," she said, wistfully, as though imagining how wonderful life would be with a child. Maya didn’t have any brothers or sisters of her own. Her mother had raised her after her father left them before Maya was born. Growing up, she never envied the other kids who had siblings at home, waiting to pick on them and call them names. No, Maya was content to be the only object of her mother’s affection and attention. Now she was going to be a mother to a child of her own.
Warren folded the newspaper and set it on the scratched, stubby coffee table in front of him. He ran his hands through his hair before burying his face in them. "Pregnant," he repeated, his voice muffled and distorted.
He spread his fingers and looked at Maya through the narrow slits. She was still just sitting there, on his favorite chair, a beat-up, old, red recliner with cracked and peeling leather that his mother had given him when he moved out, legs folded beneath herself, looking out the window, looking as though she didn’t have a care in the world.
Warren lowered his hands, clasping them under his chin, elbows resting on his knees. "What, uh, what are we, I mean, what do you want to..." he trailed off, unsure of what he wanted to say.
Maya turned her emerald eyes toward him, her short auburn hair glinting in the fading sunlight. Her voice, when she spoke, was carefully bottled anger, quiet and dangerous. "What do you mean, what do I want to do? It's our child, War. Yours and mine."
Her gaze made Warren’s blood run cold. He hated when she looked at him like that, icy and unemotional. He averted his eyes and shifted in his seat, crossing and uncrossing his legs, before stiffly standing up. He started pacing around the room like a caged beast. He examined the ceiling, the cheap, stained carpet, the curling movie posters on his "Wall of Shame," he looked everywhere but at Maya.
"I, uh, you know..." Warren sputtered as he looked at his Plan 9 from Outer Space poster. He heard Maya's legs unfurling, the denim of her jeans rustling as she stood up. "We've only been together for a...a few months, is all, and..."
"Look at me," Maya whispered in his ear. She was close enough that the fruity scent of her shampoo tickled his nostrils. She smelled clean, fresh, like a newborn.
Warren inhaled slowly and counted to five before exhaling. He turned around. Maya was standing with her arms crossed gently beneath her breasts, her head tilted slightly to one side, grinning impishly.
"Kidding," Maya said. "I'm only kidding. I just wanted to see how you’d react." She quickly wrapped her arms around him, resting her head on his shoulder so he couldn't see her stifling back tears.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
The Magician (longer version)
I heard my son scampering home moments before he flung open the front door, his small, wooden shoes clomping loudly on the cobblestone road outside.
"Papa, Papa!" Blake cried over and over as he whirled through the house searching for me. He quickly found me upstairs in my study. I turned away from my writing just in time to see him trip over his own two feet when he spied me. As he stumbled forward, I reached out to steady him and he breathlessly tumbled into my arms. "Look, Papa, look," he gasped between big gulps of air, "there’s a ‘gician comin’ to town." He thrust his little hands toward me. He was clutching a thin scrap of paper.
"Calm down, son," I said. "Breathe, nice and slow. That’s it." I gently rescued what turned out to be an advert from the town newspaper from his stubby, newsprint-stained fingers. "Now, what do you have here?"
I leaned back in my chair and arranged the boy comfortably in my lap. I positioned the piece of paper in front of us and began to read: "Presenting, for the first time in over twenty years, the Inexplicable Erskine, Europe’s most prominent and prodigious prestidigitator, performing phenomenal feats certain to fascinate and captivate. One night only."
Erskine, I thought. Erskine...from where do I know that name?
"A real live ‘gician, Papa," Blake squealed as he squirmed around to face me. "Can we see ‘im?" His eyes were bright and round, hungry with anticipation and excitement.
I lightly tousled his fair, almost white, hair. "Well, I don’t see why not. Why don’t we ask your mother during dinner tonight? Speaking of which, go wash up. She’ll be home from the market shortly."
Blake hopped off my lap as if his rear was on fire. "Yay! I get to see the ‘gician! I get to see the ‘gician!" he chanted as he hurried off to wash basin.
I was never that young, I chuckled softly to myself and turned back to the desk. I looked at the advert again, trying to remember where I knew the name of the magician from, this Erskine. "For the first time in twenty years..."
When my wife Kaelyn returned from the market Blake helped her unload her purchases and prepare dinner, all the while nattering on and on about the magician.
"What kinds of tricks do you think he’ll do? Will he wear a top hat and cape like in my picture book? The ‘gician in my picture book made a lion disappear," said Blake, wide-eyed with wonderment.
"It’s pronounced ‘magician,’ sweetheart," Kaelyn corrected our son. "It certainly sounds like it will be an interesting performance. The ‘Inexplicable Erskine’ must be quite good."
"Have you ever seen a m‘gician, Papa?" Blake asked between mouthfuls of bread.
"I...don’t know, son," I said with uncertainty. The advert that still lay on my desk upstairs nagged at my memories. "Seems like something one would remember, doesn’t it, but I can’t say for sure."
Blake jumped up on his chair, arms held wide. He held his fork in one hand, like a magic wand, waving it around his head. "We’ll see the ‘gician together, Papa. He’ll do all sorts of tricks for us an’ we’ll always remember it."
"Absolutely, son," I said, laughing, as Kaelyn seated the boy properly in his chair and urged him to finish his meal. Though I wished to be, I wasn’t nearly as certain as feigned.
Later that evening, after putting Blake to bed, my wife found me seated in front of our closet, rummaging through old, dusty boxes that once belonged to my father.
She kneeled behind me, kissed the top of my head and began to rub my shoulders. "What are you doing, dear?"
I leaned back into the ministrations of her nimble fingers and sighed. "That advert, the one Blake brought home, I don’t know, every since I read it I’ve been haunted by it. By Erskine. I think I’ve seen him perform before, but it’s hazy, like my mind’s been clouded over with a thick fog. I’m looking for something, a playbill, anything that my father might have kept from when...if," I corrected myself, "if we might have seen him."
"My poor husband," Kaelyn said, folding her legs underneath herself and laying my head in her lap. She continued to rub my scalp and forehead with her expert touch. "It will come to you, in time. You cannot force the memories to surface. You will remember when your mind is ready."
"I know." I opened my eyes and looked at her upside-down face, her fiery red tresses framing her head like a scarlet halo, lightly tickling my face as they would brush against me. Her eyes, verdant as a lush summer meadow, soothed and calmed my nerves. I felt the day’s tension melt from my body.
"Come to bed, love," Kaelyn said. "Let Erskine trouble you no longer this evening."
I awoke with a start, shivering, and my body covered with gooseflesh. I had been dreaming. Horrible, though faint, images danced macabrely behind my eyes, taunting and teasing, just barely without my grasp. I clutched my hands to my face in a futile attempt to ward off the darkness, but to no avail. "Er...Erskine..." I muttered through clenched teeth, for I knew it was he who filled my mind with such terrors.
Sleep eluded me the remainder of the night. After the initial fright, I simply lay in bed, trying desperately to remember the magic show of my youth, despite Kaelyn’s earlier counsel. I envied her peaceful slumber beside me.
I stared at the walls and ceiling, calmed by their security and protection; moonlight coruscated through the window, shapes forming and dissolving in the shadows quicker than my mind could recognize them. The ceiling...
That was his trick, his final trick. It came to me in a flash, as if lightning had struck my brain. I roused Kaelyn. "I remember! Not all of it, of course. Most is just bits and pieces, fragments, but I remember the final trick!"
We were sitting toward the rear of the great theatre, in one of its highest balconies. We needed my father’s field glasses to see the stage, but I didn’t care. I was overjoyed at the idea of seeing a real, live magician.
We sat through an evening’s worth of hoaxes and illusions that remain obscured by time, waiting for Erskine’s grand finale: the disappearance of the grand theatre itself. Yes, he pledged to displace the walls and ceiling, to expose us to the elements, all while we sat comfortably in our plush velvet chairs. A most audacious and improbable feat, my father had said. That is why we were there. My father wanted to laugh and crow and jeer when the trick surely failed, as he wholeheartedly believed it would.
The lights dimmed and we were plunged into near complete darkness, save for a narrow shaft of light that illuminated the wizened old man on stage. My mother cried out in alarm before my father could reassure her it was all part of the performance. Erskine stood nearly immobile on stage, a strange, thunderous language I’d never heard before or since enveloping us like a warm blanket on a cold winter’s eve. Using the field glasses, I could barely see his lips moving, yet the strange tongue boomed and echoed all around us.
The rhythmic cadence mesmerized me. I leaned back in my chair and felt as though I were floating. I stared at the ceiling, transfixed by what appeared to be tiny swirling lights amongst the ornate carvings. I tried to point them out to my father, but he shushed me, staring at Erskine, intent on discovering the truth of the trick.
I blinked rapidly, trying to chase away the small, undulating pinpricks of light, but each time I opened my eyes there were more of them. The ceiling began to take on a translucent quality. It would fade away slightly, as if out of focus, before becoming whole once again.
Erskine slowed his strange speech and it became little more than a murmur. Then he started again, faster and faster, building to a deafening crescendo. I started to raise my hands to my ears, but stopped short. There, above my head, I saw the moon, bright and full. I grabbed at my father’s arm, to show him, but he ignored me, still fixated on the stage. I looked around, to grab the attention of another patron, but none would pay me any heed. All around me people were focused on Erskine himself and nothing else.
In awe, my mouth agape, I realized I was the only one who was noticing. To my left, where a sturdy wall had once been, I could see the marketplace down the street. To my right, the church spire jutted tall, overlooking the town. Behind Erskine, where once had been a curtain of the deepest blue, I could now see the lake, the moon reflected in its calm surface.
Erskine suddenly stopped his chanting. He had a strange, bemused look on his wrinkled, weathered face. The lights came up and everyone started booing. I didn’t understand. Had they not seen what I saw? How could they not have? My father stood up, threw one final epithet toward the stage and ushered my mother and I outside and away from all the "foolishness."
I tried to explain to my father what I had seen, but he derided me, told me I was imagining things, to stop lying. But I knew. I knew what I saw. I knew what Erskine had done, even if nobody else did…
"He made the building disappear, Kaelyn," I said, standing by the window, watching her reaction in its reflection. "I know he did. But why...why had I forgotten about it until now, until Blake resurrected the memories with that advert?"
Kaelyn was sitting up, cross-legged under our comforter, illuminated by the moonlight that shone through the window. She beckoned me to sit beside her. She took my hands in hers, her thin, lithe fingers entwining with my own, and leaned forward and kissed me with more passion than I’d ever felt before or hence. She pulled back after what felt like an eternity and looked at me. I wanted to lose myself in her gaze, her emerald eyes burning in the darkness. "It’s time, my love. Time for you to learn the truth."
"Papa, Papa!" Blake cried over and over as he whirled through the house searching for me. He quickly found me upstairs in my study. I turned away from my writing just in time to see him trip over his own two feet when he spied me. As he stumbled forward, I reached out to steady him and he breathlessly tumbled into my arms. "Look, Papa, look," he gasped between big gulps of air, "there’s a ‘gician comin’ to town." He thrust his little hands toward me. He was clutching a thin scrap of paper.
"Calm down, son," I said. "Breathe, nice and slow. That’s it." I gently rescued what turned out to be an advert from the town newspaper from his stubby, newsprint-stained fingers. "Now, what do you have here?"
I leaned back in my chair and arranged the boy comfortably in my lap. I positioned the piece of paper in front of us and began to read: "Presenting, for the first time in over twenty years, the Inexplicable Erskine, Europe’s most prominent and prodigious prestidigitator, performing phenomenal feats certain to fascinate and captivate. One night only."
Erskine, I thought. Erskine...from where do I know that name?
"A real live ‘gician, Papa," Blake squealed as he squirmed around to face me. "Can we see ‘im?" His eyes were bright and round, hungry with anticipation and excitement.
I lightly tousled his fair, almost white, hair. "Well, I don’t see why not. Why don’t we ask your mother during dinner tonight? Speaking of which, go wash up. She’ll be home from the market shortly."
Blake hopped off my lap as if his rear was on fire. "Yay! I get to see the ‘gician! I get to see the ‘gician!" he chanted as he hurried off to wash basin.
I was never that young, I chuckled softly to myself and turned back to the desk. I looked at the advert again, trying to remember where I knew the name of the magician from, this Erskine. "For the first time in twenty years..."
When my wife Kaelyn returned from the market Blake helped her unload her purchases and prepare dinner, all the while nattering on and on about the magician.
"What kinds of tricks do you think he’ll do? Will he wear a top hat and cape like in my picture book? The ‘gician in my picture book made a lion disappear," said Blake, wide-eyed with wonderment.
"It’s pronounced ‘magician,’ sweetheart," Kaelyn corrected our son. "It certainly sounds like it will be an interesting performance. The ‘Inexplicable Erskine’ must be quite good."
"Have you ever seen a m‘gician, Papa?" Blake asked between mouthfuls of bread.
"I...don’t know, son," I said with uncertainty. The advert that still lay on my desk upstairs nagged at my memories. "Seems like something one would remember, doesn’t it, but I can’t say for sure."
Blake jumped up on his chair, arms held wide. He held his fork in one hand, like a magic wand, waving it around his head. "We’ll see the ‘gician together, Papa. He’ll do all sorts of tricks for us an’ we’ll always remember it."
"Absolutely, son," I said, laughing, as Kaelyn seated the boy properly in his chair and urged him to finish his meal. Though I wished to be, I wasn’t nearly as certain as feigned.
Later that evening, after putting Blake to bed, my wife found me seated in front of our closet, rummaging through old, dusty boxes that once belonged to my father.
She kneeled behind me, kissed the top of my head and began to rub my shoulders. "What are you doing, dear?"
I leaned back into the ministrations of her nimble fingers and sighed. "That advert, the one Blake brought home, I don’t know, every since I read it I’ve been haunted by it. By Erskine. I think I’ve seen him perform before, but it’s hazy, like my mind’s been clouded over with a thick fog. I’m looking for something, a playbill, anything that my father might have kept from when...if," I corrected myself, "if we might have seen him."
"My poor husband," Kaelyn said, folding her legs underneath herself and laying my head in her lap. She continued to rub my scalp and forehead with her expert touch. "It will come to you, in time. You cannot force the memories to surface. You will remember when your mind is ready."
"I know." I opened my eyes and looked at her upside-down face, her fiery red tresses framing her head like a scarlet halo, lightly tickling my face as they would brush against me. Her eyes, verdant as a lush summer meadow, soothed and calmed my nerves. I felt the day’s tension melt from my body.
"Come to bed, love," Kaelyn said. "Let Erskine trouble you no longer this evening."
I awoke with a start, shivering, and my body covered with gooseflesh. I had been dreaming. Horrible, though faint, images danced macabrely behind my eyes, taunting and teasing, just barely without my grasp. I clutched my hands to my face in a futile attempt to ward off the darkness, but to no avail. "Er...Erskine..." I muttered through clenched teeth, for I knew it was he who filled my mind with such terrors.
Sleep eluded me the remainder of the night. After the initial fright, I simply lay in bed, trying desperately to remember the magic show of my youth, despite Kaelyn’s earlier counsel. I envied her peaceful slumber beside me.
I stared at the walls and ceiling, calmed by their security and protection; moonlight coruscated through the window, shapes forming and dissolving in the shadows quicker than my mind could recognize them. The ceiling...
That was his trick, his final trick. It came to me in a flash, as if lightning had struck my brain. I roused Kaelyn. "I remember! Not all of it, of course. Most is just bits and pieces, fragments, but I remember the final trick!"
We were sitting toward the rear of the great theatre, in one of its highest balconies. We needed my father’s field glasses to see the stage, but I didn’t care. I was overjoyed at the idea of seeing a real, live magician.
We sat through an evening’s worth of hoaxes and illusions that remain obscured by time, waiting for Erskine’s grand finale: the disappearance of the grand theatre itself. Yes, he pledged to displace the walls and ceiling, to expose us to the elements, all while we sat comfortably in our plush velvet chairs. A most audacious and improbable feat, my father had said. That is why we were there. My father wanted to laugh and crow and jeer when the trick surely failed, as he wholeheartedly believed it would.
The lights dimmed and we were plunged into near complete darkness, save for a narrow shaft of light that illuminated the wizened old man on stage. My mother cried out in alarm before my father could reassure her it was all part of the performance. Erskine stood nearly immobile on stage, a strange, thunderous language I’d never heard before or since enveloping us like a warm blanket on a cold winter’s eve. Using the field glasses, I could barely see his lips moving, yet the strange tongue boomed and echoed all around us.
The rhythmic cadence mesmerized me. I leaned back in my chair and felt as though I were floating. I stared at the ceiling, transfixed by what appeared to be tiny swirling lights amongst the ornate carvings. I tried to point them out to my father, but he shushed me, staring at Erskine, intent on discovering the truth of the trick.
I blinked rapidly, trying to chase away the small, undulating pinpricks of light, but each time I opened my eyes there were more of them. The ceiling began to take on a translucent quality. It would fade away slightly, as if out of focus, before becoming whole once again.
Erskine slowed his strange speech and it became little more than a murmur. Then he started again, faster and faster, building to a deafening crescendo. I started to raise my hands to my ears, but stopped short. There, above my head, I saw the moon, bright and full. I grabbed at my father’s arm, to show him, but he ignored me, still fixated on the stage. I looked around, to grab the attention of another patron, but none would pay me any heed. All around me people were focused on Erskine himself and nothing else.
In awe, my mouth agape, I realized I was the only one who was noticing. To my left, where a sturdy wall had once been, I could see the marketplace down the street. To my right, the church spire jutted tall, overlooking the town. Behind Erskine, where once had been a curtain of the deepest blue, I could now see the lake, the moon reflected in its calm surface.
Erskine suddenly stopped his chanting. He had a strange, bemused look on his wrinkled, weathered face. The lights came up and everyone started booing. I didn’t understand. Had they not seen what I saw? How could they not have? My father stood up, threw one final epithet toward the stage and ushered my mother and I outside and away from all the "foolishness."
I tried to explain to my father what I had seen, but he derided me, told me I was imagining things, to stop lying. But I knew. I knew what I saw. I knew what Erskine had done, even if nobody else did…
"He made the building disappear, Kaelyn," I said, standing by the window, watching her reaction in its reflection. "I know he did. But why...why had I forgotten about it until now, until Blake resurrected the memories with that advert?"
Kaelyn was sitting up, cross-legged under our comforter, illuminated by the moonlight that shone through the window. She beckoned me to sit beside her. She took my hands in hers, her thin, lithe fingers entwining with my own, and leaned forward and kissed me with more passion than I’d ever felt before or hence. She pulled back after what felt like an eternity and looked at me. I wanted to lose myself in her gaze, her emerald eyes burning in the darkness. "It’s time, my love. Time for you to learn the truth."
Saturday, September 23, 2006
The Magician (short version)
I heard my son scampering home moments before the front door was flung open, his small, wooden shoes clomping loudly on the cobblestone road outside.
"Papa, Papa!" Blake cried over and over as he whirled through the house searching for me. He quickly found me upstairs in my study. I turned away from my writing just in time to see him trip over his own two feet when he spied me. As he stumbled forward I reached out to steady him and he breathlessly tumbled into my arms. "Look, Papa, look," he gasped between big gulps of air, "there's a 'gician comin' to town." He thrust his little hands toward me. He was clutching a thin scrap of paper.
"Calm down, son," I said. "Breathe, nice and slow. That’s it." I gently rescued what turned out to be an advert from the town newspaper from his stubby, newsprint-stained fingers. "Now, what do you have here?"
I leaned back in my chair and arranged the boy comfortably in my lap. I positioned the piece of paper in front of us and began to read: "Presenting, for the first time in over twenty years, the Inexplicable Erskine, Europe’s most prominent and prodigious prestidigitator, performing phenomenal feats certain to fascinate and captivate. One night only."
"Erskine," I said to myself. "From where do I know that name?"
"A real live 'gician, Papa," Blake squealed as he squirmed around to face me. "Can we see 'im?" His eyes were bright and round, hungry with anticipation and excitement.
"I actually think I’ve seen this magician before, this Erskine," I said.
"You have?" Blake said, mouth agape.
"I haven’t thought about it in years, but reading that advert has made it all came back to me. I saw him when I was about your age, Blake. I remember my parents and me getting all dressed up in our best clothing and walking downtown to the theatre. There was a huge crowd of people; it seemed like the entire town was there, all dressed in their finest clothing, men in suits and top hats, the women in gowns and heels.
"Our seats were toward the back of the theatre. The crowd was buzzing and murmuring as all crowds do when, suddenly, the lights went out. Real quick, like someone had thrown a pillowcase over your head. It was blacker than midnight. The murmuring turned to surprised outbursts. People weren’t sure if this was part of the show. Then a booming voice rang out in a language I didn’t understand, followed by a bright flash of light and smoke, and there he was, the Inexplicable Erskine, standing onstage, his arms held wide apart in welcome.
"Time has clouded my memory regarding the specifics of most of that evening. I remember being enthralled, enraptured, by the wizened old man on stage, by his witty patter with the crowd, by the ease with which he made it all look. Except..." I paused, unsure if my mind was playing tricks on me.
"What, Papa, what happened?"
"His last trick," I continued. "It didn’t work. He was going to...he said he was going to make the building, the entire theatre disappear from around us, exposing us to the elements. He spoke in that strange tongue he used at the beginning of the evening, waved his arms around and plunged us into darkness again. There were no panicked cries this time. We all knew it was part of the show, but when the lights came back up we were still seated inside the theatre. Rather, the theatre was still enclosing us. Erskine looked confused, unsure of himself. He kept looking out over the crowd with this bemused, bewildered face.
"Then the laughter started. Just a small, stifled chuckle at first, but soon it overcame the entire audience. Everyone was laughing and jeering, deriding that poor man just because one trick out of many failed to work properly. I felt bad for him. He vanished shortly after that performance. No one knew what happened to him."
"That’s sad, Papa. Why was everyone laughing at him?"
I sighed. "I guess because they found it amusing that he had failed for some reason. I don’t really know, son."
"When we see him we’re gonna cheer for him, right, Papa? No matter what happens?"
I smiled and wrapped my arms around my boy. "That’s right, son. No matter what happens."
"Papa, Papa!" Blake cried over and over as he whirled through the house searching for me. He quickly found me upstairs in my study. I turned away from my writing just in time to see him trip over his own two feet when he spied me. As he stumbled forward I reached out to steady him and he breathlessly tumbled into my arms. "Look, Papa, look," he gasped between big gulps of air, "there's a 'gician comin' to town." He thrust his little hands toward me. He was clutching a thin scrap of paper.
"Calm down, son," I said. "Breathe, nice and slow. That’s it." I gently rescued what turned out to be an advert from the town newspaper from his stubby, newsprint-stained fingers. "Now, what do you have here?"
I leaned back in my chair and arranged the boy comfortably in my lap. I positioned the piece of paper in front of us and began to read: "Presenting, for the first time in over twenty years, the Inexplicable Erskine, Europe’s most prominent and prodigious prestidigitator, performing phenomenal feats certain to fascinate and captivate. One night only."
"Erskine," I said to myself. "From where do I know that name?"
"A real live 'gician, Papa," Blake squealed as he squirmed around to face me. "Can we see 'im?" His eyes were bright and round, hungry with anticipation and excitement.
"I actually think I’ve seen this magician before, this Erskine," I said.
"You have?" Blake said, mouth agape.
"I haven’t thought about it in years, but reading that advert has made it all came back to me. I saw him when I was about your age, Blake. I remember my parents and me getting all dressed up in our best clothing and walking downtown to the theatre. There was a huge crowd of people; it seemed like the entire town was there, all dressed in their finest clothing, men in suits and top hats, the women in gowns and heels.
"Our seats were toward the back of the theatre. The crowd was buzzing and murmuring as all crowds do when, suddenly, the lights went out. Real quick, like someone had thrown a pillowcase over your head. It was blacker than midnight. The murmuring turned to surprised outbursts. People weren’t sure if this was part of the show. Then a booming voice rang out in a language I didn’t understand, followed by a bright flash of light and smoke, and there he was, the Inexplicable Erskine, standing onstage, his arms held wide apart in welcome.
"Time has clouded my memory regarding the specifics of most of that evening. I remember being enthralled, enraptured, by the wizened old man on stage, by his witty patter with the crowd, by the ease with which he made it all look. Except..." I paused, unsure if my mind was playing tricks on me.
"What, Papa, what happened?"
"His last trick," I continued. "It didn’t work. He was going to...he said he was going to make the building, the entire theatre disappear from around us, exposing us to the elements. He spoke in that strange tongue he used at the beginning of the evening, waved his arms around and plunged us into darkness again. There were no panicked cries this time. We all knew it was part of the show, but when the lights came back up we were still seated inside the theatre. Rather, the theatre was still enclosing us. Erskine looked confused, unsure of himself. He kept looking out over the crowd with this bemused, bewildered face.
"Then the laughter started. Just a small, stifled chuckle at first, but soon it overcame the entire audience. Everyone was laughing and jeering, deriding that poor man just because one trick out of many failed to work properly. I felt bad for him. He vanished shortly after that performance. No one knew what happened to him."
"That’s sad, Papa. Why was everyone laughing at him?"
I sighed. "I guess because they found it amusing that he had failed for some reason. I don’t really know, son."
"When we see him we’re gonna cheer for him, right, Papa? No matter what happens?"
I smiled and wrapped my arms around my boy. "That’s right, son. No matter what happens."
Monday, September 04, 2006
Public Embarrassment
Every exquisite, handcrafted, plush velvet seat in the Grande Theatre sold out mere days after the announcement of the performance, his first in nearly twenty years. “Witness the Return of the Inexplicable Erskine!” announced the signs that were plastered on seemingly every building in town, in finely-written cursive script. The entire populace was abuzz with gossip and rumor about the old magician.
“He was locked away in an asylum,” whispered the withered busybodies in the tea shop.
“He was captured and tortured in the king’s dungeon, he was, for bein’ a witch,” argued the men in the taverns.
“I heard,” a small, freckled boy named Hadley squeaked, “he was locked in mortal combat with a fiery demon from the Underverse for ages and ages until he finally vanquished the creature with a glowing sword made of pieces of the brightest star in the sky and now he’s returned to us.”
None of these stories were true, of course, but the townspeople discussed and dissected each tale as if it were gospel. The return of the Inexplicable Erskine was, quite simply, a Big Deal.
The night of the performance arrived quickly and the theatre was packed with all the gentlemen and ladies of the town, earnestly dressed in their finest clothes. The crowed murmured to one another, “What sort of trick do you think he’ll perform for us tonight,” and, “How exciting,” while the musicians in the orchestra pit were tuning their instruments. (Just one musician, actually, an African man named Kiano, whom the magician had befriended many years ago during an expedition.)
Backstage, an elderly man was twisting and contorting himself into a tuxedo made of the richest, blackest fabric you’d ever seen. It was like staring into midnight. Thousands of tiny, almost invisible sequins were embedded in the pants and jacket so that when the light hit just right you were dazzled by their radiance.
Twenty years have passed since the Inexplicable Erskine last dazzled anyone. As he fumbled with the buttons of his shirt with thin, bony fingers, he thought about the last time he performed his magic for a crowd. It was a disaster.
He had been at the height of his popularity, a master of legerdemain, but when the time came for his final prestidigitation, a brilliant set piece in which he was to make the entire building, the same theatre he was to perform in that very evening, disappear from around the audience, he failed. The old, stoic theatre stubbornly remained where it was. His once-loyal fans and admirers scoffed and laughed and derided his efforts. They told him to make himself disappear, that it might be easier for him, and so he did. With his shoulders slunk down and head held low he awkwardly shuffled off the stage, cheeks aflame with embarrassment and anger.
The Inexplicable Erskine pledged there and then that he would not return to the stage until he had perfected his craft. He would journey to the farthest reaches, study with the grand masters, and only then, when he was truly ready, would he attempt another conjuration.
Now, tonight, he was ready. He would show them something they’d never forget.
“He was locked away in an asylum,” whispered the withered busybodies in the tea shop.
“He was captured and tortured in the king’s dungeon, he was, for bein’ a witch,” argued the men in the taverns.
“I heard,” a small, freckled boy named Hadley squeaked, “he was locked in mortal combat with a fiery demon from the Underverse for ages and ages until he finally vanquished the creature with a glowing sword made of pieces of the brightest star in the sky and now he’s returned to us.”
None of these stories were true, of course, but the townspeople discussed and dissected each tale as if it were gospel. The return of the Inexplicable Erskine was, quite simply, a Big Deal.
The night of the performance arrived quickly and the theatre was packed with all the gentlemen and ladies of the town, earnestly dressed in their finest clothes. The crowed murmured to one another, “What sort of trick do you think he’ll perform for us tonight,” and, “How exciting,” while the musicians in the orchestra pit were tuning their instruments. (Just one musician, actually, an African man named Kiano, whom the magician had befriended many years ago during an expedition.)
Backstage, an elderly man was twisting and contorting himself into a tuxedo made of the richest, blackest fabric you’d ever seen. It was like staring into midnight. Thousands of tiny, almost invisible sequins were embedded in the pants and jacket so that when the light hit just right you were dazzled by their radiance.
Twenty years have passed since the Inexplicable Erskine last dazzled anyone. As he fumbled with the buttons of his shirt with thin, bony fingers, he thought about the last time he performed his magic for a crowd. It was a disaster.
He had been at the height of his popularity, a master of legerdemain, but when the time came for his final prestidigitation, a brilliant set piece in which he was to make the entire building, the same theatre he was to perform in that very evening, disappear from around the audience, he failed. The old, stoic theatre stubbornly remained where it was. His once-loyal fans and admirers scoffed and laughed and derided his efforts. They told him to make himself disappear, that it might be easier for him, and so he did. With his shoulders slunk down and head held low he awkwardly shuffled off the stage, cheeks aflame with embarrassment and anger.
The Inexplicable Erskine pledged there and then that he would not return to the stage until he had perfected his craft. He would journey to the farthest reaches, study with the grand masters, and only then, when he was truly ready, would he attempt another conjuration.
Now, tonight, he was ready. He would show them something they’d never forget.
Monday, August 28, 2006
Where I Grew Up
I don't think I have much time left. They're close. I can smell them, their rotten, peeling flesh and putrid, stale breath, like something crawled down their throats and died. Which isn't too far from the truth, I suppose. But I should be safe here, for now, huddled in the comforting darkness of what once was probably a nice suburban neighborhood, the kind of block where everyone knew one another and young children played safely in the street.
In the fading twilight, the house had looked fairly intact, a white two-story building halfway down a hill with a tall tree growing in the front yard, an oak, maybe. I quickly snuck around the perimeter, jumping over the slatted, wooden fence rather than risk the loud creaking I was sure would emanate from the copper-colored gate hinges. My cursory inspection yielded no broken windows or shattered doors, which I took as a good sign. I made my way back around to the front, careful not to disturb what was left of the rose bushes that once lined the south side of the house. Respect for the dead, maybe?
I wrapped my hand in a once-fluffy baby blue towel I scavenged from a nearby mall and jabbed at a narrow pane of etched glass to the right of the front door, cracking it until it gave way with a slight tinkling sound, like a glass wind chime in a stiff breeze. I scraped my arm on a jagged shard when I reached inside to unlock the door, but it's just a scratch. I can barely see it in the dim light of my laptop monitor.
The door, its red paint long faded, groaned when I pushed it open, like someone in pain from being forced to stretch muscles they had long forgotten about. The last slivers of sunlight glinted off a gold-colored doorknocker as I stepped inside the musty house, the faint outline of a surname barely noticeable in the gloom. "Sorry about the window," I muttered to the ghosts of the family that once lived here, as I closed the door behind me. I turned the deadbolt and it made a satisfying thunk, locking me inside a stranger’s home.
Not wanting to risk alerting anything to my presence, I left my flashlight in my backpack, choosing instead to allow my eyes to adjust to the gathering darkness. After a few minutes of standing with my back to the door I began to make out shapes in the open room to my left, some chairs, a sofa, a tall bookcase. To my right was an ominous stairway leading to the second floor.
I walked forward, where I saw a rectangular wooden table surrounded by matching chairs, overturned, as if someone had left in a hurry. I flicked the light switch on the wall next to me, but nothing happened. Not that I was actually expecting anything. Most cities stopped generating power years ago, which is why I steered clear of the large refrigerator that stood ominously against the wall. There was no telling what had gone rotten in there in the aftermath.
I walked back to the front door and paused for a moment, looking up into the gaping nothing of the staircase. Convinced that I was alone in this house, I pulled out my flashlight and flicked it on, the bright halogen beam giving me little comfort in the emptiness. The steps, I noticed, were carpeted in the same vibrant green as the living room, now covered with a thick coating of grey dust. I started up the stairs, each creak magnified by the utter silence that surrounded me.
Family pictures hung on the wall to my right. I tried not to look. I didn’t particularly want to know whose home I was invading, but the glow of the flashlight cast garish shadows as I trudged up the stairs, eerily illuminating at least three generations of dead people. A large family portrait greeted me at the top of the stairs. Parents, grandparents and countless grandchildren stared at me with tired, vacant eyes and fake, toothy smiles, the kind you get when you’ve been posing all day and just want to be done with it. Nice-looking family, I thought.
The top floor consists of three bedrooms, each with clothes and books haphazardly strewn about, abandoned, and the corner office I’ve claimed as my own. It’s the room least cluttered by reminders, save for the Pittsburgh Steelers memorabilia placed with obvious care on the desk and bookshelves.
I hear movement outside, vague scratches at the door and windows, and I silently pray they haven’t picked up my scent. Then I hear pounding on the door and I remember the scratch on my arm. They’ve found me.
In the fading twilight, the house had looked fairly intact, a white two-story building halfway down a hill with a tall tree growing in the front yard, an oak, maybe. I quickly snuck around the perimeter, jumping over the slatted, wooden fence rather than risk the loud creaking I was sure would emanate from the copper-colored gate hinges. My cursory inspection yielded no broken windows or shattered doors, which I took as a good sign. I made my way back around to the front, careful not to disturb what was left of the rose bushes that once lined the south side of the house. Respect for the dead, maybe?
I wrapped my hand in a once-fluffy baby blue towel I scavenged from a nearby mall and jabbed at a narrow pane of etched glass to the right of the front door, cracking it until it gave way with a slight tinkling sound, like a glass wind chime in a stiff breeze. I scraped my arm on a jagged shard when I reached inside to unlock the door, but it's just a scratch. I can barely see it in the dim light of my laptop monitor.
The door, its red paint long faded, groaned when I pushed it open, like someone in pain from being forced to stretch muscles they had long forgotten about. The last slivers of sunlight glinted off a gold-colored doorknocker as I stepped inside the musty house, the faint outline of a surname barely noticeable in the gloom. "Sorry about the window," I muttered to the ghosts of the family that once lived here, as I closed the door behind me. I turned the deadbolt and it made a satisfying thunk, locking me inside a stranger’s home.
Not wanting to risk alerting anything to my presence, I left my flashlight in my backpack, choosing instead to allow my eyes to adjust to the gathering darkness. After a few minutes of standing with my back to the door I began to make out shapes in the open room to my left, some chairs, a sofa, a tall bookcase. To my right was an ominous stairway leading to the second floor.
I walked forward, where I saw a rectangular wooden table surrounded by matching chairs, overturned, as if someone had left in a hurry. I flicked the light switch on the wall next to me, but nothing happened. Not that I was actually expecting anything. Most cities stopped generating power years ago, which is why I steered clear of the large refrigerator that stood ominously against the wall. There was no telling what had gone rotten in there in the aftermath.
I walked back to the front door and paused for a moment, looking up into the gaping nothing of the staircase. Convinced that I was alone in this house, I pulled out my flashlight and flicked it on, the bright halogen beam giving me little comfort in the emptiness. The steps, I noticed, were carpeted in the same vibrant green as the living room, now covered with a thick coating of grey dust. I started up the stairs, each creak magnified by the utter silence that surrounded me.
Family pictures hung on the wall to my right. I tried not to look. I didn’t particularly want to know whose home I was invading, but the glow of the flashlight cast garish shadows as I trudged up the stairs, eerily illuminating at least three generations of dead people. A large family portrait greeted me at the top of the stairs. Parents, grandparents and countless grandchildren stared at me with tired, vacant eyes and fake, toothy smiles, the kind you get when you’ve been posing all day and just want to be done with it. Nice-looking family, I thought.
The top floor consists of three bedrooms, each with clothes and books haphazardly strewn about, abandoned, and the corner office I’ve claimed as my own. It’s the room least cluttered by reminders, save for the Pittsburgh Steelers memorabilia placed with obvious care on the desk and bookshelves.
I hear movement outside, vague scratches at the door and windows, and I silently pray they haven’t picked up my scent. Then I hear pounding on the door and I remember the scratch on my arm. They’ve found me.
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