Drive

He went out to the car and found his ex in the front seat listening to a song from back when. The song seemed familiar, but the title danced away from his recollection. The ex, she wasn’t going anywhere, so when he went for a drive it wasn’t alone.

I didn’t expect to see you again he said.

I need some money his ex said.

How much.

Whatever you can spare.

I can maybe give you twenty.

Forty would be better.

Twenty’s what I can afford.

The ex slumped in her seat. OK OK she said. OK OK.

They headed in the direction of downtown. The sky turned storm-green. The wind picked up. Blobs of pollen whirled past the windshield like lost birds. A scrap of paper blew in one window out the other. At the atm by the liquor store he withdrew twenty and the ex put it in her purse and he waited to see, all right now, and she made no move to get out of the car.

Let’s keep on driving the ex said.

Where to he said.

See where the road takes us.

Which would have sounded fun, like an adventure, if not for all the times he’d been down the road she meant and ended up exactly nowhere.

Minutes later they passed a house with a swaybacked roof and leaning garage.
I used to cut grass at this place he said, slowing the car to a crawl. A lady on crutches lived there. She lost her feet in an industrial accident. She used to sit on the porch and yell about being a cripple. How her stumps hurt. How everyone always wanted to help when she didn’t want it and ignored her when she did. She wouldn’t shut up. I’d hear her over the lawn mower engine.

When did you ever cut grass the ex wanted to know.

Back in high school. I didn’t do it long. I’d see these guys who’d been cutting lawns a few years and they weren’t alive anymore. The sun beat them down. Their hands were stained green from picking up grass cuttings. I didn’t want to turn into that and got a job in a garage.

I remember those wrenches of yours.

Gone. Them and that job are history.

He stopped the car and got out and opened the door for his ex and they waded through kneehigh weeds to the rear of the house. During the previous winter or perhaps the one before a birch tree had fallen against the garage. The windows of both the garage and the house were missing. The storm was getting close. Flash of light. Count one two three four. Here came the thunder.

His ex dug through her purse for a cigarette and lit up. She exhaled soft smoke and the scent whisked him off to a place he’d thought locked up and forgotten.

I hate summer he said and pretended, not for the first time, to be the only human being left in the world.

"These Ones"

Who are they, drifting into our camp by the lake. Appearing from the woods and wandering through a maze of shabby tents and filthy sleeping bags. Stepping around a hundred small fires. Day and day and day again. They come and they come. The one who waves hello to everyone he sees. The one who keeps her mouth covered with a hand. The one with weary eyes. The one with many nervous tics. The one who peels off his clothes and dives deep into the lake. The one who sits on a stone by a blackberry bush and picks off berries and feeds them to squirrels. The one who writes in the dirt with her fingernail. The one who claims God has a plan. The one who laughs at the notion that a higher power can possibly be at the wheel. The one who goes a little mad, then a lot mad, then seems normal again, but isn’t, not really. The one who walks to the center of the camp and dances in tight circles. The one with two hats on her head, pink and the bright yellow. The one, I think he’s a man, but so old who can tell, just loose skin and white wispy hair and so many wrinkles it’s hard to make out a human face. The one who smiles and smiles and smiles, then lies down under a tree and stops breathing. The one with a limp, who says he was born lame, the limp used to be much worse, it has steadily gotten better the further west he’s walked, maybe if he travels far enough his gait will completely heal. The one who can’t stop looking over his shoulder, but never explains what terrifying entity haunts the rear. The one with red hair tied into dirty knots. The one with hair that is no definable color. The tall one. The short one. The one so thin she seems transparent. The one who talks to himself with a variety of unique voices. The one who nods quietly and seems so wise it makes me hurt deep down in a way that defies description.

These ones. I used to hear people use the phrase, maybe hundreds of times, and always wanted to ask them hey what’s wrong with you, these ones doesn’t make any sense, a plural describing a singular, can’t you see the obvious contradiction of terms. There is no these. There are only ones. We are all ones. We are all part of a great unseen whole that moves towards a common fate. Proper grammar isn’t the issue. There are matters of much more importance.

Yesteryear

A long while back I lived in a crazy part of town, populated by artists and musicians and drug addicts and thieves, maybe the thieves weren’t crazy, they had business to conduct is all, business isn’t crazy, business is business. The others, though, they were clearly insane. Don’t tell me artists and musicians aren’t as bad as drug addicts. All of them are out of their heads. I was probably out of my head living down there in the gutters with the rest of them. I didn’t have much money, so that maybe counted as an excuse. I don’t know. Humans come up with a lot of reasons for their failings. How was I any better than the rest of them. Not by a long shot.

There was a pub where I took my nightly drink. End of a twisted and dirty street. No name, that pub. No sign, even. Everyone in the neighborhood understood what the place was, they pushed through the screen door and sat in the dimness and filled themselves with whatever the bartender had to sell. Beer, homemade wine. Whiskey on special occasions, where it came from was anyone’s guess. One night the pub burned down, a candle left unattended the most likely culprit. We almost lost the whole damn neighborhood with the pub, it was a hell of a bonfire, the devil would have felt right at home. The pub went, the buildings on either side went. The grungy squatters in the buildings went. The bartender didn’t make it out of the conflagration. She ended up on the roof, trying to decide whether or not to jump and die on the cobblestones or wait for the flames to gobble her up along with the rafters and shingles. She waited so long the roof gave way and made the decision for her.

Don’t ask me if the poor bartender was one of the crazies. I would probably have done the same thing.

August

She hated the name Lish, it reminded her of failed poets and Victorian school teachers. She said that he must hate her for having such an old fashioned name, but he said not really and smiled and she went back to making coffee. It was late afternoon and late summer and he’d come home late from work and she was late in a different way and worried and unhappy and not in the mood for coffee or dinner or anything, really. What she wanted was not to be. For a little while. If that were possible. If she had the ability to temporarily deactivate herself. If, by some benevolent manifestation of fate, she could locate the off switch.

Through the open kitchen window she heard the hot wind roaming through a garden that had never quite managed to do more than make weeds. The sunlight looked brittle. She imagined it fracturing. What a lousy name she said. I mean, Alicia. Who names their child Alicia in this day and age. What the hell were my parents thinking. You give a kid a name and it should serve as a guide for life. Tell me anyone named Alicia who amounted to a hill of beans.

He went to the stove and got the coffee pot. He poured two cups and added cream to them both.

What about that cool woman from the Fantastic Four.

The invisible one?

No, the Thing’s girlfriend. The blind sculptress.

What’s cool about being blind. What has a blind person ever accomplished.

How about Helen Keller. Stevie Wonder.

Sure, them. Two people in all of history.

How about Homer.

Homer who she said, weary and confused.

He laughed, absolutely the wrong path to take at that moment.

Shaking his head in frustration she went off to the bedroom, forgetting about coffee and whatever might next be said.

Progression

Nobody else noticed the absurd event. The clown. The dog. The ducks. Only the man in the threadbare overcoat saw it happen. The absurd event unfolded on a busy street corner. The man in the threadbare overcoat was there for the beginning of the absurd event. He saw the clown. He was there for the middle portion of the event. The dog. A few moments later the man in the threadbare overcoat nodded his head at the conclusion of the absurd event. This was the thing with the duck. Who would have believed a bird could manage such a feat?

Three elements came together and formed a progression. The man in the overcoat bore witness and, in so doing, became a part of the progression.

Four elements, then.

Hey. Did you see that the man in the threadbare overcoat asked a young woman in a flowered hat as she stepped out of a nearby drugstore.

What? Was that, mister?

The young woman spoke with a noticeable stutter.

The man in the threadbare overcoat couldn’t decide.

Was this another part of the progression?

Why not?

Now You Know

For a time she had a male artist friend who carved miniature wooden birds and sold them to local boutiques. He was immensely talented and she admired his ability to translate rough blocks of pine into ornate parrots and stately eagles and long legged storks. Her artist friend lived down the hall, she often saw him at the elevator and talked about movies or books or some new restaurant. Once, when the elevator took an inordinately long time to arrive, she branched off into new conversational territory and detailed her upbringing on a large horse farm in the west. A nice bit of description she thought, but the next day she passed her artist friend’s apartment and saw the door standing open. She took a few steps inside. The rooms within were dark and desolate caves. Her artist friend had vanished without a trace. No note goodbye. No hint of where he might have gone.

She had her suspicions.

I shouldn’t have told him that story about stallions. . .

Across the Street

The neighbor’s wife left without any warning, it goes that way more often than people think. People consider the matter of abandonment and tell themselves there are always signs of it coming, but in truth there are rarely any signs, a person is there and the person is not. Some force spirits them off. What motivates such spirits, who can say. That’s life for you. That’s about what we can expect. I didn’t observe the neighbor’s wife make her departure, but did watch the neighbor walk around and around the house that night. I guess he was looking for his missing spouse. Maybe she’d come leaping from a bush or pop out of the garage. Don’t ask me what he expected. The neighbor went around and around. I was on the porch, dead from working all day, drinking grape soda because I’ve enjoyed grape soda since childhood. The neighbor circled his house more times than I bothered to count. Three soda glasses worth, anyway. Just after dusk he started, and continued until the moonless dark swallowed him up. The neighbor had never been a friend, just the guy across the street in the red house with the shutters. Still, I felt bad for him. I knew what the poor bastard was going through. Seven years back my own wife took off. I hadn’t received any warning signs, either, and had done a lot of things odder than walking around the house.