L. Gone

Farther down the road were skid marks. The car must be past the bend. All that was left was a backpack with the contents dashed across the asphalt. The sun had risen behind a layer of clouds, casting thin glow between the banks of trees to either side.

The thick arm of Jenny’s watch gestured toward the 7. She approached the scene slowly. Marc clung to my side. We took him with because we didn’t know what else to do. Hours had been spent looking. Marc slept until moments ago, when Jenny’s whispered pleas to pull over grew more intense.

The backpack looked unfamiliar and I could feel the heat of hope still within me. I scanned Jenny’s features for any flicker of recognition. Those books could be any books. All pens are functionally the same pen. This mess could be anything. Doubt crept in. This morning my own clothes felt strange. The road only five miles from our house felt strange. Even my Jenny, with her new stone face, was the strangest person I had ever seen.

Jenny touched

A Story about Patrick

I’ve known Patrick for almost two years now. When the Police asked me to describe him all I could say was squirrelly. This attempt here to tell his story here is my way of figuring out what I should have said instead.

We met in the popsicle melting heat of the summer. On my way our of the liquor store with a six-er and a bag of chips he asked if I could buy for him. What was he to me? A skinny boned punk. But he exuded a confidence in flashes of eye contact. It was either confidence or stupidity that made him speak to me. I’d looked more like a cop that day, back from my mom’s funeral. It didn’t cross my mind that he might have known me from the neighborhood. Looking back, he made everyone’s business his business. Had he known about my mom?

Any other day I wouldn’t have even acknowledged his presence. No need. But that day I felt like what-the-fuck. I told him to follow me. The chimes announced us to the store. Jesus poked his head over the cash register. He’s cool, I said, gesturing to the punk. Jesus goes, he better be. Hear that, I flip a look to Patrick, you better be. Patrick is unsure. Pick out what you want. And I leave. Later when I asked Jesus, said he picked out a 40, paid in coins, drank half of it in front of the store and then left the bottle.

I ran into him again and Gabrielle’s party – she had him manning the keg.

A Story About Watching

Tic, tic, tic. This one felt slow compared to his father’s watch, whose soft heartbeats soothed him. He had to hide it in a drawer because of how it bothered him. And now, returning to the quiet glow of the lamp and drawing his book into lamp, Jessie exhaled, ready to relax. Yet when the silence settled again, a clockwork call came from the roll-top desk. Tic, tic, tic.

If he was an ungrateful man, he would have returned it, but he was happy to have his family and the image of his son’s face when he gave the gift. No, he simply wished that there were less gifts and less occasions for gifts. The objects he had chosen to bring into his life were important and each addition diluted his space. Perhaps this watch was a meaningful gift, but how could one tell when it seemed to come with the menagerie of ties and mugs and ceramic bric-a-brack. He was a luddite of a different stripe. A man simultaneously modern and thoroughly backward looking.

The choice now was to either get up and move the watch again, hoping that it would be out of range or to simply see if he could let go, forgive the watch it’s boring insistence. The third option would be to disbatch the infernal thing, but the rest of the family could be home at any time and as had been his luck this week, everyone would be piling into the kitchen the moment that the father’s day present slipped out of his hands and into the trash, or, as was his impulse, smashing it with a hammer. He slipped into these slight moral quandaries so easily these days.

Instead he chose a fourth option, surprising even himself. He let his book fall shut without a marker, turned off the lamp he had received on his wedding day, and walked out the front door leaving no note and having no way to keep track of the time.

A Story About Face

Alfred had two eyes shaped like almonds. His irises where shaped like marbles. His nose was in exactly the place a nose should be. He had a perfectly reasonable mouth. All of it was covered in skin, just like anyone had the right to expect.

Alfred looked up the Wikipedia definition of Face Blindness. He was surprised to find that Oliver Sacks and Chuck Close suffered from face blindness. He spent over 30 minutes looking at paintings by Chuck Close. Huh, he thought. Then he went back to Wikipedia and hit the button to edit. After the definition he wrote, “What if the problem is NOT that someone can’t recognize faces? What if the problem is that no one recognizes my face?”

Laying in bed, unable to sleep, Alfred couldn’t remember the last invitation he got. Sure there were the mass invites to various activities, but he couldn’t remember the last time someone wanted to be up close with his him. There must be something wrong with his face, so he decided to change it.

Sometimes the distance between him and other people seemed manageable, just a matter of crossing the street. But then he saw how close other people were, and how they would laugh and laugh, and he couldn’t help feeling like it was still as difficult as finding a seat on the school bus. No one would say, hey, come sit here. How could his troubles not be face-based?

He briefly considered the fact that he didn’t care much for other people. That he wasn’t good at making time for others, and he often preferred to be in his house reading, or some other solo activity. Finding time for other people required a lot of work, and he wasn’t sure he was able to give up that much real estate in his heart. But his face, that was another story.

A Story About A Chance Encounter

…What am I doing in here… he wondered. …I came in the room for a reason… He stood awkwardly equidistant from all the furniture, trying to reconstruct the moments before. …What was I… he had moved from the office into the living room. In his hand he held a pair of scissors. …I was doing something, when I started thinking about… But at this point he couldn’t even remember the thing he had been thinking about that had distracted him. There was a space in his head that had been occupied by a day dream. …Something about a movie… …The movie we watched two days ago… Maybe he had been engaging his habit of reconfiguring films that had potential but weren’t quite good. Maybe he had been involved in imagining his plans for tonight, dinner, a movie and all the things he might say. Maybe something else. All of which may or may not have anything to do with the scissors and the living room and the stack of books on the coffee table. He deduced vaguely, assuming nothing. …I might have been picking up the house… This was a number of tasks he performed mindlessly, enjoying how their simple physical activity freed his mind for other pursuits. In fact he spent the majority of his time either ruminating on the past, projecting himself into the future, or a third space of alternate presents and imagine landscapes. Apparently his autopilot failed. He resented being so rudely being brought into an immediate and unforgiving present.

The most difficult thing to understand was what the scissors had to do with the books. Both were out of the ordinary, but the obvious solution, that he would be cutting pages out of the books, made no sense. He did not remember putting the books there, nor even what books they were. Likewise he did not remember picking up the scissors. He was completely unsure how to proceed and stood in the middle of the room looking from the books to the scissors and trying to push his brain back into the blank spot of his past, like trying to find his car keys. When anything was lost he’d inevitably find himself looking in the same logical spots over and over, as if looking in his desk drawer more deliberately might yield different results. Simultaneously he would try to think of the best illogical spots, an endeavor that proved just as frustrating. The only thing to do in those situations was to convince himself that he did not want the object he so desperately and then it seemed that the object would manifest itself accidently. He once found his wallet in the refrigerator. The only course of action seemed to be pretend he didn’t want to remember what he was doing, which might be best accomplished by reading these books.

Naturally he went to set the scissors down on the mantle and noticed the broken picture frame. The image of his own face, albeit slightly more tan, beset by a mountainous landscape was obscured by broken glass and just touch of blood. Only at this moment did he notice that he was bleeding, near his elbow where the nerve endings…