The Somersault
The closet is 10 feet wide by 14 feet high by 6 feet deep and it spans the length of Sam’s far bedroom wall. His bed is positioned directly across the closet on the other side of the room. Each morning when he wakes up Sam sits up right to stare at the two full double doors.
Behind those doors Sam keeps a long row of white shirts and black jackets, slacks of all neutral colors folded neatly across wooden hangers, ties attached to hooks that dangle from precisely their middle, flush against the wall. On the floor is a low wrought iron rack that holds a series of same-looking black shoes, but each pair is slightly different than the pair to its left.
Everything in Sam’s closet is very different, yet from the angle of his bed things look entirely the same. Some stripes are wide while others in the same color are thin, some shirts are pressed while others hang without a sharp crease along the sleeve. Yet still, they all look the same. Since noticing this, Sam started sleeping with the closet doors securely shut; waking to a full wall of identical uniforms made his morning feel unfortunate at best. Everyday felt unfortunate, because every day felt the same.
Sam wakes up. Sam gets dressed. Sam looks in the mirror. Sam doesn’t recognize what he sees. Sam walks away.
As he walks to work he says to himself, “I am happy this way, I am content and well paid, I have great feelings finally, I’m whole again, this is good for me.” The bells to the school down the street chime at 7:46 am each day while he walks past, he anticipates their sing-song tone like a jingle in a radio advertisement. On the weekends he hums it to himself, somewhat silently.
Today on his way to work the school bells didn’t chime, instead they were silent as he walked past the schoolyard. Two nuns huddled around the bell, shooing from it a pair of doves who had nested there overnight, wedging their sticks and leaves between the mechanisms that caused the ancient bells to ring. Sam remembered those bells from when he was in school, and remembered how he and his friends would shove juice box straws and pieces of bark into them to prolong recess just a few more minutes.
The nuns chirped to each other and the children nearby that it was time for school to start, even if the bells hadn’t run yet. One said to the other, “Should we call the handyman? Or should we just let them be?” The other nun took this question quietly, as if it were a type of prophetic parable. “Well, should we let them be?”
Sam rolled up the sleeve of his starched shirt revealing the red and blue tail of a dragon, a tattoo that winds up both arms, wraps over his shoulders, down his back and around both thighs. (The tongue nips at his ankles.)
