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The Napkin

Karl is seated at a 4-person table in the middle of the restaurant, and he chooses a seat facing the door so he is the first thing they see when his wife and son walk in. He adjust the chairs so the booster seat is next to him and his wife only has the option of sitting directly across from his seat. This way he can look directly at her when she speaks, something she’s always complained that he’s not good at. He’s trying to be better at most things he does.

Susan arrives late with their 3 year-old son and greets Karl with a tale of poor parking options and traffic on the 94. He asks her softly if next time she might mind calling, she stops short and declares something is different about him, and asks why he’s not mad that they are late. He tells her seeing them is enough for him to not be mad at anything. She smirks.

Karl still wears his wedding ring. Susan does not.

This is the sixth weekend in a row that Karl and Susan have been living apart. They hide this from their friends by only calling from their cell phones, claiming the home phone battery is always running low, and on couples night when they show up in separate cars they say Susan wanted to go to the gym after work. By the third couples night, their friends figured things out. They haven’t said anything yet.

When they were first married, Karl would come home from work stressed and angry for no particular reason at all, and Susan would listen to him vent all weekend about his co-workers, the unfairness of corporate politics, the idiocy of his clients, the pressures of success. She would calm him with her patience until one night in July the heat of his words and the summer wind overwhelmed her and she just walked out.

Sometimes we all just need a break.

Now Susan and Karl meet twice a week to share their son. It’s an awkward dance of responsibility they don’t know the steps to, so they improvise with neutral settings and the hope of reconciliation.

Regardless of what we think of our present circumstance, all of us are far more blessed than we realize. We’re lucky to have people in our lives who love us in the depths of our worst moods, throughout a series of disappointments. Even when we let years of bad days replace the optimism of our youth with jaded irritability, they really do still love us most of the time.

Susan goes to the bathroom and Karl quickly tells the waiter not to bring the check until he asks for it directly. Susan returns and 20 minutes later begins to complain that the waiter has completely forgotten they’re even there, doesn’t he realize they need the check? Karl agrees and smiles briefly, bouncing his son on his knee as he traces his hand in crayon on the napkin.

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.)

Revelations.

Mark has had an idea for this character he’s writing about for five years now and he hasn’t been able to give her a name in all that time. He has lists of things she does and does not do, he has tables and charts of her past life experience and a catalogue of issues for her to adjust to at some point in the story. What he doesn’t have is a name for this character he’s building, so instead he refers to her as X.

On a lined piece of notebook paper he has taped to the left side of his computer monitor is a brief list of things he likes to keep in mind while he’s writing:

• X is tall
• X is bright and witty
• X has a boyfriend named Tom, or Matt, depending on the draft
• X went to summer camp in the Catskills every year until she was 15
• X is depressed, underweight, and she doesn’t know she has cancer

The cancer thing is going to be her breaking point, that’s when the reader is going to feel a deep and sudden connection to X and want to know what will happen next to her, how she’ll react and whether Tom/Matt will be there for her through it all. It’s the real clinch of the whole story, the pièce de résistance, and he's been saving it for five long years ever since he first wrote down the words, “Her long thin fingers ran across the edge of the envelope as she sighed."

He hadn’t intended for X to be a writer, she just ended up as a writer because being a doctor as he intended for her to be felt too convoluted and besides, he knew nothing about medicine. He knew about writing and so X could easily be a writer herself, and that made it much easier for him to focus on her flaws and struggles and needs without having to reference a desk manual for the correct terminology of it all. It was only logical this way. Logic is never convoluted.

The only person Mark has told about X and her story is his therapist who insists Mark has intimacy issues with his family because of all the pain they have caused him. "Don’t you see," she’d say to Mark, "you are X, you’re projecting your pain into this character. X doesn’t exist, but you exist."

Mark would think about this when he finished each chapter but it never made sense until one day he recalled the trauma of his family’s laughter as he told them he wanted to write. He wished in that moment they all were dying of cancer, a wish he’d never even told his therapist. Mark has only just now accepted that X is being written for the mere reason of spite.

He’s doing this to get back at them all and they don’t even know it. He doesn’t even know it, really. It's convoluted logic.

The Wood

It hadn’t rained on her home in over 17 years. During that time there were droughts and there were floods, but the rain never touched her roof. Before climate change, before the dust bowl, before the river that ran sideways through the back of her property dried up for good, two trees were planted at opposite corners of her yard, and over time their branches grew to interlock with one another like a great umbrella. Stretched out long and lean, their limbs had grown so thick together that it hadn’t rained on her home in 17 years.

The last time the rain did touch her home the trees barely held their own against the wind and the water. They tore their branches out, thrashing all night long as she lay awake beneath, counting the seconds between thunderclaps and walking imaginary paces to where she figured lightning had struck. The dogs howled downstairs as water dripped through the gutters onto the porch below, softening the wood that would split open five years later during the hottest summer she’d ever seen.

That was the summer he left her. In June the wood on the porch had split in several places and it was too hot to try and fix. By that August whole planks were jumping loose from their nails, splintering under the lightest steps and springing their pieces all over, ragged sawdust breaking under the foot of the movers who had come to remove his old wingback chairs, his china hutch. She would follow them to the door with each trip they made for something else, and then she’d bend down to pick up rotted fragments of wood they’d left behind.

That winter the siding began to decay, the gate no longer swung shut, the roof above the kitchen was missing tiles. To stay warm she started bringing pieces of the porch inside to burn in the fire and the heat radiated through the thin walls creating warmth she had never known when he still lived there. A heat so intense sometimes she’d have to walk away from it to cool off, even as the snow fell outside and the windows cracked with ice. She would sit in her living room watching the wood burn and she could hear the wind in the kitchen, whistling through the cracks in the roof, through the empty rooms and hallways.

Her home had fallen apart. The porch where they had stood to watch the crows fly in circles above their fields was now what warmed her each night. The kitchen where she had blistered her feet making hot meals and cold drinks was a cavern now, icy and vacant. The bedroom where they’d slept for years together under a quilt she had made with frail hands and bad eyesight was now full of dead leaves that had fallen through the gaping holes in the roof. Piles of dead leaves scattered across the floor, the bed, the window sill.

But the trees kept her dry.

Veracity

The psychic told him very seriously, "Your internal atomic clock ticks away inside you at a pace no one else can keep step to."

For $28 she told him this, rubbed his hand in between her hands, and offered him a soothing cup of pungent tea she said would clear his head before her reading. It smelled of dirt and brought him back to memories of going to the county fair as a teenager, kicking through the crowd as dust clouded his feet and swelled up to his nostrils.

He closed his eyes and thought of these moments, several years of random county fair nights bleeding into one vivid image of being in the middle of a crowd all alone, sweating in the August heat, a soda in one hand as his other fanned the dust from his face. A band was playing a bad cover of some country song. A man carrying balloons walked past. Couples in the nearby beer garden swayed to music, their arms around each other’s waists clinging tight to loose fabric and old denim.

He took another sip of the tea and cleared his head like the psychic instructed. “Are you feeling calm now?” she asked him.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said dryly.

“I mean, do you feel calm?” she said again, cooing the last word slowly as she leaned toward him, close enough so he could see the creases in her thick makeup.

“I guess so,” he said. “I’m just kind of a calm person by nature, so I don’t know if I can get any calmer.”

“Ok then. We’ll begin.” The psychic sat back in her chair and closed her eyes, stroking his hand with her long cold fingers and humming quietly as he looked on. “You’ll have no children,” she said, her eyes fluttering open to meet his in the dim light.

“You’ll have no children and your home…your home will be engulfed in flames.”

He imagined the tiny apartment he lived in now burning to the ground. The couch would go first since it’s made of entirely cheap synthetic fabrics, then the carpet would catch fire, igniting the rest of the place like a line of gun powder set off by a single spark. This made him incredibly happy.

“You will meet many people in your life, many people who will harm you. They will not understand you and…they will blame you for this.”

He thought of his mother and the sound of her glass clinking to her lips as she told him she was moving to Florida to be with Benny, their old neighbor who’d left his wife for his secretary. He thought of his mother saying this with such resolve, he realized she was just too tired to hide things from him anymore.

The psychic closed her eyes again and took a breath, then said, “Your loneliness is not over yet. You will have seven more years of sadness.”

He thanked her, paid her, and left.

The Stomach Ache.

In a box under a bed in the guest room of an old farm house in Iowa rests four years of correspondence this woman has had with a man she never knew. Years and years of wishful thinking and deep confessions are written between the lines of platitudes and benign conversation, and each letter ends with a simple yet touching, “Until Later.”

She adored this person she had come to know through these old-fashioned means of persuasion, she spoke about him to her closest friends with the warmth that precedes musings of lost loves. She was anxious for his attention, and imagined the thought and purpose he put into each of his letters over the years. She wanted most of all to know what he was really feeling when he wrote to her. And she would tell people in her most honest of moments, “I feel for him something that is so rare and frightening to me, and how can it be? We’ve never even met.”

But to him, she was something he kept to himself.

He lived alone and worked hard, he had several close acquaintances but few he confided in for anything. His self-sufficiency came before his need for confessions to anyone. Before long his own feelings were a blur to him, his movements were mechanical, his rituals the sole defining part of his life. Before long he was finding himself saying things to her he should never say, because first and foremost, he didn’t mean it.

When he said he wanted her what he meant was he wanted someone. When he asked what she had done the night before what he meant was he was curious of the rest of the world. When he said he didn’t know what would ever make him happy anymore, what he meant was he didn’t know if she could.

Before long she started to understand that she was nothing more than a placeholder for him. This was her biggest fear in life, to be an interchangeable object of affection for someone who didn’t even know what affection was. But it had happened sometime between years two and three and carried into the beginning of year four, when he first stopped asking her what she had done the night before.

Soon the letters stopped coming. One day she felt a pain in her stomach so dull and aching it could only have been caused by a beating in a bar fight, or the bruising of an ancient battering ram. It ached so badly that she took out the last letter she received from him and a map of the entire Midwest and she began to drive to the return address on the envelope.

Days past until she could find it and then one day she saw the street address clearly marked on the side of an old brick building. She wandered to the front door where she read a poster hung by an official department of some sort that said only, “CONDEMNED.”

The Purist

James lived his entire life having the last word. This was one of his greatest, most misunderstood traits but it epitomized him through and through, even to the point of ending all his correspondence with the curt and cold, “Regards.” Sending off an email or letter with a closing like, “Sincerely,” or “With all my best,” left the proverbial door open for company. It meant the recipient of his correspondence had a chance to reply to him, or worse yet, engage him in even more correspondence that he felt would be entirely unnecessary, since James had already made his point clear.

James lived his life in pursuit of always making his point clear.

He employed this reasoning with women he dated as well, especially on the first or second date when he needed to make strict and fast assessments of the probability of sleeping with these women. He needed a definitive answer then and there, and thus one of his greatest sociological tricks was born. Truthfully, he’d began this experiment when he was quite young after a teacher had embarrassed him during a vocabulary lesson. He certainly couldn’t, at the age of ten, explain what exactly rhetoric meant. But at 25 he knew that rhetoric is the act of determining, in each individual case, the available means of persuasion.

So on dates when the evening was slowing to a lull and James needed to know how much more wine should be brought out, he would say to whichever woman he was with, “What are some of your favorite words?” She would giggle and say, “No one’s ever asked me that before!” He would take a swig of Merlot and wait for her answer.

“Uhm, gosh! I don’t know. I guess picnic is a good word?” she’d ask.
“Picnic? Sure, that’s a fine word! What else?”
“Oh wow, uhm. I do like picnic,” she’d say, concentrating on the rim of her wine glass and fearing her drink had drowned her own sense of reason. “Oh, and I like the word verisimilitude,” she'd drone emphatically. “I heard Tom Hanks say it once, on Inside The Actors Studio, a great episode. What about you?”

James already had his answer, he’d had it long before she mentioned Tom Hanks and his $2 word that she probably had to repeat to herself a hundred times before she made it to the bookshelf and scrambled for a dictionary to look up. Of course she didn’t know how it was spelled so she fumbled through the V section, passing veritable and versus and skimming back to valerian, which she’d learn was just a root. He thought of these things with a visible smirk on his face, staring deeply across the table through the dimmest of lighting as his eyes traced each and every flaw about her.

“James?” she’d ask, breaking him out of his daze of self-assurance. “What’s your favorite word, if you have one?”

He’d just say through his smirk, “Floccinaucinihilipilification.”

And she would reply, “Oh.”

The Future

"LESSON #1: People don’t want to know as much about you as you think they do. This may come as a shock, since you spend a whole lot of time preparing every last detail of your social network profiles to superfluously describe every facet of your being, but the reality is no one reads every word in social network profiles. They skim them, just like they skim your photos, your updates, your blog posts. Just like they skim your life.

The people you know and care about are the speed readers of your life. Like those old commercials from the 80’s, they’re sitting at a kitchen table with you opened in front of them while they run their fingers along your edges as quickly as possible, absorbing only the most important, most relevant parts. They don’t care what dandy musings and favorite quotes you have plastered across your MySpace profile. What they see is your name, your location, your status. What they see is all they want from you ever.

LESSON #2: Don't ever expect that just because you are having some kind of emotional trauma that anyone else needs to mirror your emotions. They absolutely do not have to feel something just because you feel it, and if they do, be highly suspicious of them! No one who really loves you will want to be just like you. It’s only the people you need to be wary about who willl react just the way you want them to."

Mike stops typing for a moment. Outside his window a man is giving a jump start to a woman’s car as she sits on the curb weeping into her cell phone. Mike spends ten minutes watching them, watching the woman cry and then thanking the man empathically for helping her. She drives off in a hurry as the man spends the next few minutes wrapping up his jumper cables and fidgeting with the hood of his truck which has a corner spring stuck on something and won’t go down. Finally he slams it shut, and Mike starts typing again.

"LESSON #3: Stop allowing things to distract you so easily! Focus and focus again! Your life is right now in this moment and all you can do about it is sit there and stare at strangers performing mundane tasks across the street. Don’t you think your time is worth more than that? Don’t you owe it to yourself to not care whether or not that man finally gets the hood of his truck to go down?"

Mike prints the page he’s just typed and folds it three times over and one time across. He puts it in a small envelope, then that envelope inside a larger manila envelope, he drives it to the bank and places it inside his safe deposit box. He double checks the date of expiration on the drawer as he returns the safe to the box. August 18, 2010. He’ll have to remove all the contents by then.

The Sunshine State.

Months ago she'd warned him, "Don't worry, we'll get used to each other." He'd taken her statement as a threat and it wasn't comforting to him in the slightest. He'd never in his life intended to find someone to get used to. By saying that so pointedly to him she was making a claim for his future, or at least the next few months of his life. She was assuming they would get used to each other’s habits and somehow be a couple by the time it took a person to accept obsessive nail biting as cute and not as grotesque as it actually was. Her selfish reasoning that he was committed to her was one reason why he left her.

Another reason was less justifiable but much more important to him: she had become increasingly terrible in bed. The more sex they had the less natural it felt for the both of them, as if the closer they got the less they were able to meet each other’s needs. It wasn't that she lacked skill or experience; in fact it was her experience that lent to her clumsy advances and poorly timed shouts of intended ecstasy. She made love to him like a paranoid movie starlet, trying against all odds to make their passion seem real for an audience of critics and perverts. Her movements were contrived, her moans distracting and not nearly believable. The more she tried to conjure up chemistry, the more concentration it took for him to maintain his interest in her. There was nothing romantic to her movement whatsoever and he told himself that was the reason he never fell in love with her.

He found an apartment on the other side of the Mission district at the edge of Potrero while flipping through one of her unread newspapers. "I deal exclusively in the state streets," the Realtor said. "I've got places on Missouri, the Show Me State, a studio on Tennessee, the Neighbor State, and a nice three bedroom on California, the Golden State. You know, cause they found the gold there." He signed a lease, sight unseen, on a third story studio on Florida Street, the Sunshine State.

"You'll love it," the Realtor told him. "It's a good state to be in."

He began moving his things into his new apartment slowly, boxes he had packed while she was out and had hidden under the bed until he had a chance to sneak off with them. Then one day after he'd taken all he could without her noticing, he left for work and never returned. A week later he called to explain and he wanted to tell her something about how bad he felt, but he was only able to say, "You can keep the couch if you want it." She hung up on him and had all her bills forwarded to his office, and he paid them until she moved six months later.

It was the least he could do.

From Aisle 15.

From his window seat he looked out at the city and shrugged, not knowing how to respond properly to the last glance of it he might have. He had romanced that city, had wrapped himself in her streets for years, and now he was leaving. One day he was content enough to jot his address on an envelope freely, the next day he stopped short at the beginning of the third line and he felt trapped. He put down his pen. He opened a dusty road atlas of the Pacific Northwest. He licked a stamp and made up his mind.

If the city had merely been a girl he'd met the night before and gone home with, he would have said, "This was great, I'll call you." Then he would have walked away quickly with no intentions of calling, having said he would only because it was the natural, polite thing to say. Instinctively, the girl would have said, "Yeah, I had a great time. Let's do it again. I'll call you." She would have smiled widely and offered a handshake or a hug, depending on how much she'd had to drink the night before.

Neither he nor this girl he'd met would have had a particularly good time, in their memories there would not be etchings of one another inside daydreams of romance and futures, their meeting had simply been. But now, in saying goodbye, they would be obligated to leave the other person with a feeling of accomplishment after their evening together. Even in the cruel advantage they had taken of each other there was a sense of loss, and in an attempt to reconcile their lust with their fear of being bad people, they would each extend just enough kindness while they dressed, wiped under their eyes with their index fingers and gathered up their keys.

They would not attempt to contact each other, they would recall only a few sloppy hours from the night before ambiguously. As time went by their night together would get progressively worse in their memories until it was unfairly embellished at parties for other people's pleasure. "He barely looked me in the eye," she would say to her friends. "She laid there like it hurt or something," he would say to his friends.

But this city had not been some girl he'd never called. She had been his greatest love, his first home, his family. She had predicted his needs and had known his wants and had made life for him simple and uncomplicated. She had spread her streets before him unreservedly until he knew them by heart. Her name had allowed him abandon, he had felt powerful and driven because of her, she had given him ambition. When others might have avoided recklessness, he embraced it because of her. Had the city had been a girl he'd never called, the rest of his life would have been so much easier.

He would not feel so empty when he thought of her.