046.

The magician studied the nearly weightless bag sitting on the bench beside him.  That brass-buckled thing had taken him to Vegas, Atlantic City and all the Podunk towns along the way.

He was at the end of a road that began at a carnival in Mississippi.  He’d known the bag was no longer really his when the freakish carny had passed it back to him.  It was heavier.  The buckles shined.  The bench he sat on now was the final destination he didn’t think of back then.

That bag eventually defined him.  Not for his trademark bits pulling giant things from it but for the looks on the audience’s faces.  Their smiles made him forget how the bag got lighter every time and their smiles made him go to the bag more and more often.

The carny sat down beside him: “One more left and I ain't missing the show.”

045.

Clutched in little Davey’s arms, Teddy pretended to sleep.  It was the dangerous time of night when nasty things took shadows from the walls to wear and insinuate themselves into Davey’s slumbering world.

Teddy had one button eye open, studying the corner of the room opposite the window.  A pile of storybooks was stacked on the table beside the rocking chair.  A blanket was tossed over its back.  The moonlight melded all of these things together into a strange dragon shape on the wall. 

“Why do they always leave the curtains open?” Teddy thought.  “The creatures won’t be able to resist that.”  It was true.  The shadow was menacing indeed.  It was also true that the creatures couldn’t resist it.

The shadow started to move.  It drew itself out dramatically, slowly wrapping itself, serpent-like, around Davey’s bed.

Never beaten, Teddy sprang to action with the confidence of a nightlight.  

044.

He looked at his drink for an idea but the first beer never had one.  Its job was to be the gracious host instead of the muse.  If he made it to the fourth or fifth he would be an unintelligible genius.  The trick was to stop before the idea of ordering another sounded better than anything he wrote on the page.

Tonight was an unplanned excursion.  The legal pad sat blankly on the bar in front of him with a pen he found in the car resting on top.  He couldn’t look at it the same way he did his moleskine and think “Hemmingway used this,” but he could look at his beer and think the same thing.  He was close.

Light bounced off the choir of bottles opposite him.  Each glint was an idea.  Each idea was a vision of heaven.  Each vision was worth chasing.

He wrote.

043.

The storm didn’t dispel the protestors.  She looked on them from above, wrapped in comforters.  Cold rain washed away the dirt and soot in growing streams along the sewer grates but the rioters persisted.  Police held an austere perimeter outside her building the demonstrators didn’t seem to want to cross.

The color of the crowd changed with the words used to describe it.   “Riot” from her father; “protest” from the activists.  Was she the intended audience of the chants bellowing up to her?  Were the messages scrawled in wet, running letters on their cardboard signs somehow meant to call her to action against the man there at each of her birthdays?

The cardboard signs wilted; the rain extinguished their inflammatory slogans.  Ashes of words melted into the dirty channels of rainwater below.

He was her father.  They would never understand that.

He was their devil.  She would never understand that.

042.

They had both joked that neither of them were the marrying kind.  Eventually the truth in that made their ending – though not their epilogue – easier.  Steve walked into the house, empty but for a few pieces of furniture and stacks of neatly labeled boxes neatly arranged in the hallway, unsullied by lawyerly hands.

The familiar cursive writing on the boxes reminded him of the strong hands that dragged the Sharpie across the cardboard, spelling out “Adam – Kitchen” and “Adam – bedroom.”  His heart paused with fresh dread at finding The Note.  Steve scanned the countertops and tables for The Note that would predict Adam’s perfunctory return.  When he found there wasn't one, his heart resumed, fell and left the falling feeling in its place.

He studied the outlines on the walls of where pictures used to be.  Their time together was now bounded by these dark outlines; distilled into these boxes.

041.

Regret should be avoided. Look back too hard too often and he’ll turn you into salt. It could happen the very next time, so don't try it. That sad archaeology will let Regret rob you of the only two things you will ever have: Here and Now.

Here and Now sip coffee in an all night diner, tracing libidinous patterns on the tablecloth. They flirt and negotiate the world with their eyes. They're plotting a bank robbery. Or a coup. Here and Now can do anything they want and that is a seductive proposition indeed, so long as Regret stays sitting alone on his stool at the counter. He pretends to read the want ads while he eavesdrops.

Here and Now run out the door into a waiting sedan. Now grips the steering wheel and tears down the highway while Here hangs out the window, waving goodbye to befuddled Regret.

040.

Afternoon sunlight hit the ancient, polished wood of the station house and a train approached with disconsolate inevitability.  Bound to the tracks and an inescapable timetable, the train would arrive and the train would leave.

“Remember letter nine?” she asked.

He smiled and quoted:  “A sweet white rose wherein love lies in ambush for its natural prey.”

“I loved that line.”

“I’m going to miss you, Gretchen,” he said.  She searched his gaze for the same sense of impending loneliness and thought she found it.

A short goodbye and a long kiss later, the two o’clock to Chicago moved down the line taking her away.

He returned to the bench inside the terminal.  He had a little over an hour to kill before the three fifteen from St. Louis would deliver Melinda to his arms.  She was only on letter four and had required much less wooing.

039.

He spun the gun to see from which direction his killer would come.  The muzzle of the gun made a heavy, hollow sound as it traced a slowing circle on the wooden end table.  It came to rest pointing westward, toward the door he’d pulled the threadbare recliner in front of.

He spun the gun again and again it pointed at the door.  Farther west was Caroline’s house.  His killer could be pulling out of her driveway.  Maybe it’d be Caroline herself.  There would be a certain kind of justice in that.

He spun again and again it pointed toward Caroline’s house.  Beyond that, Portland.  Plenty of would-be executioners there.  Then Victoria, Alberta.  Stretch the trajectory long enough and it swoops right back on himself, circumnavigating the world with a malicious red line ending at the base of his skull.  The gun was pointed at himself and always had been.

038.

Tucson argued with the transformer on the street corner because it had all the power.  It was also very condescending about this.  Halfway through his second bottle of wine Tucson’d had enough of the attitude.

“Do you really think the government is interested in where you buy your alcohol from?” asked the transformer.  The thing was so snotty.  It was missing his point entirely.

“They’re interested in me telling the truth!”

“The government doesn’t care about what you rant to passers-by.  The passers-by don’t even care.”

Tucson raged at the transformer’s derision and pointed an accusatory finger at the green box.  “You shut up!  You’re a city employee!” 

“That may be.  You’re still undercutting your own point.”

“How?”

“You’re arguing with a power transformer and I’m winning.”

Tucson contemplatively wiped his chin.  “You’re in on it.” 

“That’s it.  You’re cut off,” said the transformer and shut off all the streetlights.