063.

The doorman hated the security guard for sitting at a desk, warm, indoors and likely watching a basketball game on the monitors.  The guard hated the doorman for getting tips.  Handful after handful of folded bills was deftly, almost secretly, pressed into his palm just for calling a cab forward or opening a door.  Especially at Christmas.

The two had little in common beyond their shifts and an array of shiny buttons on their uniforms.  The doorman had a tall hat.  The guard had an air gun he could use to knock that hat off the doorman’s smug head.

Tonight the doorman opened the door for the guard’s son, whom the guard hadn’t seen in years.  The doorman beamed at their yuletide reunion and his own ingenuity for orchestrating it.

“Is that an air gun?” asked the son.

“Yes.”

“How far away can you knock that guy’s hat off from?”

062.

The guy upstairs makes a lot of noise late at night but he has cancer and an unsecured wifi network.  I stare at the ceiling listening to him clomp around at one in the morning and wonder if either of those two things was different – if he was healthy or password protected – if I would storm upstairs to demand that he take off the damned clogs for once.

“But he has cancer,” I think when his pacing stops me from falling asleep.  I take my laptop from the nightstand and peruse the silence of the social networks.  All those timelines on pause as the world sleeps save for me and the sickly shadow above.

I send him a friend request and listen to him plod across his apartment.  He accepts and I see most of his updates complain about the loud music “from the freeloader downstairs.”

That wispy little prick.

061.

“You’re the one Scott hired.” 

“Yes.  To do...”

“I know why he hired you.  I don’t like it when he does that while I’m on vacation.”  This querulous, red-faced man was Joe, Scott’s partner. 

“My name’s Steven…”

“I know your name.  What’s that?”  Joe pointed to the tip of a devil’s tail showing beneath Steven’s short sleeve. 

It was a regrettable tattoo. The kind you get and then and dream about covering up for the next couple years: a cartoon devil, pitchfork ready, giving the finger.

“I keep forgetting about that.  You can barely see it…”

“But I do see it.”

The devil shuffled around inside Steven’s shirtsleeve before poking his head out.  “I see you too, jackass.”  He waved his pitchfork at Joe.  “How about you let the kid do his damn job?”

Joe, confused, skulked away.

“I'm never thinking of covering you up again,” said Steven.

“Damn straight.”

060.

Christmas always meant the slow stream of returning classmates.  They always opened their conversations with a “How long has it been?”  Almost a year exactly and in this same place, only we had different cell phones then. 

They came to town for family but came to the bar for gloating.  Ten years later the tradition continued but the gloating dissipated.  The fantastic new job had become a hell hole.  Purposefully casual mentions of promotions were replaced with complaints about office politics.  Wedding rings appeared and disappeared.  Some of them aged faster than others.

He enjoyed the irony of being the bartender.  He’d never been invited to their parties but now they sought out his place like a historical marker of Home.   He’d never been a consultant or a banker but he still looked young, lived above the bar and, over the years, had slept with every one of the cheerleaders.

059.

They keep skeletons in closets.  Shameful things people need to hide from daylight.  Keep them from conversation and people can go back to work, take walks, live their lives.  Just so long as the skeletons stay where they’re put.

Chris looked at the closet he couldn’t open.  His hands have passed through everything he’s tried to touch since the accident.  Now that he’s dead, knocked out of the corporeal world through the windshield of his father’s car long ago, he must wait for living hands to open the closet doors and switch on the light to see what was inside.

To confirm what was inside.

How long had his parents kept his bedroom undisturbed?  Years were hard for him to count.  His mother didn’t limp anymore.  The scars across his father’s face had faded.

And his toys now likely sat in unlabeled boxes on the floor of the closet.

058.

The voice on the other side of the screen was unfamiliar.    John had expected Father Stark.  John always went on Wednesday afternoons because he would follow the high school kids’ weekly confession and, after them, Father Stark would be bored, tired and apt to give an easy penance. 

The voice coming through the screen was not tired or bored but frighteningly focused.  “These are weighty sins,” said this someone new, whose voice deepened with the import of his words.

“Yes, Father.”

“They require an equally weighty act of contrition.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Do you know Bernard from St. Xavier’s Parish?”

“The Jesuit church?”

“Yes.”

“You must beat the holy hell out of him.  Don’t hold back.”

“Father?”

“Go in peace.”

“Thanks be to God?”

“It’s not a question, child!  Get to it!”

When John found Bernard he was already on the ground being pummeled by a group of high school students.

057.

She dipped the wand of the espresso machine into a small pitcher of milk, released the steam valve and adjusted the positions of both with the slight hesitance of remembered, though out of practice, perfection.  She smirked when the steam hit the surface of the milk just so and the diner filled, briefly, with the sound of frothing milk.

It was a nothing restaurant -- a chain that snaked around highways that snaked between the small town South and sprawling, confused hinterland separating it from everything beyond.   

The booths and wallpaper were identical in every link of the chain but only this one had her.  He thought her smirk belied a past life of big city bookshops where she worked in bohemian districts.  He thought of early morning walks replaced by a grey commute.  But why did she move back home?

He imagined her life, just as I imagined his.