076.

Tara realized she was psychic when, as a child, she took her comatose father’s hand and saw the muzzle of a gun and the scabbed-over, shaky hand pointing it at his head.  She saw the flash when the gunman pulled the trigger.  

Tara works in a hospice now, caring for cancer patients about to go.  Most are okay with how their stories are ending.  She holds their hands and digs through their memories to read all of the chapters that came before.

She holds a new patient’s hand and sees her dad’s store.  She sees the gun.  The hand.  She sees her father lurch backward against the cigarettes.  Tears stream down her cheeks but she doesn’t let go.

She sees the killer’s face for the first time as he runs past the patient standing just outside the doorway.  She feels his confusion and twenty years of regret for doing nothing.

075.

He dropped half a dozen unfinished canvasses into the dumpster along with all his paints and brushes.  He wasn’t going to frustrate himself anymore with malformed paintings; his hands would never move with the subtlety or grace the image in his mind demanded.  He watched loose paint crawl down the heap of canvasses, slowly ruining more what was already ruined, before slamming the lid down.

“Now why’d you do that?”  A bum had suspiciously appeared behind him.

“I never got them right.”

“No one does.”

“The greats did.”

“You just think they did.  You should see what ‘Starry Night’ was supposed to look like.”

“It turned out alright.”

“Not if you ask Vincent.”

“You know you’re a cliché, right?  An undeveloped shortcut.”

“Imperfection’s what makes me real.  The world can’t see what’s in your head.  Not when you have to turn it into something else for them to see it.”

074.

”Just listen to me!”

“Why?  It’s always the same thing with you.  I don’t have to listen anymore.  I already know what you’re going to say.”

“This time is different.”  He’d thrown that Hail Mary pass too many times before but still prayed that it might miraculously find open arms.

“If I forgive you this one last time it’ll never happen again, right?”

“Yes!”

“You’re going to be so good to me when all this over.  You’re going to make sure that I NEVER feel unappreciated from here on out.”

He hesitated.  “Exactly!”

“You say that crap EVERY time.  Do YOU even listen to yourself?”

“I love…”

“Don’t.”

He paused.  “…could you ask your dad?”

“I AM my dad.”

“You don’t know what it’s like for me!”

“Do YOU know what it’s like for ME?  Try getting nailed to a couple planks of wood sometime.  You can go save yourself.”

073.

The car had already made its first three sixty spin before he understood something was wrong.  The problem was so obvious his brain refused to acknowledge it:  the temperature dropped enough for standing water on the road to freeze.  He’d hit one of those puddles in his haste and was now statistic waiting to happen.

Eighty miles an hour.  The spinning probably wouldn’t slow that down but the light pole he was headed for definitely would.  He envisioned plowing into it sideways and flying helplessly out of the car into the cold, hard night.

He skidded into a ditch just beside the pole instead, safe by mere feet.  He breathed in deeply and looked at the bag of money that’d fallen to the floorboard.  “How…” was all he had time to wonder before the cop car chasing him appeared, also in a death spin, on course to crash into him.

072.

The artist sat in a straight-backed wooden chair cordoned off from the rest of the gallery with a six foot by six foot square of de rigueur aging velvet ropes.  An unkempt docent unhooked the rope every five minutes to admit the next patron in line.  Once inside the velvety square each was invited to look into a crack in the side of the artist’s head to see what it contained.  He was on exhibition from six to ten, Thursday through Saturday.  His posture was impressive.

No one knew how the crack got in the artist’s head (though there were stories) but the “how” melted into the “what” once they crossed the threshold and peered between those bits of skull.  

Inside were inspiration and fear.  A pair of hands holding the sunset.  Wooden scratches etched by raw fingers.   The terrifying and the lovely that made him him.

071.

“Aftercare’s the usual.  Wash it a couple times a day.  Clear, unscented antibacterial soap.  Pat it dry with a paper towel.  Don’t rub – pat.”

“Uh-huh,” Jim answered dutifully.  He’d heard all this before.   Would she suggest cocoa butter or skin cream next?  It didn’t matter how highly recommended she was; Jim still had half a tub of cream leftover from his previous tattoo that he was going to use regardless.  A tattoo’s a tattoo once it’s done.

“Keep it moist.  Cocoa butter.  Skin cream.  Whatever.  Use just enough…”

“… so it’s a little tacky.”

She smirked at the know-it-all kid.  He’d bragged the entire session about how well he took ink, eyes never not looking down her shirt.

“Come back in a week and we’ll see if you get to keep it.”

“Wait, huh?”

“A tattoo’s a contract, kid.  Let’s see if you live up to it.  Otherwise it’s gone.”

070.

He’d tell the story to anyone who would listen.  He'd tell it just to hear it again himself, always opening with:

“I knew she was the one when our eyes met.  I’ve had my share of bad ones.  You don’t wind up in a place like that without going through at least a couple.”

Here the listener would interject with either commiseration or incredulousness.  This particular watering hole drew them all in: the ones who’d been kicked around and the ones who’d never had to find dinner in a trashcan.

“She had kind eyes.  Kind but stern and I’ll take stern any day.  They gotta have some backbone.  Short leashes held by loving hands.  She could have had any one of us but she chose me.”

He loved the story and he’d tell it to anyone so long as their butt smelled halfway decent and they weren’t a damned Chihuahua.

069.

John looked down at the array of thin, black welts that now lined his chest.  He smiled.  Inside their borders were the colors and painful shading that formed his family crest.  It wasn't perfect.  It shouldn’t be.  The artist had made it more weathered.  The shield was appropriately battered around the edges. 

A banner flew beneath the crest just over his left nipple, where most incorrectly thought their heart was. Inside was his father's name along with the month and year he was born.  Beside that was this year and this month. 

"I lost my dad a couple years back," the artist said.  "I don't even remember how much it hurt those first couple weeks.  My condolences, man."

"Thanks.  He loved his family.  In his way."

When John got home his dad leapt from his recliner: "Just where the hell have you been, boy?"

John calmly took out his knife.

068.

Red and blue beasts darted back and forth across the alleyway, impossibly fast, skipping from wall to wall.  No one could keep up with them.  Not the girl trying to run from them.  Not anyone who would answer the call for help she knew was too futile to scream for.  No one could catch them but him.

They toyed with her, jumping in mad circles around her as she ran: behind her, now above, beside.  He dashed toward the woman with his super speed but how could he deal with the beasts in such close quarters without keeping her harm’s way?  Best get her to safety and then worry about that.

He was a pulsating superhero god capable of saving the girl, the city, the world, until the drugs wore off, the beasts disappeared, and he was just a heavy-breathing guy chasing a hooker in front of a police cruiser.

067.

At the entrance to the garden sat a sizeable stone capital A as though it were a punctuation mark that had fallen from the sky.  Weathered recesses and cracks birthed long strands of ivy that stretched outward in all directions, curling arbitrarily.  A cherub sat dangling its legs over the crossbar in the A’s inner triangle.

“Finally,” it said.

“Is this heaven?” the approaching man asked.

“It’s your epilogue.”

“The thing on my tombstone?”

“That’s an epitaph.”

“You mean an epigraph.”

“You never did quite get the words right, did you?  This is your epilogue.”  The cherub hopped off its perch.  “This is where you find out what happens to the rest of them now that you’re dead.”

“Epigram!” exclaimed the man.

“No!  Epilogue!”

“That’s not it,” he argued.

Annoyed now, the cherub barked, “Your wife remarries within a year to a well-endowed man who makes more money than you!” 

066.

She’d been coming in for months, worldlessly stuck in her own head, to sit in the seat nearest the window slowly sipping her drink and watching the twilight melt.  The peculiar light caught the imperfections in her glass and made it glitter.  She loved this.

“Don’t do it,” pleaded the Bloody Mary.

Yet she did.  She took the celery in her hand and brought it to her lips to lick the last bitter bit from its stem, and walked into the street looking straight ahead, mindless of both the dog sitting preternaturally vigilant on the sidewalk and the deadly stream of cars rushing down the street.  She tingled.  So close to death and because of that, alive.  She barely registered the dog knocking her to safety.

It looked lovingly into her eyes, as dogs do.  She scratched behind his ears knowing, regrettably, that she couldn’t return the love in kind.

065.

Why don’t more people just use carry-ons?  The line to the terminal was fourteen miles long.  Rodney hopped expectantly from foot to foot.  “Calm down.  There’s plenty of time,” Neil reassured.

“It’s not that.  It’s just…  your parents.”

“I know…” Neil smiled what was usually a charming and disarming smile but Rodney's agitation remained unabated.  “There’re going to like you.”

Once they arrived at the counter a TSA agent asked if they had any baggage they’d like to declare.

Neil: “Peter Pan issues, body dysmorphic disorder, stress-induced kleptomania, fear of abandonment, fear of success, fear of failure, situational nymphomania…”

Rodney:  “My last boyfriend never came out so I’m a little distrustful.  I’m also scared of clowns.”

The screener unzipped Neil’s bag and opened the resulting flap with both hands.  Disinterest prevented him from raising an eyebrow.  “You’ve got a pretty big Oedipal complex in here.”

“I didn’t mention that one?”

064.

Seven o’clock conversations fell around him like settling smoke: wispy, ethereal, annoying and toxic.

“If I win the lottery this year…”

“I’ll start getting up earlier…”

“No one’s gonna…”

All that talk.  From his vantage point at the bar, a shadowy spot where only the staff knew to look, he heard it all.  If he played back an audiotape from last year, would the conversations be the same?  Would the resolutions come to the same results?  All the lofty talk that would dissolve when the clock struck midnight and the slow search for a friendly face turned frantic. 

He had been in the middle of it last year, resolving to marry her and proposing in grand fashion.  They were the talk of the night.  And after all the strangers’ congratulations, there she was at midnight: beautiful and beaming before the five A.M. accident.

He went home early, alone and unwidowed.