Friends

It wasn't what he expected, just soft and juicy. An odd taste, mostly dirt. He was used to it by now. Every day at recess Jack ate a worm, and every day his friends would laugh.

The worm was gross, but it was well worth the laughter. It was worth having friends. This was a new town and a fresh start, and he was going to do it right this time. Jack was seven, and he had never been to a birthday party. He had never had one of his own. His parents ignored him for the most part. He had never had friends before.

It was a bright day. Blue sky. The kids were gathered round, cheering, when they heard a whistle and the mob parted, Jack dangling the long nightcrawler above his mouth. The teacher shouted and knocked the worm to the ground. The principal explained that it was against the rules. He tried to tell him that the kids weren't his friends. But Jack knew the truth, and he hated the man for lying. If worms were out, he would find something else. He needed the laughter. And he knew they couldn't stop him.

You

I don't need you to tell me shit. I already know what you're going to say and then what you'll follow with, I can see it all in silver, shimmering silkworm strings. Your opinion means little to me and so much means little to you except you. You mean everything.

With that fucking look again. I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to laugh, cry, or call a doctor. Maybe all three. I'll watch your eyeballs roll down me until they're plop on the floor. Then, you can look up to me.

I am eschewing all human contact. Scuttle back to your holes. I want none of it. Your weak-kneed excuses and mental travails. It all makes me tired. The kind of tired that you want to fall into because the blackness is so deep.

Shit and grasshoppers, son. That's no way to tie a fishing line. Who the hell taught you to do that?

I've been hanging with the wrong crowd, and I got the stink on me. That's what you say. That's what you look like. Save the broken artifice for someone who needs a cause. I already got one.

Play your cards, son. Play your cards. I don't care if it's UNO, you play 'em and you hope just like the rest of us. Heart attacks don't give a fuck about your bank account. Your kids aren't gonna thank you. You'll feel good about the whole thing, though. Stigmata.

So, ramble on Billy boy, and fuck the folks behind you. We're going on a rabble rouse and you're not invited. You're old news and no one wants to hear your shit. It pours from your mouth like sickness. You are sick. That is why you are tolerated. You are the old dog that no one has the heart to shoot.

Stare at the sun and let it burn you. Why should you be any different? What makes you so goddamn special? Pick up a shovel, like the rest of us, and start digging. You're gonna need somewhere to sleep.

Trains

His grandfather loved trains. He had a shelf of books about them. He had a model train set in the cellar that rivaled any you could find in a museum or fair. He often started stories about bulls and campfires that trailed off, circled around the room, and landed with a rough calloused hand through his hair. "Someday, I'll tell you all about that."

His grandfather died before he got a chance to tell the story, but there were a million stories hidden in the cellar. There was a giant wooden box full of hundreds of night-crawlers. There were old things that he would find poking around when his grandfather was making the rounds, sharing a beer with his friends. There were tools he spent hours trying to decipher. There was a sap, although he didn't know what it was called at the time - he knew what it was for. Woven leather around a lead ball. He tried to imagine his grandfather hitting someone and he couldn't. He held it in his hand and heard train whistles through the corridors of time. Wheels rattling the tracks.

It was a small house, but it was full of treasures. There was a perfect replica of a sabre, but tiny, used to open letters. The plumbing was iffy and the cellar flooded in the rain. He could barely tolerate the non-fat dry milk with ice cubes that he drank to be polite. The wonder outweighed the sagging mattresses and blue milk.

His father's room had been maintained because of the death. Going inside his father's room was like discovering King Tut's tomb. Old toys and pocket knives and books - god, the books. There was a series called "The Book of Knowledge". Volumes designed for children. They taught everything from how to tie knots, to how to survive in the wild, to how to cross-stitch. And they were filled with stories.

There were other books, too. Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys and Chip Hilton. He read them all and he read 'Wyatt Earp' over and over again. He broke some of the toys, but no one criticized him. There were still clothes hanging in the closet. A few pairs of pants and a stack of shirts. The whole house was spartan, but the things that were there were precious. He spent hours going through the drawers in the kitchen. Old matchbooks and souvenirs from all over the northeast.

Most of all, he liked to look through the tackle boxes. His grandfather was a simple fisherman, but he was not immune to the angler's obsession. There were lures and flies and many of them were homemade. Some, the shiny ones still in the boxes, were like trophies. His grandfather never used them and never would.

In hindsight, it is astounding that they could still live in the house. That they weren't always looking for phantom bloodstains. His grandmother never went upstairs. Into the 'boys' room'. It was a house filled with joy and the lingering smell of pipe tobacco. There was nothing in the house that was less than ten years old. It would never change, and there was something about that. A warm feeling.

But the years passed and the stairs to the cellar creaked louder...his grandmother fell once, and before he knew it the house had been sold. The nonsense treasures he had found vanished. His grandparents moved into an apartment across from the High School and later a home. The trains were given to friends and fellow enthusiasts.

He still drives by the house, but it brings, alternately, a sense of sadness and a sense of betrayal. He is just beginning to understand that time betrays us all.

The Happy Leaf

Outside the window, there is a tree. I don't know what kind of tree it is. I wish I did, but I would have to call a professional botanist because it looks like, well, a tree. A nice leafy one. Like a lot of nice leafy trees I see. It doesn't have pine needles or weird bark or a visible root system. It's just a tree. Doing its tree thing. I respect that.

The leaves look a little like maple leaves, but smaller and missing two points. They are green. Just green. Not olive green or apple green. Just green. It is the kind of tree I picture when someone says the word tree. Stolid, but wavy in the breeze, unobtrusive.

I sit beside the window while I write, so I know this tree very well. In the spring, the songbirds go insane in the hidden spaces of this tree, and I write to a symphony of chirps and tweeps. The birds are long gone now. And soon the tree will lose its leaves, but I like it that way, too.

It gets really hot by the window sometimes, but the tree and I don't trip. I sweat. The tree's leaves shrivel up near the top where the sun assaults them. Down at couch level, they stay nice and leafy, though. I wouldn't want to eat one or anything. I would kind of like to rub one against my face. But I live on the second floor and it's probably best that we just hang out...nothing physical.

When the sun hits the leaves, the veins stand out, but you really have to look. It is a delicate tree. It is like a first date, the tree. It is full of nervous energy, twitching in the wind, hoping its leaves are the right color and shape.

I'm not quite delusional enough to think that the tree knows I exist. But I believe it anyway. We're brothers, the tree and me. We forgive each other grammatical mistakes and allergens. But the tree is really the beginning of the story. The story is about a happy leaf.

All the leaves on the tree look the same (except for the extremely scorchy ones on top). All except for one. At my eye level, right near the end of the branch, six inches from the glass of the window, there is an especially happy leaf. It is malformed and it has a bright orange dot on it. It seems to dance in the breeze a bit more vigorously. It is quite obvious that it doesn't lament its difference. It is merely happy to be doing its leafy thing.

There are days when my world becomes an opaque blackness, and I want everything to burn to the ground. I want to die. I want everyone I know dead. I want it all to be over. I want the buildings to slowly rot and fade back into pastoral splendor. I want all the TVs in the world to explode. These days are infrequent...they didn't use to be. Sometimes, on the black days, I sit with my laptop and just fucking hate. And sometimes I am smart enough to stop hating and look at the happy leaf. And then I smile a bit, and the smile erodes a bit of the pain. The leaf does a cheeky floop in the wind. It is not a magic leaf, it does not cure anything, but it helps.

I haven't named the tree and I refuse to name the leaf. I'm sure it has its own name and it doesn't need my help. It needs songbirds and sun. Lately it has been needing a little rain. But it gets by. And maybe, just maybe, the tree knows that I am here. I don't know. Seems stupid, but so many things do. You can't convince me it doesn't. You wouldn't be able to convince me that it does either.

It's just a droopy, floppy tree. It's not the kind of tree that would stop you if you were in a hurry. But since we share office space, I look at it a lot. My infant daughter will stare at the waving branches and smile. I know she doesn't see the happy leaf and it doesn't see her. I think. What I'm getting at is that it doesn't matter if it does or doesn't. Not everything needs to be explained. So, I'll take my leave now. I need to work on a novel. But first I need to watch the happy leaf shimmy.

Boots

He pulled the makings out of  his breast pocket and started rolling a cigarette without breaking eye contact. His hair wasn’t so much grey as it was without color. He said, “Son…”

So, I stopped listening. I pulled my knife out and started an ambling whittle. When I started listening again, he was talking about shoes.

“…the kind of shoes you could wear wet or dry. Boots. The best pair I ever had. By a long sight. So, it wasn’t no joke when he took ‘em. You take a man’s boots and that’s one thing. Bad enough, I reckon. But he knew about those boots. And he just off and took ‘em.”

I had a very sharp stick by now. The evening sounds were a broken facsimile of a bootleg orchestra. I pulled a Camel from my pocket and stared into the sharp fire while he lit it with a kitchen match. I tipped the clear jug bottle and goddamn but I dare you to find a man who won’t cringe. I hit it again while my throat was numb.

“You fuckin’ kids. Do you even get what I’m saying to you?”

“Yessir. You really liked them boots.”

The Fisherman.

Standing, stork still with rod in hand, he waits.  A foolish shadow grinning through the afternoon glare.  He hears trains in the distance, the call of gulls, children building families of pebbles, twigs and sea smoothed rocks.  His is a foolish pursuit.  As any hope is foolish, for the universe smiles as it devours the optimistic.

In a small apartment hundreds of miles away an old friend pushes a needle into his arm and smiles at the irony of it.  It is not a smiling matter.  This does not occur to him as the drug forces its way into his veins.  He has given up on hope.

In the mind of a three year old every second is infinity.  Every laugh is an explosion that sends vines of happiness creeping on soft skin.  Every injustice is the world defeated.  Every sadness, forever.  Every smile a blessing.  It has not occurred to her to question the validity of hope.

The writer and the fisherman are one in the same, broken but standing thanks to bits of tape and glue.  The page holds them together.  The blank canvas is hope, be it an empty screen or the orange sheen of an egret's sunset.