Parker Thomas - Part I

Part I - The Orbs

Parker Thomas was a liar. He knew he was a liar, and the girl in the passenger seat of his car knew he was a liar. The two of them couldn't seem to decide who was going to say something about it first.

Dinner had been wonderful that Friday, just like it was wonderful the Friday before that, and the one before that. In fact, every Friday was dinner at their favorite sushi restaurant in the southern suburbs of Chicago, a treat for getting through the week, with the exception of one.

Two weeks earlier, Parker Thomas was at the sushi restaurant, like always, but not with the girl he sat two feet from just then. The girl sitting in his car just then he shared an apartment, a bed, and even a dog with. With the girl he ate with two weeks ago, he just shared a bed.

He had told the girl in his car some nonsense about being forced to stay late at the accounting firm that he worked for, having to finish up his papers and attend a teleconference with a company in Japan whom his firm represented. She knew it was bullshit almost as soon as he did.

Sadie Parker never finished college, and made her living as a photographer. She had met the liar Parker Thomas at a bar 2 years earlier at the college she didn’t finish and had bonded with him over the way they shared a name, and since then gave him two of the best years of her life, and now she hated him for it. She hated him from the top of his brown haired head, all through his pale skinny body, down to the worn out flip flops that sat on the floor while he drove barefoot.

Parker Thomas, on the other hand, loved Sadie Parker, from the first strand of strawberry blonde hair on her head, over every inch of self-designed ink on her body, down to her slender soft legs; he especially loved her legs. He firmly believed that she loved him back, right up until the moment when he noticed a shining, solitary tear rolling gently down her cheek. He knew almost as soon as she did what was coming next.

The words came flowing like a torrent of water unleashed from a dam filled to bursting. He promised he could explain, but she explained it all for him. The liar, the cheater, the rotten lying cheating bastard. He begged her to listen to him, he grasped her hand, and he promised he could explain everything if she would just give him a moment to speak.

He told her he loved her.

She told him she didn't.

The silence would have gone on forever after if it hadn't been for the stop sign; the screeching tires Parker Thomas couldn't hear over the roaring silence.

Not until the pick-up truck connected with his door.

Parker Thomas’ world completed its destruction right there and then. He saw two blinding orbs of light as they collided with him, and threw him through the air, hurtling, almost flying. He could feel his body moving through space completely free of any attachment, all the while the two orbs of light remaining fully illuminated against the black sky, never changing size or shape.

Next came the ground. He could feel the cold dew on the grass as he hit, knocking every ounce of air out of his lungs, and he slid until he came to a stop in the damp weeds. His head was throbbing, and he was able to lift it one last time long enough to look up and see the two orbs of light hovering massive in the black sky out in front of him, illuminating him in an island of light in the darkness. Next thing he knew, the lights faded from his vision, and Parker Thomas was unconscious.

“You should have seen the sign… Oh, why couldn't you have just seen the sign?” Her voice sang to him, almost mockingly.

He recognized the voice through his grogginess. Parker Thomas opened his eyes, letting in the bright, white morning light.

“Shit, Sadie, are you really going to keep this up right now?” He asked. A moment later he remembered the crash, flying, landing, and falling out of his mind. “Holy shit, are you okay?!” He sat up abruptly and blinked in the bright light.

As his eyes adjusted, he froze. He was sitting on a green, grassy knoll with a vast landscape of trees and mountains extending out before him. As his pupils adjusted further, he saw that the extra light came from a second blazing star in the sky, both fixed together and burning bright, like the headlights that threw him through the air the night before.

He heard footsteps and leaned back to look up and meet the bright blue eyes hovering over him. Sadie bent over him, hands on her knees, smiling, with shocks of hair rolling down over her shoulders. He blinked in the light and saw that she was different.

The woman bending over him against the azure sky was Sadie, but she had bright red hair instead, and before he knew what was happening, two massive shadows erupted from behind her, shading him momentarily as they did.

Sadie had two massive, feathered wings on her back, stretching out to either side in a bizarre display of limbering the unearthly appendages up as a bird would do before taking flight.

He was speechless. She knew he was speechless, so she just smiled wider, her hair changing to a dull golden hue. She stood upright, folded her wings behind her back, and sat down on a waist-high stone a few feet in front of Parker Thomas.

He struggled to find the words, but soon they tumbled out of his mouth.

“Is this heaven?”

She looked down at her own hands clasped between her thighs as if debating what to say. Without looking up, she let out a sigh, smiled, and then shook her head slowly, her hair fading to a navy blue.

“No.”

What We Tell Ourselves

A short fiction, written in one sitting, for fun

by Matt Kelzer

“—tell me, did you fall for a shooting star? One without a permanent scar, and then you miss me while you’re lookin’ for yourself out there—“

The music was an old thing that I’d heard a million times when I was young. Growing up in the 90’s everyone had these songs that they heard and even sang to, but never really understood until they grew up, got older, developed “sense”. It was never wasted on me that we never understood the best songs about love and freedom until after we’d become the classic early-20-year-old cynics. All the same, it was still something to bob your head to, and some rhythm to guide your pen across a stack of papers the size of the Webster’s dictionary.

I still remember that day clearly, all these years later. I try to pretend that it wasn’t significant. It’s what I have to tell myself, for my sake.

I was toward the end of my first year as a graduate student in the field of Ecology, doing the cliché grad student thing: grading papers from my class of undergrads at the local coffee shop, a Starbucks, naturally. I sat near the plate glass window that made up the front of the shop at one of those little two chaired tables made for dates, or business meets, or whatever else you might use only two chairs for. I faced the back wall in the corner with no other tables in my view save one of the high-topped ones on the other wall as the building wrapped around, I didn’t want distractions; my stack of papers were headed back to their owners the next day.

I pushed through the papers as quickly as I could, cutting through letters and words here and there, leaving them bleeding red ink in the wake of my destruction. Some papers had good data, good writing, a couple were even compelling in what way a mere undergrad could muster. Others, well, let’s just not talk about them.

I must have been about halfway through the stack when it happened. I went to move a paper over to the growing stack of the wounded when my arm snagged the cord to my ear-buds, yanking both out of my ears and plunking them cleanly into the gaping maw of my coffee cup. I froze. Actually sat there a few seconds with the paper hovering in my hand a couple inches over the pile, in disbelief that that could seriously have just happened right then, of all times. Just as I took a deep breath and was about to unleash a vile, albeit whispered, slew of all sorts of unimaginable profanity, that’s when I heard it.

A quiet sniffle. No, a snickering.

Without moving my head, my eyes reflexively darted up over the rim of my glasses, and there she was, at the one other table I could see. She sat there silent, eyes fixed firmly on some tablet I couldn’t identify in one hand, the other wrapped around a steaming cup of who-knows-what. Her green eyes were fixed stationary on the screen, the far corner of her mouth quivering as she tried to pretend she hadn’t just laughed out loud at me. She had bright red hair, clearly not natural, cut neck length so the tip of a tattoo could be seen as it snaked its way around the back of her neck and under her fitted black leather jacket. Her stylish jeans left little to the imagination; she was clearly in good shape. Her flats showed that she had just come in out of the rain.

I looked back to her eyes and met them; she was starting directly at me. I realized instantly that I’d been caught and finally dropped the page I’d realized I was still holding above its fallen comrades. Before I could even muster a smile I felt the heat in my cheeks and I looked down back at my papers, instead seeing my headphones still bathing in my drink, surely ruined. I cursed under my breath and dragged them out, fitting one into my right ear to see if it could possibly still be working.

Nothing.

I pulled the plug out of my iPod, dropped the stupid things on the far end of the table. Before I knew it, my corner of the shop was filled with a blaring rendition of “Welcome to Paradise” flying out of my damned player. I scooped the thing up, fiddled with the touch screen, and silenced it.

Another snickering sound, this time with a sultry note of female voice.

I looked up again, and she had her hand cupped over her mouth this time, looking right at me, not even pretending to be ignoring me this time. If she were any less pretty or any more opposite her gender I probably would have made some obscene gesture before I’d known it. The best I could come up with was to run my hands through my hair and cup them behind my head, leaning back in my chair.

“This is my life” is what it said. She turned back to her tablet, still smiling.

I leaned forward again, took a heroic gulp of coffee, and took up my red pen for another round. Just as I was about to assault the first spelling mistake I found, I heard it again.

Green Day, “Welcome to Paradise”.

I swore again, louder this time, and lunged for my iPod, knocking my cup of coffee right off the table. I didn’t see it, but I could hear it go everywhere. I pretended not to notice and flicked the screen on, and saw that nothing was playing. It registered then that the song came from elsewhere, from the other table. I looked up, and this time both hands were over her mouth. Her eyes were squished shut, holding desperately onto tears, although her shoulders were now shaking with silent laughter; her tablet lay on the table, sounding off the old punk rock anthem.

This time I sat and waited for her to collect herself, and when she did she wiped a tear from her eye and stood up.

Her voice cracked a little with laugher and asked, “Okay, okay, cream or sugar?”

“Both” I said, before I realized what was happening.

Without another word, she disappeared behind the wall separating me from the counter. She reappeared 30 seconds later with a copy of the drink I’d just dropped in one hand and a fistful of napkins in the other. She set the coffee in front of me, and knelt down to wipe up the spill.

“Stop, stop, stop” I knelt down with her. “I’ve got it, it isn’t your fault…”

I took the napkins from her hand and she stood up, and padded silently away without another word. I silently reprimanded myself for being so curt with someone so pretty and kind, and told myself I’d be apologizing as soon as I’d soaked up my mess.

I swung back up into my chair and as I came fully upright I jumped a little. The girl with the bright red hair was now sitting in the chair opposite me, smiling brightly.

The rest of the night is a blur, really. We stayed there all night, sitting, talking, and laughing about school and work and nonsense we heard on the news. The specifics of the conversation are meaningless now; there was the bright smile, almost as bright as her hair; there was my stack of papers, unfinished but recombined messily, with our hands around coffee cups in the center of the table; there was the way she would throw her arm over the back of her chair and lean back when she told a story.

Toward the end of the night I got up to use the bathroom, telling her I would be right back.

When I came back she was gone, no trace she was ever there aside from her empty coffee cup, still on the table. I hadn’t even asked her name, we didn’t even act at any point like we didn’t already know each other.

I never saw her again. My papers didn’t get graded either, but that doesn’t matter so much now. I came back to that spot, that exact table again for nights on end, and again every now and then after I’d had no luck for a month. A short eternity later, my schooling was done and I’d gotten some entry level job I barely remember anymore down south. It was then, after I’d moved, when I emptied my old canvas school bag of all its old contents, and among the crushed pages in the bottom I spotted a folded shred of yellow legal paper.

I unfolded it, and it was a name, “Emily”, and a phone number. It hit me like a lightning bolt, even after the years had passed, that I’d seen a yellow legal pad sticking out of that girl’s bag. It didn’t take long for me to reach for a phone and dial the number.

A female voice came on.

“I’m sorry, the line you are trying to reach has been disconn---“

I hung up before it could even finish.

I guess it just goes to show you that this world is full of great, tragic, random happenings. I think that night over every now and then, now probably a decade ago, and wonder what would have been. Maybe I’d still know her, maybe we’d be married or have kids, maybe we’d be estranged and never speak again anyway.

Maybe it’s better this way. Of course it is. It has to be. At least, that’s what I tell myself.

It’s what I have to believe.