Drowning Quietly

Open the door, turn, lock, check once, check twice, down the stairs.

As I get closer the same familiar rumble grows, always so threatening. I throw open the front door and a torrent of sound assaults my ears. I blink in the sunlight for a moment, it has been days since any color but grey shone down during the day. Soon shapes form in front of me again.

The city bus is stopped at the end of the block, the driver loitering on the sidewalk enjoying his morning cigarette while passengers lean out the window, yelling at him; it just adds to the racket. Exhaust from the bus burns my nose, but I cough it out, make a quick left and head down the sidewalk, away from the offending airborne poison.

I unravel my familiar ear-buds, push them into my ears, and press play on my iPod. Some familiar rock song drowns out most of the symphony of human activity around me, wrapping me in a protective sheath of rhythm; order to combat the chaos.

Even this early the heat is stifling. The sun must barely be up and I can already feel sweat beginning to stick to the back of my shirt, and the scent of garbage gives me the sneaking feeling that if I actually looked I would see that I'm sweating some kind of black, putrid grime. The walk to work was never pleasant, but there is never enough money in my pocket to justify dealing with the tobacco and who-knows-what-else addicted bus driver.

A homeless man sits at the next corner with a dog, always asks for spare change, even when he knows I don't have any. The crosswalk halts me at his corner, and he and I share an uncomfortable silence, if you could call it that here. We catch eyes, and our stare holds only a moment.

No one says anything. His gaze drifts lazily up, to something above me. I follow it up, into the blue sky coating the spaces between the old high rises, swallowing up and dispelling swathes of black exhaust. The waxing moon sits dead center over the thoroughfare, and I realize suddenly that I can't remember the last time I ever saw anything in that sky but clouds.

I feel transfixed by it's beauty, a reminder that something exists outside of this place. It makes me so woefully aware of my surroundings.

I feel other people building up at the corner with me, encroaching on my body, compressing me. I feel the smoke welling up over my head, trying hard to stake its claim in the remaining space around me, suffocating me. I feel the noise pushing on my temples, every metallic pulsation threatening to crush my bones and come flooding into my skull without my ears to filter it, killing me.

I feel a sudden surge of rage building in my chest, bottled up for so long, longing to reach for the sky, for something beautiful. I feel myself drawing a breath, wanting to yell, scream at the top of my lungs for someone to reach down and pull me out of this place.

But the smoke jams in my vocal chords, and all I can do is cough, almost to my knees before I can find a breathable span of atmosphere. The other people have already crossed the street, but I feel a person next to me.

"This'll help."

The voice shoves a plastic bottle under my lips and I take a long drink. The liquid burns, and I cough again, falling back to sit right there on the corner. A hint of vodka joins the airborne cacophony around me. I look up again to meet the homeless man's stare, his expression blunt.

"I thought you said this would help!" I exclaim, my voice raspy from the strain.

He sits back down at the corner, and gazes back to the sky, the sun accentuating the dirt filling the valleys in his tired face made deep from age and drink, his expression with a hint of longing that I suddenly recognize.

"It's the only thing that does," he says.

I look back to the sky.

Before I know it, I've taken another swig from the bottle.

Still Life

Certain moments in life remain even after they have long since passed, drifting in and out of the consciousness of every one of us like tattered fabric in the breeze, not tethered to anything but the wafts of time as it surges ever forward, churning constantly.

Some parts are still vivid, colorful images, almost real enough to reach out and touch, and all the rest is ground into dust, so disintegrated that it is rendered undetectable.

All of life is precious; every second is irreplaceable, but do we miss the tattered holes? Is there any way to rue the loss of what we can no longer realize was ever there? No... But, perhaps the gaps are what make what's left so pure and so visceral. It is only natural to add value to what is left when recognized that some is lost.

The true experience of life is not only gained from the present. The present merely holds the keys to unlocking the past. Music, scents, words... All of the world is the match which might serve to reignite experiences long extinguished in our minds. Things such as these may not exist in the physical realm only for a practical purpose. Purpose implies perception of it's use, and altering this perception in turn alters the purpose. Anything and everything around us has the potential to ignite something deep within the swirling ethereal din of fleeting, used up memories.

Raindrops falling from the sky, landing on the uncovered head, brings forth an image, a frayed still life tapestry of emotion woven in a time of pain as it slithers seamlessly into the past, down the same face in a time almost lost, and mingles with the tears of yesteryear, before dripping from the chin and onto the ground in the present, once again lost among its uncountable number of fellow droplets in the soil; each one so incredibly insignificant compared to its innumerable counterparts, and yet each so powerful that it could invoke such raw emotion in the unsuspecting bystander.

Our world is not just rock and soil and plants and animals and water. A hidden world lies just beneath the surface of everything there is and ever will be, just waiting to be discovered. Portals to other times and worlds hide in the most mundane of things, with infinite potential just waiting to be tapped.

There is nothing esoteric about it. This ability is free to all of us.

You need only be willing to see that it's there.

Parker Thomas: Part III

The Shadow

Dark.

All of it was dark. Parker Thomas had felt himself stop falling what seemed like hours ago. One moment he had been transfixed, staring into the bleeding eyes of his girlfriend in a black-and-white spot-lit hill, cold sweat all over, and the next, the lights were out, the ground was gone and he was falling. He lay on his back, in the darkness, and wondered what all of this could possibly mean. He was too scared to move, and even if he could muster the courage, he wasn’t sure what he would even do if he did.

He drew another breath and choked on it. Parker Thomas was suddenly aware that he was in the deep embrace of something fluid, something viscous, something that tasted like metal. He sat up suddenly, sputtering and gasping for air, flinging the stuff everywhere, making a lazy, thick splashing sound which seemed to go on forever, without so much as an echo. He coughed and spat, trying to clear his lungs, panicking all over again when all he could see above the surface was still just pitch black and cavernous. He began to feel agoraphobic and claustrophobic all at once; his mind unable to decide if he was lost in the abyss or trapped in a box.

For all he knew, he was already six feet underground.

“He-hel—“ He coughed, and spat one last time, “Hello? Anybody?!”

His words went for miles, it seemed, and didn’t hit a single thing. He sat in silence a moment longer, still waist deep in the warm fluid. When he was just about to try again, he heard something: something was softly dripping just ahead of him. He moved to stand, but suddenly an orange flame erupted from the surface no more than 15 feet directly in front of him, springing from nothing at all. He sat, mesmerized by the dancing licks of flame, until he caught sight of his own hand, resting on the surface of the endless lake, and realized what he was sitting in was most certainly not water.

Blood. It had to be. It was crimson red, opaque, and thick. And then he remembered the taste; the awful mixture of warmth and rust. He began to gag, spitting in a desperate effort to return every bit of fluid in the reaches of his body into the lake.

In the midst of his struggle, Parker Thomas was suddenly aware that he was not alone. The orange light had been intercepted, a shadow cast over him. Slowly, he looked back toward the flame, eyes wide, afraid of what he might find. There was a figure standing directly between him and the flame. It was tall, maybe seven feet, he guessed, and thin. There was no discrete outline he could see; the flames constantly twisted the figure as they moved back and forth, rising and falling, giving it a bizarre quality of shapelessness. All Parker Thomas could conjure in his head were the drawings of the Grim Reaper, the hooded skeleton who ferried souls to whatever their destination was.

Each just stared at the other in silence. Parker Thomas could not make out any features in the darkness, but he could feel the figure watching him, motionless. “Who—Who are you?” he finally stammered.

It drew a rasping, cold breath, and spoke, its words sounding more like a hiss of steam than like an actual human voice. “You know why you’re here. You know who I am. I live here; I guard the misdeeds you so secretly conjure. Now you can join me here in the filth you created for yourself. There’s nothing keeping you from me now.” It drew another hideous, difficult breath. Parker Thomas finally stood up in the knee high crimson lake, not out of bravery, but out of the desire to be able to run in the all-too-likely event that this ghastly creature was about to attack him. The figure made no motion in acknowledgment.

“You did this all to yourself, made the bed you must now sleep in, dug your own grave; references all too appropriate for someone in your position. You and I have been especially close lately, haven’t we?” The figure emitted a rasping sigh that Parker Thomas could only guess was supposed to be laughter. He could feel the cold sweat breaking out again, and he wanted to run, but he felt himself rooted to the spot, paralyzed with terror. “The other girl, the other night, that was our best work yet, wouldn’t you say? We always thought of it before, I never missed a chance to show you what we could have done with her. Was it everything you always though it would be? She really was quite talented.”

Parker Thomas spoke, before he could stop himself, “No! No, no, no…” The terror seamlessly altered itself to regret. He could feel the memories of that lecherous, lustful night being forced into the forefront of his consciousness. “I shouldn’t have done that. I don’t know why I did it.”

“Oh, yes, you do.” The shadow retorted. “You dreamed about it a long time. You knew you would break, you knew you would fall for it. I knew it for a long time, all it took was the proper persuasion, the perfect opportunity. Don’t deny it. You chose this.” It laughed hideously to itself again, each gasping chuckle more eerie than the last. “Every sinner wants so desperately to deny what he did was wrong. Tell yourself it will only happen once, promise you’ll make it up to Miss Sadie Parker, rationalize it all away, and convince yourself you still love her. After all, you can’t very well play the part unless you believe it first, can you?”

“I do still love her.” He whimpered, all of what little assurance he had completely drained. He could feel the doubt eating at the back of his mind even as he said the words. “I would never do anything to hurt her.”

At those words, suddenly the flame was extinguished completely, returning Parker Thomas into the arms of darkness. The air was suddenly frigid. His stomach turned, and he began to look around frantically for any sign of the ghoul. He heard the sharp, labored breath again, right where it had been before, and he tensed his muscles, and turned rapidly to face it, ready to flee. There was a long pause, punctuated only by the uneasy drip-drip-drip of the blood from his fingertips.

“Is that what you really think?”

“Y-Yes.” He choked out.

Two white orbs suddenly opened, right where the shadow’s eyes should have been, and before Parker Thomas could react, the shadow lunged through the mire with a sickening Whoosh! as it pushed through the sickly, coagulated solution, and clamped a cold grasp as tight as a vice around his neck. It lifted him off his feet and out of the lake, strangling him as it did. He instinctively grasped to hold onto its arm for leverage, but his hands found nothing. All he could do was stare into its blazing, round white eyes as they slowly inched closer to his own. He struggled in vain, his arms and legs flailing hopelessly in the darkness, the drops of blood flinging from his limbs the only thing which broke the utter silence around them as they pattered dully onto the surface. He felt its icy breath on his face; it smelled like rotten meat so foul it made his eyes water.

“See the truth.” It hissed, almost a whisper.

Parker Thomas tried to scream, but his breath was all used up.

The orbs pressed into his eyes in a flash of exploding pain, and all he could see was blinding white light.

Fear is Real

"Shit, shit, shit!"

I can't help but yell at myself. I shouldn't have done that. Shouldn't have left my squad, shouldn't have left my friends, shouldn't have even moved. This lone wolf crap will get me shot. It got them shot, why wouldn't it get me shot?

Past the next tree, under another limb, over another log.

Smack!

A shot collides the tree on my left and I have to take cover. Next log; big enough? Good enough. I hunker down, back against the log, butt in cold mud, and close my eyes. I need to catch my breath. I can't see anything but the sight of Whitmore coming around his tree to move up, just like I ordered him, and then Whitmore taking 3 shots strait to the chest. The fire opened up, and I ran.

We were outnumbered, it was all I could do...

I start to groan, but catch myself. This whole thing's been botched by one stupid move. One move! We took out the guards quickly, made it in, picked up our cargo, and were almost out. I knew it seemed too easy... If it's too good to be true, it usually is. So damn close, and there they were, just waiting for us. Ambush.

I can't think anymore, I can hear them now. Heavy boots shuffling through the dead leaves, eyes searching behind expressionless dead masks, fingers on triggers. There's nowhere to go, the next tree isn't close enough. They can't be more than 20 feet away now.

Then, suddenly, pain explodes on the back of my head.

I wasn't low enough.

I can feel my right hand fly instinctively to the stinging in my skull. It comes back coated in yellow.

Dammit...

Next thing I know, I'm on my feet, facing my attacker. He just stands there smugly, paintball gun lowered. I can't see his mouth, but I can tell he's smiling.

"Dammit, Stricker! You could've just called me out, asshole."

"But where's the fun in that?" He laughed, "Now, hand it over."

All I can do is rub the back of my head, and fork over my cargo.

He snatches the red nylon flag from my hand. "I accept your unconditional surrender."

I think I'm actually bleeding.

"Asshole..."

Parker Thomas - Part II

Part II - The Anima

     “Not Heaven?”

     “Not Heaven,” she confirmed bluntly, looking up to meet his stare.

     “Then… where the hell are we?” Parker Thomas whined. He could feel an odd, seemingly unfounded terror welling up inside him. She just smiled at him again; this time it began to shake his nerves.

     “Why have you got wings on your back?” he ventured.

     “Because people in heaven are supposed to have wings on their back, right?”

     “But we aren’t in heaven.”

     “No.”

     “So why wings?”

     “Because you thought you were in heaven”

     Her hair changed back to a dull golden hue.

     “Well, I’m beginning to think you’re right, we aren’t in heaven.” he admitted, finally getting to his feet and gazing around at the landscape. The world surrounding him seemed almost more out of place than the twin stars which lit it. In the distance there stretched patches of just about every topographical feature anyone could dream of, and in the most radical forms. Deserts lay in the middle of entire forests, mountains jutted out of the ground at impossibly acute angles for their height, and lakes were formed of a most unnatural bright red color. In the distance, he could have sworn a waterfall off one of the mountain peaks was flowing upwards.

     He shook his head at the absurdity of it all, rubbed his tired eyes, and turned back to Sadie. He started and realized instantly that her wings were gone. She simply sat there on her rock and waited for him to speak, grinning yet more mischievously.

     “Where’d your wings go?”

     “Away.”

     “Because we’re not in heaven?”

     “Now you’re catching on.” she said playfully.

     He raised an eyebrow. “So, I take it you aren’t still mad at me?”

     “I’m not who you think I am.” She said simply, and gazed into his eyes, expecting him to complete the thought.

     He didn’t even know where the idea came from, but he blurted it out all the same. If he was right, it wouldn’t be the strangest thing he’d seen that night, not by a long shot. If he was wrong, he figured it would be understandable, given the circumstances.

     “You’re me. A part of me. I read about this, I know this… College, psychology class, the guy with the mustache… Freud?”

     “Jung.” She corrected.

     “You’re one of them. The archetypes. Like in his dreams.” He stammered, his eyes growing wide with realization.

     “Very good!” she clapped her hands loudly in front of her and sprang to her feet, her hair changing back to its original fiery red. She put one hand on her hip, raised the other over her head in a flamboyant arc, and proclaimed dramatically, “I am the woman, the mother, the feminine side,” and bowed low, as if she had expected applause.

     A moment later she looked back up at him from her bow, “And I guess in your case, the girlfriend,” She added with a giggle, straightening back up. Her eyes shot toward the sky, and she cocked her head a little to the side in thought, jostling her hair and giving it a momentary appearance of being multicolored in the unrelenting sunlight. She shrugged and smiled, meeting his gaze again,“Gives the whole thing a Freudian twist though, eh? But, so long as we’re agreed we’re going off Jung’s book, you can call me ‘the Anima’.”

     His head spun for a moment, and he could feel his jaw dropping slightly. As parts of his more rational accountant mind began to cry “Bullshit!!”, he looked around at the strange world with two Suns and decided this might not be wholly impossible. He resigned to assuming it was true.

     “So where are we?”

     “That, I don’t know,” she said, looking over her shoulder out toward the two glowing Suns. Her hair turned a shade of verdant green, and then faded back to blue. She sighed.

     “How do you not know?” he asked, sidling up beside her.

     “To be blunt, I don’t know because you don’t know. Not yet. I feel like you’re on the cusp of that one, though,” she crooned, turning to face him, not even a foot away. She wrapped her arms around his waist and looked up into his eyes like a child. The whole thing made Parker Thomas uncomfortable.

     “What do you mean?”

     Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, he heard it.

     Ba-thump.

     A distant rumble, and yet he could feel the vibrations in his chest, like the beat of a massive drum. He froze, and looked around wildly after a moment. He saw nothing but serene, mountainous landscape.  

     “What the…”

     Before he could finish, he felt a blow to his chest so hard he thought for a split second that the Anima had somehow punched through his body. Before he could utter a cry of surprise, he was being dragged forward by his breastbone though the air toward the two Suns, which narrowed together and shrank as he hurtled into them. The lights blinded him, until he suddenly felt as though he couldn’t breathe and gasped for air.

     When he opened his eyes, he was back in his car. He could feel the cold embrace of metal all over him, mixed nauseatingly with the feeling of warm fluid passing over his skin. His eyes darted around frantically, and he began to panic. He could feel his heart doing summersaults in his chest.

     There were other sets of headlights, he could hear sirens, and he could barely make out sobbing next to him over the ringing in his ears. He looked to his right. Sadie was less than a foot from his face, her fist on his chest right where he’d been struck not a moment before. She began screaming something when she saw his eyes, but he couldn’t hear her. The gymnastics in his chest stopped, and darkness encroached on his vision once again.

     He saw the two orbs once more, and they slipped away from his eyes as though he’d just been dropped out of a mask. He fell until he felt his momentum disappear without any impact. He opened his eyes and realized he was lying on the hill again, this time in the spotlight cast by the orbs, surrounded by blackness.

     The Anima was sitting on her rock, somber and silent, elbow on her knee, palm under her chin. She and the hilltop seemed to have been drained of all color; it made Parker Thomas feel as though he’d landed in an old movie. She said nothing, and just stared at him gravely through locks of black hair, her eyes searing into the back of his.

     Ba-thump.

     The beat of the drum came again, shaking him to his core. He looked around frantically, expecting to see jagged mountains shadowed against the background. He saw nothing. It was just him, his grassy hilltop, and the Anima, without the company of so much as a single hint of color to mingle in with the shades of grey and white and black.

     “Am I... dead?” he asked meekly.

     The corner of her mouth seemed to quiver for a moment behind her hand, and then plunged into a pitiful frown. She looked as though she would cry for a moment, when the rumble came back.

     Ba---

     And then nothing. Parker Thomas felt cold sweat break out all over his body. 

     He noticed the Anima's eyes were glassy, shining in the harsh, white light. She squeezed them shut, but a tear escaped, rolling down her pallid cheek; it was as red as blood. 

     “You are now.”

     And then the ground dropped out.

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.