Weep For The Gravest Of Our Misfortunes: Old Man, Finish It (616 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 2 on 8 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Zampano (View user info) at 2007-04-23 11:41:46 EDT
Act I - I Find The Pretty Girl - http://www.ubersite.com/m/100589
Act II - The Hard Evidence - http://www.ubersite.com/m/100756
Act III - Two And A Half Rolls - http://www.ubersite.com/m/100884
The Final Act
Old Man, Finish It
Meredith only has the power to keep me in Chicago for a few weeks at a time; a couple of months if I'm particularly down on my luck. I leave her though for the reason I've left countless cities in my declining years: other women. There were women before Meredith, as there were after or even during my time with her. The intensity, though, with which she loves me will one day leave me blind or, at best, crippled. I return to her with my tail tucked away and flint striking in my eye, but it's a return just the same, and she can't pretend that she hasn't counted the minutes between now and my departure. Now she knows that I'll be back, and usually evading some new or old demon. Now she knows that I am temporary. This, however, she feels that she can change.
I am no handsome man anymore, and it's a wonder that she still opens the door to me. Force of habit. Each time I return, she takes me just a little less far into her apartment. Now, this last time, I hardly make it into the doorframe. There was a time when she pushed me straight onto her bed before either one of us could manage a greeting.
"Hi, Meredith."
"No, it won't do here. We'll go to the diner."
"The diner? It's a perfectly fine day out. We can make it to that café off of Michigan Aven—"
"If you can make it all the way there without complaining about a swollen prostate or broken hip, I'll be genuinely surprised."
Hand over heart. "Meredith, I'm wounded. I really am. You're not that much younger than me, m'dear. If you can walk 'all the way there,' then I believe that I can as well."
Our talk is abbreviated; our words, terse. She thinks, How temporary is it this time? I might be just be a cycle of the clock's hands.
It won't be as bad as the first time, that first duel of shouts and insults at four in the morning. Shattered glass on walls, tossed books. Nothing unique to our fighting. I still smelt of someone else's perfume, tasted like her lipstick. Meredith shoves me at the framed duplicates of her exhibition pieces, her father's war photography. This is what you could have been! she yells at me. My life is on loan from a greater good that spared me the horrors of war, apparently. My neighbors and schoolmates look down on me from above the spheres of the stars, and they bury their faces between their hands. Shameful. I'm spoiling the gift. What if this had happened to you?!
Yeah? Well, it did happen to me!
I never follow up, I never elaborate. I just leave her and her photos. For the following weeks, there is a great unchaining of weights in chest and guts. A relief sweeps along in my steps, but it is not at having been unfettered. Rather, I have been bound for the first time in years. I can forget Meredith's photos, but not their subject, which is something I have hardened myself against in my youth. It's a wearying feeling, but it's feeling just the same. My heart quakes! My limbs shiver! These angry tears...they're earnest!
I laugh at the barbs that wrap themselves around my insides. Finally.
When I return, it's so that I might taste again the slap of humanity. It's on the pretense that I missed her. She believes me, until the night of my second leave taking. I skip along.
And again. And again. Given eternal life, this cycle might repeat ad infinitum.
The only time I ever yell at her—truly yell, that is, by meaning it—is the night she drops to her knees and pops open the loose floorboard in her kitchen. It is my niche, my secret vault. She reaches a blind hand into the darkness beneath her and hauls up the one hidden thing. It's a music box, ornately decorated and carved out of a willow's heart. The lid opens on a hinge, and inside are a chipped mirror, a porcelain ballerina that has forgotten how to pirouette, and the dozen or so things that I will carry with me to the grave. Most are letters. There are stories behind each, including the box itself, but they play no effect here. The only story that matters is the one that has been half told already.
Meredith plucks out from under an envelope a length of material that was once a clean and marble sliver of silk, but has been smudged and darkened by soot and age. Old lace. I tell her to take her hand off of it. She throws it aside and begins to root through envelopes and photos of people who were given no proper grave. My words are acid on the tongue: Let go of those. Lord help me, I've raised my hand. Lord help me, it's too fast to stop. Oh, oh God...that's not moonlight brimming in her eyes. I gather up these things, these things more important than living people, and I leave before I can hear her sob. This time, it's for years.
"Meredith," I say from over my mug, "can I stay the night?" It is the last thing I will ever ask of her.
"Don't think for a minute—"
"Please, please...it's just one night. I'll be leaving in the morning." She won't look up from her coffee. "I promise."
She pulls out the couch for me and offers me something to eat for dinner, but I decline. Wine is drunk; I forget myself and let my accent slip into the conversation. After a time, she goes to bed. I hear the lock click.
Beneath my covers, I hold in my hands a length of lace. It used to be clean once, and shone like wet marble. Smudged fingerprints and streaks of ash have soiled it, made it stink of the past. I once thought it was ribbon. Christ, how many years have passed? It's been here, all the way. I've since lost the music box, and the letters inside it, and the photos that sometimes went with those letters, and clear memories of the faces in those photos. But the lace has been there from the start.
Between the covers of a book I held in my hands when I was ferried into New York Harbor.
In my pocket when I cowered with other hidden students in the blankness of a bomb shelter in a French country house, uncertain if it were friend or enemy dropping their payloads onto our heads.
Wrapped around my fingers on the floor of the Marne train station. The trains have stopped so long ago, and I've squeezed in through a shattered window to the basement. It's no longer a comforting cold like at first, when the stone helped chill my burning blood, my burning cheeks, my burning spark-lit pulse. It's a forgotten cold. I rock on my haunches and I pretend that there is something past the gunshots, the rappa-taps coming from the village. There's a woman over me. God, three-days-hungry. Don't take my lace. It's not a ribbon, it's a lace, and it's mine. How have you gotten so dirty, she asks, but she knows. There is still smoke rising over the trees, still an afterglow on the cloud-bellies at night. All this ash, she says.
It came from the run, the blind and naked run through whip-branches and woodlands made boggy from spring showers. The fields, the fields, they smelt of overcooked chicken and duck, because the barns are on fire, but it's not the livestock that are roasting alive. The doors to one crumble into galaxies of embers, and inside I see a man-shaped thing flail amongst other writhing worms on the floor. It can't be a man, because it is made entirely of flame and gaping mouth. A mouth can't go that wide. He trips over the worms wrapped in trousers and capped with boots, and his legs writhe with them. She isn't behind me any more, but I've got the lace, and I fall too, I fall into ash and dab at the spots in my eyes with the silken material. She isn't behind me anymore.
She stands in the field, on the grassy banks of the stream that runs just south of town, and I think she's looking for tadpoles in the shallows but she's just preening flower petals and musing aloud that he might love her, he might love her not, he might love her. Who is he? He was never me. The gravest of our misfortunes is on the march a mile outside of town, but at the moment it's just us, and the snake of lace she holds against my hand. My heart, oh, it's racing, and this is a funny thing because at the same time I can feel the reality of my heart in a place outside of this, outside of the sphere of sleep, and it's under a thin blanket on an old woman's couch in Chicago, and it's slowing down, growing rusty, turning the blood it pumps thicker and flakier. This is a funny thing, and I still have so many apologies left. I can only think of two. I'm sorry, Meredith, for the call you will have to make in the morning, and the mortician's visit the police will make you take. I'm sorry, little girl, pretty little girl, because I never knew your name, and for the false promise I gave you.
I never knew your name.
Dimly, I hear the first bursts of gunfire, the shattering of glass, the sixty-year death rattle of an old man, and the marching of many feet, gracefully in line.
Hold my hand, pretty little girl. I won't let you go.
User Reviews
Submitted by Brdn_Nkd (user info) at 2007-09-19 15:29:53 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by sexualchocolate1984 (user info) at 2007-04-26 09:48:22 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Finally the old man finished it!
No, this was really good - I feel for him.
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2007-04-24 12:11:35 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by ChaosJester (user info) at 2007-04-24 06:53:54 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This didn't hit me as hard as the previous three, perhaps becouse I'm used to the story. The only real critiscism I have here is that your stories all sound the same. Different events happen in all four, but the tone (and, hence, the central theme) never changes. This may have been intentional, but it seems that the intensity begins to suffer after the first couple of iterations. I might have added a bit of happiness to this guy's life. As it is, the man never seems to get away from that terrible day. Perhaps that was your point, but it just seemed a bit unrealistic at the end. It has been my experience that Life Goes On, no matter how horrible it has been in the past.
Submitted by Stagger_Lee (user info) at 2007-04-24 04:09:54 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Serious literary comment.
Submitted by Orgasmatron (user info) at 2007-04-23 17:10:46 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Comment
Submitted by CaptainThorns (user info) at 2007-04-23 13:44:15 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by DudeThatsBOSH (user info) at 2007-04-23 13:08:14 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment