a letter from nowhere

Collin lied in bed and stared at the ceiling. A deep dark mood had been creeping up on him all day. A sadness mixed with frustration. It drained him of all ambition. He felt extremely restless, but he had no desire to actually do anything. He couldn’t think of what he would do anyways. Nothing held any interest for him.

The girl he loved was on the other side of the world, the other side of the planet. He hadn’t heard from her in two days, which doesn’t seem that long, but to him felt like months. He knew she was busy and if she wasn’t calling, it was because she couldn’t get to the phone. But his personality was such that the slightest little thing allowed doubt to creep in. Despite knowing full well how much she loved him too, he couldn’t help but think horrible thoughts about how maybe she had grown tired of him suddenly. How being away had changed her perspective on things. About how much fun she was having. Laughing, living her life without him.

But that was ridiculous. He had to get up and stop thinking things like that. She wasn’t the cause of his dark mood. She was his ray of light. She was the best thing in his life and to doubt her was wrong and unfair. The genesis of this depression rested in the moment he had opened that letter the night before.

It had seemed so innocuous at first. He had found it nothing more than amusing and even a little confusing. A second reading had done little to illuminate the point of the missive, so he had set it aside and gone about his evening and gone to bed.

In the morning it all seemed different. It was like his brain had restructured itself over night, making him suddenly able to decode what was being said in the letter. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the key to that understanding had been handed to him in a dream. But he couldn’t remember the dream, no matter how hard he tried.

He had picked the letter up and read it again. What it said now startled him, where it had amused him before. The things he had found particularly funny were now threatening, damning. However, the situation was hopeless. There was nothing he could do now. So he had tried to put it out of his mind. His thoughts kept going back to Adrienne. If she were here he could talk to her about it. She was the only one who would understand.

Chapter 12: the really short chapter where all hell breaks loose

[from an unfinished, and unstarted, mystery novel]

Frank sat up with a jolt. A sound had awoken him, but stubbornly refused to last long enough be identified. Confusion and curiosity were swept unceremoniously aside in favor of dizziness and nausea. He closed his eyes and sat there in bed. One minute passed and he opened them again and looked slowly around the room.

Jackie was gone. Frank dimly recalled drunken attempts to remove underpants, uncoordinated fiddling with one another’s parts and, possibly, an orgasm. He giggled at the sheer romance of it.

He finally decided to get out of bed and stood up and made a rough attempt to shake and stretch the chains of encroaching middle age from his aching body. After a few moments he decided he had succeeded as much as he was going to and plodded nakedly towards the kitchen. Some rogue organ in his side threatened to explode as he reached up into the cabinet for a coffee filter, but he paused and the feeling passed.

Once the coffee was brewing, Frank climbed into the shower to see if the hot water could wash away some of the grogginess. At one point he thought he heard the phone and stuck his head outside the shower curtain, but was greeted with only silence, so he grabbed the shampoo and went to work on his thinning hair.

As he was toweling off, the phone rang again. He considered not answering it, but thought it might be a prospective client, or even Jackie. With a sigh he walked into the living room, leaving a trail of wet footprints across the hardwood floors. He picked up the receiver on the fifth ring.

“Jesus Christ, Frank! Don’t you ever answer your fucking phone?!?” shouted a slightly familiar voice on the other end.

“Who the hell-“ Frank started.

“Listen, you’ve got no time, buddy. You’ve apparently asked the wrong questions of the wrong people and it has gotten back to even more wrong people, if you catch my drift. You have to get off the grid. Get out of town – NOW! They know who you are and this thing may be bigger than you ever could’ve guessed.”

Frank tried again to ask the identity of the overagitated caller, but was greeted with only a dial tone.

Then he heard two car doors slam outside. Then footsteps coming up the stairs to his garage apartment. Unsure of where he had left his gun, Frank reached instead for the supposedly ancient ceremonial dagger the crazy old gypsy lady had given him. Remembering her ridiculous words (“This dagger, it’s name is Horatio, it will be the only man you can trust when the time comes…”), he hid the knife behind his back just before his front door exploded inward in a hail of splinters.

short cuts

As a child I drew maps of the roads and fields and forests surrounding my home. I meticulously researched every gully, every rock, every creek that wound through the trees. I tried my best to present it all perfectly to scale.

I had dreams that I discovered new roads that I didn’t even know existed. In the middle of the country, where I lived, there weren’t that many roads, and only one that led to my house. I would surely have noticed these hidden ones. Sometimes the dreamed short cuts were preposterous, such as one road that I had never noticed, that just so happened to lead straight to Dallas. Normally a trip of some two hours, this hidden road could get you there in 3 minutes.

To this day, I still have dreams of finding short cuts. No matter where I live. I get so excited at the discovery, calling myself a dope for not having found it before. I am so disappointed when I wake up.