Have you ever been on your computer and try to do something, and it won’t do it, or it starts doing something else, and you start yelling at it, “What are you doing? Why are you doing that?”
Yeah, me neither.
Greetings
“Good noon,” the man said with a nod as he passed by.
Drawing up, she consulted her Apple Watch. He was right; it was exactly noon.
Decided
Anger and anxiety paraded through him. He’d heard a noise. The noise caused him to think, the fucking raccoons are back. But the sound seemed to come from the front coat closet, which harpooned that raccoon idea and punted him back to, now what the fuck? He didn’t need any more shit in his life.
With that coursing through mind and simmering in blood, he marched to the closet and yanked open the door. It wasn’t a large space. The coats and shoes crowded it. But it was an irregular shape, so he dropped down on his hands and knees to explore the left back corner.
One, it was darker than he’d expected.
Two, it was warmer.
Three, the closet was larger that he’d thought.
The door behind him closed.
“Hey,” he said. Fury amped his motion. Someone was fucking with him. He’d kick their fucking ass. Rising into a tangle of coats, he shoved them aside and grabbed the closet handle.
The door pulled him forward.
“You son of a…,” he said, not knowing who he addressed. Ready to see some idiot friend on the other side, he wasn’t prepared for what he found.
“Where the fuck is my house?” he said. Where it was supposed to be, he saw a gray shaft and wooden ladder.
He looked up the shaft. Probably a hundred feet above, he could see a faint white patch. So what the fuck was that? What, was he supposed to climb out of here? No fucking way. Screw that noise.
Firmly decided, he stepped back in and closed the closet door. It’d changed once; it would again.
That’s where one of his idiot friends found his desiccated body days later.
It looked like he’d been there for years.
What Else?
He was surprised. She had never spoken of her ex in kind terms. “Why?” he said.
She considered her words. “What else could I do? He was dying. He’d had cancer. I loved him once. We had two children together.”
It had been the third marriage for both, he knew. Each had children from a previous marriage. Lasting ten years, personal sturm and drang struck every day.
Her tired face softened. “He’d asked his children for help. They turned him down. He came to me. He said, “I don’t want to die in a little room alone.” So I took him in, put a bed in the living room, and cared for him until he died.
“What else could I do?”
To Do
You ever get up with a full list of things to do, and rush around completing the standard morning stuff, and then sit down and ask yourself, “Now what?”, even though you know you have a list?
Yeah, me neither.
Himself
He dreamed he was looking for himself.
The search began deep underground. Dressed in jeans and a shirt, he stood, trapped by the earth, mud and rock crushing him.
But he knew which way was up. Pushing back against the pressure, he lifted his hands and raised the earth above him, first by a barely measured fraction, then, as he kept pushing, by inches, and then by feet. As he lifted the earth away, he gained more freedom to move. With that freedom, he began swimming up through the soil and rock, even though it filled his mouth and he could not properly breath.
The last barrier was concrete. He slowed, but did not stop, though it took greater effort. The sounds he made attracted others’ attention. At last, the concrete broke enough that he could push pieces away. With them gone, he broke off more, creating a hole.
Fresh air washed in from a sunlit blue sky. Although exhausted, he worked more quickly. People’s voices reached him. “What’s going on?” people said. “Is that a person? Who is that?”
“It is a person,” an elderly female voice said. “It’s a man.”
Another female said, “Someone call the police.” Conversations swirled about why the police should be called.
Pushing concrete aside, he lifted himself out of the hole before a decision was found. A circle of staring people, most holding cell phones to videotape his emergence, surrounded him. They backed away at his growl.
Orienting himself, he began walking. The people scattered. He was on Ashland Street. He lived on Clay Street. It was less than a mile away.
It was time he found himself. Up on Clay Street, he awoke from his nap on the couch with a start. Elements of the strange dream buffeted coherent thinking. As understanding developed, he turned to the door. Watching it, he waited, bitter about what was coming. He’d betrayed himself before.
Now it was time to pay.
Anger
Have you ever exploding with anger without understanding why you were so angry, and then walk away and wonder, what happened?
No, me neither.
Help
Do you ever have a problem or something that you want to talk about with someone else, but there’s no one you can think of?
Yeah, no, me neither.
Meal
Have you ever ordered a meal, and discovered that it’s terrible, but you ate it all, because your mother taught you to always eat everything on your plate?
Yeah, no, me, neither.
Shirt
Have you ever put an old favorite shirt on and realized, it still fits, but it looks different?
Yeah….
Michael Seidel, writer 