It was a very bright, lazy, empty Sunday afternoon in the last throws of summer. A cloud swam across the blue sky, and I tried to give shape to it. For a moment I imagined that I saw something, a dragon, but the form faded in my mind and I realized it had been my imagination. I craned my head backward, looking across the rest area. A few picnic tables, a small building with two bathrooms and a candy and soda machine, and my lonely car, parked on a grassy spot a dozen yards from me. Sighing, I looked down the embankment I sat on. Waves of grass, and then lines of trees that transformed into a thicket and then a forest which continued to the distant horizon, where a line of mountains splintered the land and sky.
She was coming. I thought to myself. She is definitely coming. And yet, something deep inside me, a snarling, bestial force told me that she wasn’t coming. The creature was bleak, concealed in darkness and very dark itself. It wrapped around me, strangling me like a boa constrictor, pressed its mouth close to my ear and whispered to me that she wasn’t coming, that she had never intended to come. I felt the beast seize around me and I tried to throw him off. Childish, again, yet still I imagined myself, standing tall and noble. I failed, though, and the fear continued to chew inside my gut, my hands clasping tighter around me knees as I waited. Waited. Waited. And began to feel she really wasn’t coming.
Then, she came.
I heard her car, the steady thrum of the engines and the cracking of gravel as the tires slid onto the rest area. I didn’t look back. I pursed my lips and closed my eyes again, muttering something that might have been close to a prayer.
Another childish, immature habit I had grown over the years, like counting to fifteen. Closing my eyes and praying– only, praying wasn’t quite the right word. I wasn’t uttering my desires to any particular being or deity or anything. And the world ‘wishing’ never seemed to fit, either. A wish, I always thought, meant you had a clear goal in mind. Health. Wealth. Happiness. That sort of thing.
Happiness. How strange. I didn’t rightly know what it meant then, and I think part of me still clung to the superficial sense of the word; the vague, abstractions that people carry with them. Happiness. Love. Reduced to the physical reactions people pretended were caused by them. Smiling, endorphin release, a stressless, weightless sensation, the pitter-pattering of little hearts. It’s all bullshit. A steaming pile of emotional refuse spawned by microscopic chemical reactions in the brain. Even then, part of me understood, but another part of me clung to the romanticized, idealized notion. Part of me still does.
Even then, that part of me was dying. Not overt, not recognizably so, but beneath the surface– the veneer of happiness, the eroding waves of cynicism had begun to break the core of my humanity. The beast of human disenfranchisement–if not the same beast as the lizard-thing in my gut, then a close relative–was slowly working its way through my body. Digging, clawing, and chewing through my intestines and stomach and lungs, looking greedily, hungrily for my soul.
When I turned my head, opened my eyes and gave a slight, casual wave of the wrist, though, I’ll be damned if I didn’t believe wholeheartedly all of the romantic notions I would dismiss as childish at any other time. She was there, alright. She was there. Stepping out of her car, with her long, brown hair tied behind her, the deep, puppy-dog brown color of her eyes captivating even at a distance. She smiled a perfect, white smile and waved back as she walked.
She was beautiful. Of that, and perhaps that alone I was absolutely positive.
“Hey,” I said, and I couldn’t help but smile. She had that effect on me. Had had it, in fact, for years, since I first saw her–her deep, enthralling, hypnotizing eyes that seemed too large and mature for her when she was a child, that she had grown into as a teenager and that still always made me smile.
She sat beside me, took a small, whimsical breath and paused a moment.
“Am I late?” she asked after a moment.
“No,” I said. She wasn’t. I was early by twenty minutes or so, I didn’t tell her that.
“How long’ve you been here?”
“Not long.” I said, and cracked my knuckles. Childish habit number three. As I did, I watched my knuckles intently, and pretend that each snapping were my knuckles breaking. All the bones in my hands shattering into a thousand splinters beneath my skin.
Short Story By: Mashimoto
Short Story By: Mashimoto
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