The Referee

At first, she cried herself to sleep. Then eventually, it grew more bearable, almost acceptable.

She still smelled him sometimes when something happened to remind her of him, just the passing scent of his shampoo or his deodorant. Once she grew aware of the scents, they always dissipated. It was almost as if they were never even there in the first place. And perhaps they weren’t ever there at all, not really. Perhaps they were just flaring synapses triggered by memories. But she knew the sensations to be real, in their way. Ghosts aren’t always visible, aren’t always poltergeists making noises in the dark. Perhaps ghosts can just be scents. Why not? And Lord knows she deserved a good haunting.

She washed her hands more often these days, scrubbed them under scalding water. The flesh of her hands grew dry and brittle. Sometimes her skin cracked and bled. She used lotion, a lot of lotion, but she always ended up washing it off. It felt too familiar, too viscous, too much like something else that once coated her hands.

The house they once shared seemed unbearably quiet. He used to watch college footballs on Saturdays. She always hated the way he screamed at the television after a fumble or interception or missed field goal. She hated the way he cursed the officials. It wasn’t like the poor referees were doing anything other than their assigned jobs. They tried to be fair. At least, she assumed so. She had no reason to assume otherwise. The world needed referees, needed justice.

But no one had ever called her out. No one ever expected it of her. No one even knew he was gone. He hadn’t had many friends, and what friends he had in his life were now more or less gone, moved on to other lives full of wives and kids. The days of keg parties had been over for a long time now. No one phoned for him. His family lived in other states and rarely spoke. It was summer now. She had at least until the holidays before the eventual invitation for a visit arrived. She might have to explain something then, but maybe not. Maybe she would simply answer the phone like she was now. Explain he’s not in, but she’d be happy to pass on a message. It wasn’t like he returned that many messages before. In fact, to the outside world, his predicament made no impact at all. It didn’t really even matter if he was alive or dead. The world moved on, kept circling, and no one really noticed the difference.

No one, that is, except her. She knew the world was different.

She fumbles with the floorboards when she is lonely. She looks into the crawlspace, past the growing spider webs gathering dust, to where the earth lies faintly disturbed and uneven. The soil there is mostly hard and whole once again. There is just a lump where it had once been a hole. The holes were the hardest part. The clay dirt did not give easily, and she had not had much room to work. Still, it worked. She worked. She could do that much, at least. She gave him a proper burial, almost.

She smells him strongest at times like this, can almost feel his smell envelop her like his arms once did. She lies there sometimes and watches the ground. There is another spot where the ground is sunken next to him. She will lie there next to him one day but not today. Not that anyone would notice her absence. They’d think she just ran away like all the others.

He was the only thing that ever made her feel alive, real. Without him, the nonexistence goes on. Days turn into weeks. She works. She eats. She sleeps. She reads. Sometimes she watches television. She even turned on the Bama game one afternoon, but she grew bored with it quickly. Some things never change.

If only he had loved more. If only he hadn’t been so full of hate and rage. If only he hadn’t done those things to those innocent women.

She had seen his videos, found them on his computer. He had rented out a storage building, bought chains and leather straps. Sometimes, she still hears the young women in those videos scream. She had even known some of them. They hadn’t been friends, not really, but she did know them. The waitress at the Waffle House where they ate breakfast sometimes before church was in a video. So was the pastor’s wife who everyone thought had run away. Even one of her coworkers whose transient, free-spirited nature had led everyone at the office to believe the girl had simply gone back to Portland where she had once lived a relatively care-free life of adventure on the streets. That girl had never seemed much at home in the office. Sometimes, she liked to pretend the rumors were true, that those young women were runaways who had simply chosen other lives without responsibility. She tried to forget the videos, but they were burned into her mind.

Outside her window, the world passes by. She sees police cars. At first, just after she took care of business, she expected to hear a siren or see flashing lights, maybe a harsh knock on her door. But these things never happen. The police cars drive past, making their rounds, keeping the neighborhood safe. And it is safe now. Now that he’s gone. She had done her part.

Not that anyone noticed.

Navel Gazing

Uno

I was born in a pickle jar. My first view was of the inside of a kitchen cabinet. Stubborn bits of label and glue that would not wash off the jar obscured my vision. It was dark, but my developing eyes didn’t mind. Enough light filtered through the cracks in the doors to see all I needed to see: a coffee cup hand-painted with a beach scene from Mexico City. It was paradise. I contently swam in circles.

Deux

I smoked my first cigarette at two years old. I was outside a Laundromat beside the dumpster I called home after being tossed out by my parent who was an inconsequential and slovenly short hunk of hairy man. I had been a mistake, apparently. My parent had tossed me out, jar and all, two years previously. The jar broke, and I was born, and now here I was contemplating. While toddling around, pondering my fate, I found a crumpled pack of cigarettes on the ground. There was one lonely crushed up cigarette inside. I lit it with a Zippo lighter I carried in the chest pocket of my dirty OshKosh overalls. The lighter was decorated with a Confederate Flag. It said: “The South Shall Rise Again!” I inhaled and coughed, inhaled and coughed, inhaled and coughed again. Yet, by my fourth toke, I found I was already used to the process. A thin blue trail of smoke wafted up from my chubby hand as I waved the cigarette in lazy arcs. I cleared my throat. “The contemplative life is often miserable.” This was from a book of Chamfort plays I had found beside the dumpster one pale afternoon. I decided to follow his advice then and there to “act more, think less, and watch oneself live.” I found a tattered beret and placed it on top of my head.

Trinity

By the time I reached my teens, I realized that everything came in threes. There was me, my beloved, and my beloved’s beloved. There was a fight. I won the fight but lost the war. My beloved’s beloved fell in love with my beloved as she nursed him back to health. They went away together. Then I was alone again: two and one, one and done.

Quattor

A priest gave me a copy of his Latin Primer. He said it had been his only book as a boy. He said this in Latin of course, so I did not understand what he said at the time. I loved that book. I was in my twenties and trying to find my place. I had left the dumpster behind and moved into the Laundromat. I liked the big glass windows. When I leaned my face up against the cool glass and looked out at the cold world, it felt something like being home. Domis dulcis domus.

Five

By the time I reached my thirties, the Laundromat had been torn down. I heard they were going to turn the shopping center into a Walmart. I wasn’t sure why they would do this – there were already three Walmarts within two miles – but sure enough, that’s what they did. So, I left for the woods. I found some people out there with long hair who were very nice at first. They welcomed me, called me “Brother.” It brought tears to my eyes. They said they were Rainbow People. I liked them. They asked me if I wanted to be one of them. They said according to Rainbow tradition, there is only one prerequisite for joining the Family: a belly button. Once they realized I had been born in a dirty pickle jar with no umbilical cord and therefore no belly button, they apologized and left me alone.

Sex

By the time I reached my forties, I was coughing constantly. After years of smoking, the air I breathed was a consistency more like razorblade-infused syrup than a gas. I knew it wouldn’t be long. I walked towards an apartment building. I snuck in through an open window. I moved straight towards the kitchen. There was an empty pickle jar. It stunk inside, but I was pleased by the organic funk. I filled it with my own urine and sloughed off tiny flakes of dry skin with my dirty fingernails. I blew in a puff of cigarette smoke before closing the lid. The conditions were perfect. I smiled and watched as the fragments of myself danced in the dirty water. They came together, one by one, and coalesced into a swirling fetus. I placed the jar inside a cabinet and turned it so it would face the coffee cups. There was a nice cup in there with a hand-painted beach scene from Mexico City. I looked in the mirror and realized that I had grown into an inconsequential and slovenly short hunk of hairy man. C’est la vie.

Socrates at the Strip Mall

A class of children sat in a circle at the back of a parking lot. In the center of this circle, a man stood and talked to his young congregation. The man swept his arms behind him with a dramatic flourish. “You see, our story is indelible, written into the very fabric of this world. Look at this cliff. Look here at the layers of stone in this spot revealed when they blasted away a hill to make room for this shopping center. You can see our history. It is written in fossils, obviously, yet also in languages more subtle, if not downright obscure. Notice the striations in the rock, the shifts of color in various layers of soil. Yes, there is writing here. There are stories. You just have to look.”

“I see,” said a broken prepubescent squeal.

“You do? What do you see, Tye?”

“Uhm. What you told me to see.”

“Ah. What if I told you the earth was flat? Would you believe me then?”

Ginger Farrell raised her hand. The teacher lifted his head and pointed his thin chin in her direction. “Yes, Ms. Farrell?”

She swished her head and moved a lock of blonde hair away from her eyes. She held her pen in her hand. The pen sat poised and ready over the colorful notebook in her lap. “Is the world flat, Mr. Jenkins?" She asked the question without a smile. Her face wore the vacant look of sincerity.

Mr. Jenkins slapped his forehead with his palm in an overtly dramatic gesture of frustration.

The children laughed uneasily.

Mr. Jenkins wondered if they even understood the joke? He doubted it. If so, they wouldn’t laugh. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny at all.

Under an August Moon

We sat among empty beer cans, broken bottles, and cigarette butts in the small clearing. The night was sweltering. Our shirts, sopping wet with sweat, clung to our backs. A cloud of sticky smoke rose above us and slunk through the thin canopy of stray branches overhead. We coughed loudly with every exhalation underneath the full August moon while laughing at nothing at all.

We talked and joked with one another, spread rumors, and swapped horror stories of sexual conquests gone wrong. So far, they had all gone wrong for all three of us. We were still young, still inexperienced in the ways of women, still light years away from even the remotest understanding of the mysteries hidden in blessedly comforting curves.

The camping lantern shed an artificial glow on all of our faces, casting shadows where none yet belonged, giving us each a glimpse of how the other might look after the years wore down on us, and we became mere ghosts of the people we were that day. We were still healthy then, still blind, still smiling.

We knew the world moved on around us. We heard the low hum of cars on the freeway a half mile through the brush to our east. Airplanes flew overhead, red and green lights flashing. A train whistled as it rode through what would be an empty intersection at this time at night in this part of the world.

Life was moving, but we were stationary, lost in our smoke, sipping warm beer, and we stayed there a while longer, laughing at nothing at all.