"The Treatment"

 

There was no building next to the parking lot. The only hint of structure came from the bushes planted in a line along each edge of the pavement, forming a perimeter. Errant branches like wires extended from the plants, tangling and knotting into each other and creating the rails of a botanical fence, a reminder to any visitors of the areas they may not visit. Something about it made a sliver at the center of Julie's core slow, just as her car slowed to take the right turn onto the driveway.

Julie urged the steering wheel around, returned the car to the mouth of the parking lot, and made another right turn, back onto the street she'd been traveling moments before. 

"What the hell?" Rachel said from the passenger's seat, pointing. "My appointment's and ten. And there's paperwork I've got to do."

"We have time," said Julie. "It's just--I want to get a cup of coffee with you before you go in. Can we do that? Do you mind?"

Rachel said, "Coffee. You really think my stomach can handle coffee right now?"

And Julie's hands, her knuckles night-white, twisted around the leather grip of te steering wheel as if she were kneading dough. "I know," she said. "I'm sorry."

The scenery outside, the trees and lampposts, old with all they'd seen, crossed Rachel's reflection in the window. "Tea," she said. "I can have some tea. Toast might be a good idea. Maybe an English muffin, I don't know." She shrugged. "I really don't knwo how this is going to go, you know?"

"I know," Julie said. "I'm sorry." No matter how many times she said them, the words never could make up for everything that was wrong.

The chairs in the diner booth had padded back and flat, hard seats--a little bit comfortable, but not entirely. Julie asked the waitress for coffee and, thinking of what Rachel had said in the car, an English muffin. Rachel ordered tea and an almond bear claw and lifted one of the short glasses of water brought for them to her cracked, grey lips.

"Why not, right?" Rachel said after the waitress departed. "I mean, I'm probably not going to be in the mood for a pastry afterward."

"It's whatever you want right now." Julie's smile was a thin film stretched across the surface of her face. "As long as it doesn't hurt you." The waitress came back with a mug of thick black coffee, topped with an iridescent sheen, for Julie and, for Rachel, a cup of tea.

They were seated at a table so wide that, if they were to try, they hardly would have been able to reach their arms across it. Except for a few stains and a chip that revealed layers of wooden pressboard, the tabletop was white, reflective despite the matte finish of its coating. It bounced cold morning light onto Rachel's skin as she rested her head atop her hand. Her skin bounced the light right back.

"You're having a pretty rough time with this," she said.

"I know," said Julie. "I'm--"

"If you say you're sorry one more time, I swear, I'm going to tell the cancer fairy to fucking visit you next."

"I'm scared," Julie said. The waitress returned. For what felt like a long time afterward, the English muffin and the bear claw sat on their plates between Julie and Rachel like two lonely islands in a hopelessly pale sea.

Julie reached out from her continent first. "I'm a horrible friend," she said.

"You'd be a horrible friend if you weren't afraid." Rachel pulled the bear claw closer to her and broke off a piece. "If you were happy about all of this? Then you'd be a horrible friend."

"I should be happy," said Julie. "You're getting treatment," she added when Rachel's eyebrows rose. "You have a chance to get cured. Like, completely cured. And I'm just sitting here thinking, 'Oh, but I don't know, I don't really get it.'"

"It's experimental. It's weird. Like I said, I have no idea how this is going to go."

"Then why aren't you worried? Why am I the only one freaking out right now?"

"Because your freakout's big enough to cover both of us." Rachel waited until Julie smiled and began to butter her muffin before she continued. "You know I'm terrified," she said.

"I know," said Julie.

"It's just that, more than that, I'm tired. Tired of being sick, you know? Tired of being tired, that's what they say."

"I know," said Julie.

For a while, they both looked out the window and ate in silence.

"It doesn't seem fair," Julie eventually said, "that you have to go through something so strange all alone."

This time, Rachel bridged the distance across the impossible-looking Formica-top sea between them: she took Julie's hand. "How can you offer to wait for me today and say I'm all alone?" she asked. "The parking lot's right there. I'm only walking a short way off. And all my brochures are in the bag. You can read up on the treatment while you wait, maybe make it seem a little less strange."

"I'm not just talking about the treatment," said Julie.

The words hung between them, heavy and full under the daylight. Rachel blinked as she smiled. "You," she said, "are a basketcase."

"I know," said Julie. "I'm--"

"--a very good, very neurotic friend who's going to pay for my breakfast and drive me to therapy," Rachel finished for her. Julie squeezed her fingers and felt her bones. "Come on, before I'm way the hell late," said Rachel. They stood up from the booth together and walked to the cash register arm in arm.

Julie parked the car two spaces to the right of the path that began at the east end of the parking lot. Rachel hugged her and set off on the path, which, Julie remembered from her reading, would lead Rachel to a glade a short way into the forest. The other details of the treatment Julie couldn't recall. Nor had she understood them when Rachel had tried to explain. On the other side of the lot's perimeter, the birch trees guarding the deepening path were slowly going white, their bark becoming a silvery skin starting at the branches' crowns. Julie didn't understand how birch trees did that, either. There was so much it seemed that she didn't understand.

At the edge of the lot, separating the world Julie knew from one she could barely imagine, a row of bushes sat with their branches entwined, as if they were holding hands.

"The Gauntlet"

Four sprinklers sat in a row ahead of Gus, guarding the edge where sidewalk met lawn. The neighbors had arranged them so that the areas they sprinkled overlapped, but just barely, leaving no grass ungreened. Their spray tubes spat water in arcs that swept the ground like pendulums.

Gus rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt. He studied each sprinkler's motion in turn. When he was finished, he removed his glasses and tucked them into his breast pocket. Two teenage girls riding their bicycles in the street glanced at him while they cycled past.

He ducked his head and ran.

"My House"

 

Michael has been just as careful stacking the boxes next to the curb as he had been peeling back layers of newspapers from the dishes or sliding the new refrigerator out of its enormous crate. All of their belongings are unpacked, yet the house now feels empty without walls of boxes to trap their echoes. All of their belongings are unpacked, yet something is missing; something is not where it's supposed to be. A glance outside shows Michael that his son has dragged the refrigerator crate away from the curb to the middle of the front lawn and is drawing on it with a crayon. 

"Hey, big guy," Michael says when he approaches Calvin in the yard, "what do you got going there?"

"This is my house," Calvin informs him while continuing to color. "It's got a blue door, and two windows, and red flowers."

Michael studies his work. "Buddy, that's our old house," he says. "Why don't you give it a brown door? Make it look like what we've got now."

"This is my house," Calvin says again. He is beginning to lose against his tears. "I don't want you to throw away my house." He hits the top of the crate twice, striking the words that end his sentence. Inside the crate, the sound echoes.

"Music Takes Time"

What a crappy photo. I promise, that squash is not swarmed with bugs. That's just my phone's camera adding specks.

Lucas came back to check on the seedling two days after the seed was planted.

"It's not ready yet," Old Man Bones, who watched over things that grow, told him. "Go home and practice. Da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM. That's right." Lucas frowned but marched home, tapping out a simple rhythm on his belly.

Lucas waited a month before he marched back to visit Bones, beating the same simple rhythm that the old man had given him to work with the last time. "Still not ready for you yet," Bones said, "but come here, look at this." He turned the fruit over for Lucas to see. "See this little groove right here? This little notch?" Lucas nodded and pretended that he did. "That's going to be important. You've got to be ready to play it. So try it with some extra notes. Da-DUM, da-da-DA-dum." Lucas practiced for weeks without understanding the point of it, until one day, when, tapping the rhythm against his arm, his finger twitched and struck the bone of his wrist instead. The feeling was completely different. That's all that music was, he realized: paying attention to how the slightest changes felt.

He and Old Man Bones continued like that over the following weeks, the old man giving him new steps in his rhythm each time. Finally, summer ended, and the time for harvest came. Old Man Bones gave Lucas a beautiful drum, plucked straight from the vine. "Now it's ready for you," he told the boy, who ran off and began to play. And you're ready for it, Bones' inner voice added as they both enjoyed the fruits of their labor.

"Fire"

 

He rarely thought about the trees in any of the lands their army crossed, but this one he liked. The way the thin, curved fingers of its trunk curled toward the sky made him think of fire, and fire he liked as well. He took his striking stones from his breast pocket and reached into the pouch at his hip for one of the wax-dipped wads of cotton he carried with him. Grinning, he broke from the line of freeriders and went to kneel beside the tree. It was almost as if its lines were meant to lead the flames.

"The Tooth Fairy Pillow"

 

When I was younger, I had a small pillow, pink with lace trim and a pocket about as wide as the diameter of a quarter sewn onto the front, where I kept the baby teeth that I lost. The night after a tooth had fallen out, I would slip the dead little bit of enamel into the pocket. In the morning, the pocket would hold a coin. My tooth fairy was somewhat lax in her duties, though; often, she left the teeth tucked inside along with the quarter. As more and more teeth fell out of my mouth and ended up in the pillow, I swore that I could hear them clacking together at night, as if someone were talking very quickly, or shivering in the cold.

I hadn't thought much about the tooth fairy pillow until the other day, when I was cleaning the hair out of my brush. I'm used to imagining the tangled bunches that I pull out as tumbleweeds as they drift down toward the garbage can. This time, as it was falling, the mass of hair sprouted tiny legs and feet from its bottom side, landed on the can with its toes curled over the rim, and leaped onto the floor, where it dashed toward a crack in the wall. I thought I had been hallucinating until this morning, when some of my fingernail clippings joined together and grew a hand out of nothing, and afterwards proceeded to run out the front door like the Thing.

Sometimes I've thought about the parts of me that I've lost over the years, and the other lives that I or some other version of me might have gone on to live. Now there's a knocking on my door downstairs, and I find myself wondering, What about all the thoughts I used to have? The stories I once dreamed and the terrors I used to fear? What might have become of them?

Another Update

As you can probably tell by the stretch of time between today's post and the one I made last Thursday, I decided to take a more casual approach with the blog, at least over the past few days. I still don't know what I'm going to do moving forward. I can say, though, that the time away was well spent. I took care of another obligation, one that I'm happy to have.

I wrote my partner a story.

It's a thing we do. Every year, I write two stories just for him: one for his birthday, and one for the winter holidays. (In turn, he makes some art for me on those same days. Well, he draws for my birthday, not for his. You know what I mean.) His birthday is next Tuesday, and I had the idea; I just needed the time to write it out. Stupid as it sounds, I didn't want to talk about working on it until I had the story done. After over a decade with him, I'm still worried that I'll jinx myself and not finish the story if I mention it too early. I wonder if that worry is ever going to go away. At my age, I'm beginning to doubt that it will. And that's fine. Worry keeps me on my toes, eh?

It was hard, working on a longer piece after several months of not doing so, but I will say that this blog has helped me in committing to a story idea and seeing it through to at least some kind of ending--because if I didn't, I wouldn't have a blog post for the day! Whatever this blog ends up being, though, it's been a great exercise so far.

As for the other story I was working on, much as I love sharing with people, some stories are meant only for certain readers. (And Wes, if you're reading this... um, happy birthday! I made you something!)