Fleeting Touches on Other's Lives
This is the first of three.
Juarez liked looking at the edges of his rearview mirror when he was stopped at traffic lights. As the cars passed in front of him, they would disappear at the edge of the mirror, and reappear, as if by magic, on the other side. It was like watching a kingfisher dive into a perfectly still lake, and it pleased him. As he drove home from work, tired from ten, twelve hour shifts sometimes, it was these little pieces of magic which kept him upright. Staring into the rearview mirror he could pretend in the streetlight fragmented dark that the headlights vanishing were blinking out on the road, returning night to the domain of the dark. Last night he drove past his house, the music playing softly on the AM radio, and continued on past where Bryce Street became Arthur Drive. He drove straight through the intersection where Arthur Drive became Beaver Street and on into the warm dark. Something of a spell overtook him then, and he drove on and on, out of the city, out of the suburbs, and out into the farmlands. Drove until the streetlights had stopped, till there were no headlights in his rearview mirror at all, and he was again in night’s hands. If you had asked him then while he was driving, where he was going, he would have answered:
“as far as it takes.”
“As far as it takes to what?”
“As far as it takes to want to go back.”
Juarez played this dialogue outloud in his car. It fit nicely with the music. The stars came out, he slowed the car. Beside him was a valley filled with stars and light and the lapping of water. The night was warm. Its dark blanket draped over his shoulders, wound around his hair. He stood under the stars and swam among them.
Then, with his head held high and dripping with cool river water, he turned his car around, and drove back.
Hellen walks to her job at the public library every morning at 6:43am. She has timed this walk countless times, and it allows just enough leeway for the 6:52 train out of Maple station to be three minutes late (its latest clocked departure time one minute and fifty three seconds after its declared departure at the aforementioned hour). When she departs the train at 7:30, four blocks away from the Harrowsfield Grand Library (a vast and regal Carnegie construction) she has twenty five minutes to walk to the rear entrance to the left of the dumpsters and make it to the time clock with five minutes to spare. Enough time to prepare her coffee, two creamers, no sugar, and sit down at the archives desk and open her book, so she will look busy when her boss comes in and he will not bother her there. On good days Hellen can manage to work a whole day away simply reading from the archives, but some days she will be forced -by a records request somewhere high up and far away from her little slice of heaven- to go out on the hunt for wayward information. A task she both relishes, and despises. The archives are deep. They have not been fully explored, and she fears they never will be. But that is the job and mortal duty of the Chief Reference Clerk at the Harrowsfield Grand Library & Research Cavern, so she dons her hard hat and waterproof poncho, takes up the Dewey’s Great Harpoon, and goes to work.
“Where am I?” thought Collin as he raised his head off of the river rocks somewhere far from home. “How did I get here?” There was a vast emptiness above him, and the currents played and ruffled his hair. “Must have dozed off again.” He kicked off the bottom of the river, silt rising all around him in the cool still water, and floated, dreaming for a moment, in the middle of the stream. He was weightless, he was empty, he was the river, flowing from the mountains, down through the green valleys and lush villages he knew nothing about. In its eternal twilight the river was infinite, it was all he knew and he knew nothing. Sunlight played down through the ripples in the sky, and he delighted in it on his dappled skin. He played there as the sun played, as the currents played, and he was full of joy and contentment. Once, he remembered old things, sad things, life away from the loving water, under a harsh and bright sun, and for a moment the currents snagged him. But those fleeting thoughts passed as soon as they came, and again he was nothing but the river, and the river flowed on to the ocean.
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