penfist

stories are the bones of everything

the hill

the world they made

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The dreamer worked carefully. His long, delicate fingers moved surely over the drawings and notes, adding a detail here, and a flair there. The black pen in his hands flew from point to point, and he occasionally brought the tip down in an emphatic motion. His lean arms flexed under the white lights mounted over the sleek metal of the standing desk where he toiled. Some trick of the light made particles of dust or some other matter shimmer from time to time around the workspace. The skin around his blue eyes wrinkled up as he leaned down to check a detail. As the dreamer looked up, the stress lines in his forward relaxed for a moment.

“What next love?”

The muse threw her hair back over her shoulders, an unconscious motion, one she did dozens of times a day. Her right hand came up to her face, and she pursed her lips. From across the room, she opened her mouth, then paused a moment. Her face lit up in a smile more real than the world itself.

“Can we have a talking goat?”

The dreamer considered. He flipped through several of the large drawings, concentrating. His brow went back into furrowed mode, and the black metal pen began to dance in his fingers. The pen did a roll, and a dip and then spun around in the air with a faint whistling sound. The dreamer’s left hand caught the pen in midair, stilling it for a half second. His eyes blinked. The air around his workspace sparkled. The dreamer drew in a breath, and the metal pen came to life again, its dance resuming.

“Yes,” he said finally. “We can have a talking goat. But we can only have one.”

The pen continued its dance, and the dreamer looked up, his blue eyes piercing and serious.

“Will you keep him company? Will you make sure he is happy? A talking goat needs care you know.”

The muse stepped a half step closer to her dreamer. Her body arched, she leaned in, and her lips pursed again.

“Of course love.”

She looked at her lover, the dreamer, and smiled.

“I’ll go make us lunch.”

The muse sashayed her way out of the room.

The dreamer forced himself to look away from her retreating form, and bent his head and focused, which was his wont. On the pages of his standing desk, he plotted and planned. The pen became a whirling dervish as ink flowed from its ball point tip. An hour passed, and the muse came back into the room, bearing fresh tomato soup with basil grown in the muse’s garden, and fresh homemade flaxseed bread slices covered in ghee butter.

The dreamer walked over to their table by the window. It looked out on the rooftop garden, high above a large metropolis where everything stayed busy all the time.

The dreamer stared into his muse’s eyes, which sometimes looked green, and sometimes looked brown, depending on the light.

“I think the clouds are perfect today,” he said between bites of his flaxseed bread. He white teeth showed just a bit when he looked at the muse. They never did any other time. She made him different, somehow.

“The clouds are perfect today. Let’s put them in.”

So the dreamer did, as soon as he had finished lunch and kissed his muse on her pale forehead, and then on warm, receiving lips. It was his ritual. One of so very many he had developed since the two of them began plotting together against the reality in which they found themselves.

“I have to focus today. Our time is short, my love.”

The muse smiled, a bit sadly.

“I know love,” she said.

“After you garden, work on the list of who you want to bring, and then we’ll go to the oncologist’s office.”

The dreamer kissed his muse one more time, and bent to his task again. His hand, and the pen it held, came to life. His lips spewed up unconscious words, in an almost prayer like fashion. As the muse gardened, he built a world where her cancer was not killing her. He made forests for her, and wrote in special trees, old ones, with magnificently thick trunks that were thousands of years old. He planned the walks they would take, the ones where he could pretend to be astonished by the fact that both their names appeared together in the bark 50 feet above the ground.

The dreamer’s forehead dripped with sweat as he planned the view outside their hillside home. He labored especially intensely on the verdant greens in the grasses his muse would see out the windows of their underground home built into the hill, with the wall of windows facing east. The waterfall that came to life under the command of his mind and hand, armed only with his pen and imagination, flowed down the hillside and through the interior courtyard of the safe nest the two of them had talked so much about. That last retreat that they were going to flee towards.

Later, they went to the oncologist, and the muse was swabbed with alcohol and dosed. After, she was much braver than her dreamer, as he sobbed and held her while she threw up into the toilet. When her uncontrollable heaves finally stopped, and his eyes were clear enough for him to see, she looked up into them, and held his face.

“I love you,” she said. “I always will.” Unable to speak, he simply looked back.

The next day, it rained, and the dreamer and his muse slept in. She was sick, but well enough to hold on when he held her. They spent an hour just facing each other, eyes locked, in an easy embrace. Then he cooked while she slept the sleep of drug induced exhaustion. The dreamer came back into the room with her eggs and yoghurt, but she was too ill to eat anything. He cried, and she comforted him. She slept again.

He worked desperately. They were able to eat lunch together by the window.

“I’m almost ready love,” he said to her, later that evening.

She smiled through her pain, and her eyes came alive. Then, she had to sleep again.

He worked all night, and went through another ink cartridge. The drawer where he kept the spares was still mostly full. The dreamer worked frenetically, like a man possessed. He only stopped to check on the muse in their bed.

On a cold, blustery afternoon a few days later, the dreamer and the muse greeted their friends. She was pale, which was her normal, but also frail looking, which they did not associate her with.

Shaka, the poet, was the most visibly affected by how sick she looked. The group had not gathered in two months, and the muse was much changed.

“I’m so ready,” Shaka said, and gave the muse one of his great, big bear hugs full of pure love.

The small group gathered around the dreamer’s table.

Melanie, the tall, ethereal actress, and Matthew, her shorter, more intense partner, stood side by side as always, their bodies crackling with the electricity they generated in the inch between them.

Jennifer, the naturopath, wanted to say a few words, but the group shushed her.

“Time for that later,” said Ned, who had been a childhood companion to the dreamer, and who had once saved his life during a storm.

The dreamer looked at his muse, and then at each of their friends. His eyes, which were always engaging, seemed now to be pulling energy from each of these people he loved.

“Are all of you ready?”

They were. The dreamer opened the plain, unstained wooden door behind and to the left of his desk.

Jennifer forgot she wanted to give a speech in the light that came through from the other side. Starting with Ned, each of them went through in single file, except for the muse and her dreamer, who stepped through last, holding hands.

Several years later, under a pink sunset so beautiful that the muse wept with joy, the dreamer toasted his friends on the hillside.

“We have been here five years,” he said. The group toasted. “I love each of you with all my heart, and I want to thank you joining us on this wonderful voyage.”

“This world you made sure does have tasty grass,” said the goat. The group toasted, and the muse, who looked so full of joy she was about to burst, hugged Billy while he happily chewed grass. Then she kissed the dreamer on his lips. His eyes shone at first, and then welled with tears of happiness.

“Thank you,” she said. He said it back.

The music started, and everyone danced in the courtyard by the waterfall while the full moon watched.

The Hill

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This hill, in this city, always bustled. It bustled most in the mornings, slowed down a bit just before lunch, and then picked back up for the lunch hour. After that it stayed relatively busy until after the bars closed. Once that happened, the hill and its rows of mission houses, standing silently, with glass eyes staring into the night, the brightly painted colors muted in the semi-darkness of the street lamps, almost slept for a little while. In its neurotic existence though, the hill never quite managed complete rest. It drowsed, but never slumbered.

On this day, on the hill, it is mid-morning and overcast. There is a bit of wet in the air, and it settles on the skin of the residents who venture out. At the bottom of the hill, a stooped old man with a cane considers his journey. He is looking up towards the top of the hill. His white beard flutters slightly in the wet wind. He sighs, and begins the ascent. Slowly. Carefully. With small, halting, tentative steps. His suit, carefully pressed, withstands the advances of the air’s moist embrace. The fabric makes a scrish scrish sound with each step. The old man’s cane compliments the music of his suit with a small, slow drum beat against the uncaring concrete sidewalk. Scrish, tap, schrish, tap goes the old man’s walking song.

A car is waiting at the light just below the hill’s birthplace. The light changes, and the car jerks forward with a start, belching a cloud of white smoke onto the sidewalk holding up the cane that holds up the old man. He is enveloped for a moment, then emerges with as much dignity as he can muster, a white handkerchief done in black stripes pressed across his nose and mouth.

At the top of the hill, a young man saunters confidently, headed down. He is full of himself in his brown leather jacket. It is this year’s style and the young man has paid twice what he should have, which inflates his own self worth. His shoes are scuffed, and he is unaware that women notice details such as this. It confuses him when they turn him down for the casual sex he often offers them, using the shoes   as a compass.

Under the young man’s jacket, his dirty black t-shirt says “Relax. I’m hilarious.” His jeans are wrinkled, and he has a three day growth of stubble. A cigarette dangles carelessly from his lips, which are humming a wordless tune that is neither cheerful or compelling. It merely passes for music, in an uninspired way.

His shoes drag with each step. Sometimes he idly kicks a pebble or some other detritus down the sidewalk. The young man’s eyes narrow when he does this. As if he has some personal hatred for everything that is not the sidewalk, that is not specifically designed to facilitate his shuffling gait. One of his shoelaces drags on the ground.

A door opens halfway up the hill. The door is painted a deep red, but passersby would probably describe it as maroon, depending on the light. From the door emerges a sharply dressed woman in her mid-20s, of middling height and clad in an arranged pile of coiffed, lustrous black hair. The woman is pushing a blue baby carriage with silent polycarbonate plastic wheels. They are the kind that will not wear out for ten of thousands of years after human society has collapsed. The wheels are more durable than almost any other object on this street, which is in between being bustling at this moment.

Also present is a girl of eight or nine years, who is wearing a red dress that is not of the same red as the door from whence she just emerged, stares solemnly at the street. She is not speaking to the woman. She is not looking at the baby in the carriage. She is observing her surroundings. Scanning.

The old man shuffles up. The young man shuffles down. The trio who have just been born into the world from the other side of a red or maroon door, depending who you ask, are moving onto the sidewalk that runs up the hill in stark contrast to its wider, rougher companion, the street.

A taxi is coming over the crest of the hill that never quite sleeps. A small crowd of Polish tourists is taking pictures of the famous old burger joint at the bottom of the hill, excited by the thought of delicious dead cow parts ground up just for them and covered with sizzling sauces and a cornucopia of garnishes. The Polish people love eating ground up animal flesh that will clog their arteries with fatty deposits. They are conditioned, and never think about the animal that gave up its life. The taxi driver too is a fan of sizzled flesh patties, and plans to take his lunch at the bottom of the hill. His cab sign reads OFF DUTY.

There are a few other travelers on the street. An old Asian man is coming down the hill on the sidewalk opposite the hilarious young man who isn’t funny. He drags his gnarled, wrinkled hand along every fence separating mission houses from sidewalks and street. He appears to be counting bars fastidiously, and his lips move in a muttering prayer to the gods of the ascending count. He looks panicked in the gaps between fences. An equally old white woman follows cautiously behind the muttering old apostle of numbers and fence bars. She wants nothing to do with him, and is protectively clinging to a brown paper bag that could be filled with groceries or cocaine. This city produces dozens of old ladies whose morality may not meet Midwestern community values, so one can never be sure what old ladies are carrying around. The bag clutching woman has a piece of white toilet paper fluttering from the back of her otherwise nondescript gray pants, which hold themselves conveniently above her hips through the miracle of elastic sewn into the waistband. The elastic will not last as long as the wheels on the stroller, which is now in the middle of the opposing sidewalk, guided carefully by the middle of the street woman whose deep black hair must have some magic that keeps it from going limp. The old yellow man and the old pale woman limp their way down the hill, separate, but equally aided by gravity.

In the moist, clingy air of the steep street, in the middle of a busy district in an even busier metropolis, someone is about to die. Planning leads to congruency trumps randomness. In 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

The young man bends to tie his shoelace, which has come completely unraveled and is tripping him up. The old man steps in front of the taxi coming down the hill and holds up a single hand. His gravitas, in a single moment, goes from absent to presidential. The taxi driver stops thinking about seared flesh on assembled grain paste slices. The old man’s hand sends a message to the taxi driver’s brain which connects to his foot. The cab screeches to a halt.

The little girl makes brief eye contact with her black-haired caretaker, who could be her mother, but who is not. They both look into the stroller. The girl reaches in and pulls out a devastatingly dangerous looking gun. It is a semi-automatic .45 caliber instrument of lethality. It is made of black polymer, uses a Law Enforcement Modification trigger, and holds 12 rounds. The little girl only needs one of these, but she uses three. She has been trained.

In a practiced motion, she raises the weapon with her right hand and brings the left palm up to bear under the magazine. Her hands form a tight grip around the back of the pistol. She pulls the trigger three times, and three red holes blossom in the top of the young man’s skull. He never finishes tying his shoelace. The Polish tourists run screaming. The old man and the taxi driver exchange glances and positions. The gun in the old man’s hand does all the negotiating that is needed. The little girl reaches into the stroller again, and pulls out a white card. She tucks it into the back of the dead young man’s sport coat at the neckline. The note says, “For My Father” in neat black Times New Roman font. Probably 14 point.

The woman and the girl enter the back of the taxi while the lady with toilet paper pants and the Asian who counts fence posts gaze with astonished open mouths at the events. The taxi, now driven by the old man climbing up the hill, disappears into anonymity.

The city continues its business. Soon, it will deliver its servants to this hill. They will catalog, document, record and analyze. Then they will clean up the mess, and wash away the memory of the hilarious young man who, it may be speculated, failed to live up to the moniker on his t-shirt before meeting a bad end halfway down a hill on an otherwise nondescript day. For the young man does not look hilarious in death. Nor does the city that will be his grave seem relaxed. It is about to bustle again, and when it does, the young man’s trail will be erased.