Category: 300

A car door had slammed out on the street a minute before; that was the only reason he heard the soft knock at the door.

At this hour of the morning there was silence. No one else was fool enough to be up this early. S had been up this early. Most often, she was just falling asleep due to the insomnia and body aches that kept her restless.

He wondered if it might be her at the door. Whenever there was an unexpected knock, he always hoped it might be her, but he’d fallen out of the habit as the years passed.

When he left, she was seeing someone else. He’d said all the right things, but he was shattered. He knew he was a fool to have felt the jealousy and the anger, but he couldn’t help how he felt. Still, he didn’t want to interfere with her life.

He’d put the money in the account, and emailed her the access information, telling her if she was ever interested in taking the shot they hadn’t had to withdraw the money and buy a plane ticket to wherever he was. She said he was ridiculous – she’d said that often – but he had insisted. That had been ten years ago.

He checked the account from time to time, and they had stayed in contact, although that too had slackened over the years.

His anticipation at random knocks on the door had faded as the money continued to sit untouched and he was met with another set of Jehovah’s Witnesses or someone from the electric company asking him to switch to wind power.

As the soft knock came again, nervous anticipation raised the hair on his arms. Two days before he’d checked the account and the money had been gone.

 

 

His fingers tapped a steady rhythm on the keys. It was the only sound in the black silence of the morning. A single bulb gave off limp light above the table before being swallowed by the darkness.

They thought he was crazy to wake so early, but no one understood the burning need to record this story. It was a competition of a sort, trying to get the words on the page before the memory of the events disappeared or his time ran out.

That was what concerned him most. The story was burned into his brain, some of the details changed, but he knew the gist of what needed telling. It was time that concerned him.

He could feel it encroaching, as though someone were following him. He felt its presence throughout each day as he sat in his cubicle staring at a computer screen and work that did not matter.

He felt it in the pain that coursed through his fingers, through his wrists, up his forearms to his elbows every time he typed a word.

He felt it in the stiffness in his lower back and the knots in his upper back, and the sciatica that forced him to get up and move every few minutes instead of focusing on the telling.

His family told him he was crazy. His friends shook their heads in disbelief. They all wished he would stop torturing himself with the memory and the telling. They all felt no story was so important enough to cause him this pain, but he knew different.

And so he woke up well before the dawn each day, brewed a cup of coffee and curled into the pain to tell the story. His fingers pummeled the keys, his words bled in black lines across the page.