The Morrison kitchen was a nice kitchen for a nice home of nice parents and children. There was ring of advent candles on the table, the first purple burnt to its stub. Ornamental plates decked the cleanscrubbed walls. There was the right amount of mess by the front door where the mail was to suggest proper human habitation, and nothing more.
The chicken potpie had been served into six exactly equal portions, and almost every plate reflected this unique mealtime brand of justice. Gentle protestations of no more, too much filled the dining space as each took their due, punctuated by a modest narrowing of the eyes and a shake of the head with a tired, fauxstretch-induced tilt back from the table. Every eatingplace echoed this habit save for the corner, where a plate had already been scraped clean before the man of the house had filled his beerglass.
For the praise of the ‘amighty, said Mr. Comfort.
What is it, deer?
Mrs. Comfort was dabbing at her unsullied dimples with a napkin.
Woodja take a look at Jack’s plate?
For the praise of the ‘amighty, said Mrs. Comfort. Well I don’t have enough food to even say he’s eaten with us.
There’s half the potpie left, said little blondehaired Sammy Comfort from the depths of her own missized wooden chair.
For the praise of the ‘amighty, the parentals muttered at shifting intervals, the little voice either going entirely unheard or coming from a place that was too far away to reach their ears.
Across the table from Jack was the oldest Comfort child of them all, old Daniel Comfort, who peered through blackrimmed spectacles at the iPhone in his right palm, thumb furiously working over the keys, while he held captive and aloft in his left the pieshovel dripping with gravy and the chickensauce.
Well, said Daniel Comfort from behind his spectacles. Apple’s on the move again.
Out the window behind old Daniel the treebranches were wavering light in the breeze and split the sunrays glittering in that star’s setting. The light cut a semicircle of shadow on the table and Jack could feel the apex of it envelope his head in its warmth. His gaze shifted freely between the upheld pieserver and the branch waving just beyond, the dance of the latter a cruel backdrop to the stillness of the former.
Deer, Mr. Comfort was saying. Have you seen what they did to that place off Archer?
Deer, I haven’t.
I mean old Wellington’s place. You know the one.
I think I do, deer.
There was no change of the position of old Daniel’s arms. Thus emerging from that technological Ovid –
Have you seen what DuPont did last week? I mean…
That place sure could use that show, said Mrs. Comfort. You know deer?
The man of the house took a moment to rip from his potpie laden fork and with a hearty swallow said something about needing to give that bastard Higgins a call about the gutters.
Did you hear me, deer?
What?
I said that place sure could use that show. You know the one. Where they go in and give it a fixup and all.
She twiddled her fingers in the air and cracked her wrists when she said a fixup and all in a motion of both carelessness and happily detached pre-eminence.
Whatsitcalled. Dreams of Your Home, or something.
Ah, said old Daniel, shifting in his seat. Ah-ah. So Meredith has finally Facebooked me. Ah-ah.
Either pass that serving utensil, Jack said, or - leveling his eyes on his mother - may I be
excused?
America’s Next Top Home, said Mr. Comfort through a Coors Light mustache. He patted his stomach and looked about with something amounting to a sly grin.
No, that’s not it…
I do wonder what she was waiting for, said old Daniel, using a shoulder to slide his glasses farther up his nose. The motion of his shifting figure blocked the window from view across the table.
Either pass that serving utensil, Jack said, or may I be excused?
Mama, said Sammy.
I wanna say – no, wait – Extreme Top Makeovers, is it?
What’s this now?
The man of the house had just finished his brief foray into sidelonging irrelevance and had returned with answers. What we should do, he said, is call up that bastard Higgins tonight. That way he’s getting the message first thing. Have him come take a look at the gutters later in the day.
Mama.
Either pass that serving utensil, Jack said, or may I be excused?
Mama.
What is it, sweetie-candle?
Jack. She nodded to her brother.
What is it, Jack honey?
May I be excused?
But we’ve just sat down for our family dinner, she said.
Thank you, he said. And he stood from his chair, kissed his sister on her forehead, and left through the front screen door with a tinny whine echoing his steps down the walk.
***
The air was rich with burnt charcoal and pine drifting on the cool breeze, tempered by the warming glow of the sun. It felt good on his neck which was cold and stiff from sitting for so long. He knew then that he would not be home for nightfall.
For a time he walked. He did not know how long. He walked until his legs felt loose again and his stomach was light and he remembered that he had on his running shorts underneath his jeans and without hesitating he stowed his jeans and his t-shirt in a bush by the side of the road and he began to run.
He ran down the tarpinched cement block and veered away to the other reaches of the town, staying upon the road and the letting the woods he frequented pass him by with a blush of gentle farewell, the hopes of home kissing their warrior away to a foreign battle. Sometimes he ran to go places and for that purpose only was he concretebound. Soon he realized he had found a place that he had not been ever and continued still. Sweat beaded down his collarbone, his chest, pooled in his feet which squished with each stride. He wore no watch, told the distance he’d come only by the level of burn in his legs and how much the dancing ape in his chest had subsisted.
He’d come through a stretch of developments and apartment complexes hidden between groves of trees too thick to invite bipedal exploration. His vision was made murky by the sweat and he peered from those clouded orbs into the greens to search for an opening. And when they did come or he imagined they came he turned his gaze away to the dirt freckled sidewalk and his worn footdrops upon it with regret for that was not the way onward.
There was a little town by the end of the trees and it was beaten well by both the sun and what those who moved prepossessed in better circles might know to call as this economic climate. Singlefloor square homes with cement porches and lawns littered with windblown trash were the vanguard of its outskirts. Sidestreets led to fenced properties whose identical layouts flanked one another and were differentiated only by the type of weeds which grew unkempt in that section of this lot of long forsaken aesthetics. People, when they moved about, did so strangely, in sweatshirts and jackets toting plastic bags on their staggering ventures, as if seeking to make their condition more horrible to test the limits of whatever might be watching. Through this humid squalor the boy ran and when he came to the town’s edge he suddenly understood a tremendous thirst in his burned throat and like a cruel mathematician counted each continued step as yards away from the assured point of rehydration.
It was there that he turned, on this obscure brink of nowhereville, giving a nod from where he knew not towards the old man sitting frizzled and filthbearded by the gas pump in the shade of the overhang. He gathered his momentum and headed for him.
When he realized he would not make it home without water he did not know. The sun flicked through the trees in cruel nauseating step with his stride and when he spat it was a thick congealed wad that made it halfway across his cheek and stuck to the burnt flesh puckered by sweat. In horrible daydreams he imagined great towering stone fountains with bubbling waterfalls spilling out into an iced brook of cold sports drink. The world faded in focus but finer images at random sharpened themselves in his mind: passing cars became traveling boxes of salvation with holier oils held in juice bottles and soda cups. No though came to him and no thing was seen by him outside of the perspective of water. He giddily entertained fiendish hypotheticals as a matter of idle entertainment: were he to know it would take five years from his life, would he still welcome that fire hydrant bursting open? If he would never again fall in love with a girl, would he still welcome the road transforming into a gushing river of Gatorade? The answer would be no. All he knew of death he knew in that moment yet still he understood the principle of sacrifice. At the point he had brought his body to there was no conscious decision of morals or principles but only a realization of what is what, and such is how the boy came to know himself.
It was as though he had no peripherals. Even as he came back down the road to his town on the narrow shoulder split from the dirt by a ragged edge of crumbling asphalt and the cars were riproaring by him with the hot stink of motoroil burning on a summer’s day still he knew not his distraction. Little girls selling lemonade offered him a cup free of charge. Give one to the sweaty boy, they giggled. Sprinklers fanning the lawns at the edge of town. Mexican landscapers passing coolers filled with iced liquids. Middleaged women by the more moderate homes womanning their own gardens and flicking a hose from the shade of the porch outwards. Of all this he saw and contemplated nothing and he staggered on.
He came to the neighborhood a tripping and squishing spectacle, his skin pale and sweat pruning his fingers and palms. Long red chafe marks marred his sides beneath his shoulders where his elbows passed in friction pumping these long miles.
The street to his home was a long alley now in his tunnel vision, the simple ranch houses only neutral colored blurs. There was a row of cedars paralleling the road which stood still and erect under the sun and provided spits of shade to this otherworldly figure.
Somewhere in the distance he could hear the shouts of children at play, the crack of a capgun and an uproar of commotion. A woman scolded her faulty oven from the cracks of a passing windowsill. A crowd of teenagers played basketball by a hoop down the street, the echo of the bouncing ball ricocheting off the hollow parts of roofs and walls nearby before losing itself in the willows and ivies beyond the houses. Expletives of domestic fortitude came his way from god knows where. All this superimposed, coming to his pounding skull in varying degrees of ultraclarity and obscurity, this other normal world of man that somehow still existed after all his trial.
Old Mario across the street may have said hello to him, may have waved with a furrow to his brow. The dribbling at the court ceased and had he known to feel many pairs of eyes on him he would have but he hardly cared. He sat by the garden and drank.
***
He had once read of the great Joan Benoit who had said she swore after every marathon that she would never do that again and yet each time there she was. To say of the boy that he empathized with the great would not be true. By the top step leading to his room his leg gave from him and he collapsed. He smiled to the carpet and there he lay prone with eyes titled like a madman till came the shrieking of the dinner horn.
Song of the Day: 'Flightless Bird, American Mouth', by Iron and Wine
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