Skip to main content

Seeds and Black Suits

There’s a man at the door. He’s dressed in too many layers of black for the warm summer evening, and his sunglasses are thick, almost plated. Clark can’t see any eyes behind them. Just the black spots looking down. 


There is a car, idling on the road, a sparkling black. It’s undeniably new with the way everything shines, all that unmolested leather looking so clean that Clark can practically smell it. It seems, Clark thinks to himself, like it’s freshly rolled off from the factory floor, and he imagines that’s exactly how that model would’ve looked thirty years ago, when they were indeed so freshly born. Clark does not know how he knows the inside is clean bordering on clean-from-lack-of-use because the windows are tinted to be almost as black as the suit the man is wearing. Neither can he see whoever else is sitting in the car, but the boy can sense them, looking back. 


“I know you”, says the man at the door. 


Clark says nothing. He looks up into his own reflection in the glasses, looking lonely and unfamiliar against a sea of glossy dark. 


The man has an uncomfortably long neck, he seems very close even as far away as he is and his face peers down with a tilt that is eerie. Clark pictures an odd, dark-eyed dog in that tilt, an animalistic unpredictability buried beneath a mundane facade. He can’t see any eyes behind the man’s glasses, but he can see that well enough. 


“I know you”, says the man again, “from the Lot.” 


Clark knows the Lot. The small patch of grass and puddles and stubborn trees growing by the old Munitions Store. The Lot that somehow takes Clark nearly two hours to cross despite its seeming small size. Clark goes there almost every day now. Clark dreams about the Lot. 


Something like insight comes, quietly. The man is pressing something into the boy’s hand, something metallic and unnaturally cold, a sliver of pure winter that stings against his skin. 


“Take it the Lot”, says the man at the door. “Put it in the ground.” 


Clark says nothing. Words are unnecessary, he feels down inside, the cold casting them away. 


The man walks backward one step, standing tall and unmoved, as if nothing at all had transpired. Clark and the man are silent, and time passes over them. This, the silence, is the last part of the exchange. When it ends, the man turns away completely, and takes nine measured strides back into the car. Even when the door opens, Clark sees nothing inside but the dark and feels nothing more than the sense of someone inside, looking out back at him. 


In silence, the car glides away.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Find Your Own Way Out

 Find Your Own Way Out What if things could be undone before you’d done them? Or after? What if you could be rewritten, and never know it? What’s beyond time, what’s beyond death? What lies out in the places between places, above and outside of places? What’s in the basement and the attic of God, the places he won’t look, won’t open up to us? That’s what the note said in the empty, cold house.  It’s handwriting was rushed, the letters looping and stretched, trying to run away from the page to somewhere else. Somewhere else beyond the ominous meaning, the fate of whoever wrote it.  Water drip-drip-drips  from the faucet. Trying to fill that uncomfortable, hungry silence. Something thumps  in the attic, wood creaking before abating back into the quiet.  There are things in the house. There is nothing in the house.  Empty picture frames that you can feel unseen smiles from. If you’d run your hands across the walls there would be the essence of dust from a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tall Grass Kingdoms

We stay up late. Walk through the tall grass, let it’s fingertips anoint us in quiet summer rites. The disembodied orchestra rings out from everywhere, crickets creaking and frogs tolling and bats chittering; the voices of coronation, our adoring audience.  Sweep hands outward to our sides, catching waves of iridescence. Fireflies everywhere, indomitable omnipresent, and between them and the star-crowded sky above it’s like we float out in a mystical cosmos. All alight. All ablaze.  Home is somewhere far away, beyond us. Lost and forgotten like schedules, like good habits. We’re runaways, self exiles hungry for adventure. We share words, drawn so close by that impossible summertime magnetism.  But at the end of the night, standing up in the tall grass, home is just over there, over the hill and the fireflies are a dim trickle. Inviting stars turned cold, unblinking. We share fragile smiles— the last we’ll exchange.
Post a Comment
Read more

Review

 “It’s you this time.”  Look at everyone. All the staring faces. So many wide, watching eyes trying to mask their terror. The macabre interest hidden just behind is all to obvious— because you’ve done the same thing when the Calls came. It was you a few days ago, watching the Selection, feeling the strange thrill spasm through you. Fear from the potential, arousal from the promise, and all of it mixed by relief when someone else was chosen. You too had been part of the many quiet whispers and loaded, meaningful wordless looks. Thinking. Who would it be this time? Who? Why? Why were they chosen?   Someone coughs and all your thinking implodes. That was then . This is now. It’s you. The stares, the quiet whispers and exchanged glances; a solar system of human emotion all about what you will undertake. You lower your gaze to the Phone.  That’s just what it is. A Phone. Sharp, elegant glistening black. It should be worn, scuffed from all that usage, it’s paint changed fr...
Post a Comment
Read more