Large-Hearted

Large-hearted

Someone in my bland, uniform office is a delightful storyteller.  In the vast sea of cubicles, desks lined up as far as the eye can see, equal workspaces complete with overhead bins and shelves, myriad pen holders and bored bodies crunching numbers, in one of these chairs sits someone literary and large-hearted.  Perhaps if I was socially attuned and predisposed to be a better colleague I’d know who our in-house scribe is.  Alas, I am neither of those things.  But, I am dying to solve the mystery.

I like to think of it as a happy accident, my staying late to work on month end billing only to discover a modest mound of paper unclaimed on the central printer.  I scan the floor, looking for any sign of life or a desk still alight.  Aside from the maintenance crew emptying trash cans and meagerly vacuuming the worn carpeted floors, it is just me.  When I peel my reports away I notice sheets that look nothing like the thousands of copies printed in our office daily.  It has a tidy cover page, printed and centered in lively play-bill font. Two words:  LOVE’S DIFFIDENCE, with no name accredited.

Curious.  Upon further inspection I discover I am possession of an anonymously written short story.  I thought about writing a story once but I didn’t really know how or where to start.  I couldn’t decide if I wanted to write about an acrobat with nervous habits, a naïve airline pilot turned agoraphobic, an unusually athletic fortune teller or a philandering sailor in a foreign port who encounters a world-wise heir with a dark secret.  My efforts were fruitless.  I tried scribbling a tiny tale about an aloof sales associate in a chocolaterie at odds with a regular customer whose tension eventually blossoms into an unlikely alliance but on my first attempt it read more like a palliative letter.  The second try was pithy.  I am completely unqualified to write how people talk or how to make characters speak to spur on the story or reveal things about them.  It served as more of an angry mish-mashy dispute alternating lines without any action or breaks.  I had all of this emotional intensity strung together, a repartee of terse and contentious often biting lines bandying between the two obtuse one dimensional characters.  I had no idea how to flesh them out or make them real; it isn’t a talent of mine but if you want something sewn or baked, I’m your girl.  I am educated, articulate, I read a lot and understand the basics of storytelling and admire those who can craft them but I am not one of those people.  One thing is for certain, my name, Zelda T. Grandy, will not be gracing the shelves of your favorite bookstore anytime soon. 

I set the pages aside and hunker down to try and get my work done that I was being paid handsome overtime to complete. But, out of the corner of my eye I could see them, taunting me and so I was forced to abandon the task at hand to read.  Guilt washes over me but I gently placed the cover page on the bottom of the manuscript, it occurred to me then that maybe someone wants the story to be found.  At least that’s what I tell myself when I begin to read.

PROLOGUE

Love’s diffidence is a compassionate confusion that leaves lovers bewildered beyond the rational precincts of the soul.  While love is meant to relish beauty, consume mistrust, dissolve boundaries, flush cheeks and conquer sharp edges, reservation sometimes upends its generosity and enlightenment.  In love, knowing our very existence offers no greater gift; we vow to retain the impassioned qualities, vie to solve all of the intimate mysteries ensconced and strive to be our best selves. In love we are unabridged and it comes as a distressing turn of events when it splinters. 

Love is an anomaly, a risk of which the lessons directly reflect the outcome.   Love isn’t always patient or kind, it can be annihilating and revoked without warning or justification, such as it plays out here.

THE SORROW

Chelsea

James Riley was everything.  I would like to believe that we didn’t just meet but we were with one another all along.  In an instant, he dissolved into my heart, served as my loveliest compliment and suddenly, without warning, fled.

Philosophers would have calculated our music.  With him, my whole heart was home.  All of those nights, showered in moonlight, peppered with kisses, meals accented in basil, the table strewn with peonies, the warm quality of the wind, the sweet attributes of new love; filled my paper with poetry, eased my weary mind.  Our days together were peaceful, our nights audacious.  With him gone, all that is left is longing.  Longing for the way things were.

Our life abandoned, his leaving, has broken all of my confident shapes and stirred my pleasing colours into a murky pool of doleful sadness.  When we first met, he said he was a man akin to a serious novel searching for a woman who was likened to a soft poem to introduce him to unalloyed happiness, infinite goodness.  My heart beat rapturous when he told me that any poet to look upon me would fall in love exorbitantly, submissively, insatiably, deeply, as he had in one look.

One evening while he slept I eased myself up out of the blankets to write something sweet about the magnificent regions of the human heart.  But, the shape of his handsome face in the midnight sun arrested me and I could only write his essence.  In every word, I inscribed his name.  And therefore, my whole body of work is based on his likeness.

The most mournful sound in the world is the cry culled from those who have known love and lost it.  In defeat, there are no more infinite measures of laughter, flowering plentitude of one’s innermost desires, the ground underfoot quiets, time stands still and all that can be heard are the sorrow-filled sobs of fractured lovers, lost.  It is the polar opposite of love’s beginnings.  The outpouring of tenderness and strength, trembling of hands, involuntary sighs, weakened knees.  Opposites drawn to each other while the pain of a thousand half loves are forgotten, a fresh start, a clean slate lighted by tiny stars, glowing candles and a tending touch.

It is difficult to explain but on our first meeting, it seemed as though I had always known him.  He was temperate and familiar, safe.  The essence was easy to translate into feelings but no words were ever sufficient to articulate the probability that we loved each other, somehow, in another life.  Hoping for grace, it takes tremendous courage to forfeit the order of friendship for ecstatic romance; to boldly surmise that a human bond will sustain the sacrifice.  In the flurry of trying to salvage my singular beauties, I have become disgraceful and absent-minded in the wake of this sad, voluptuous farewell.

James

Chelsea MacPherson was the richness, the resonance, the generosity, the scintillating commotion I needed to escape the sudden frost of my masculine landscape.  Her supple limbs, her sweet ivory skin served me, her nearness propelled tiny marvels, and her laughter caused me to forget my personal atrocities to the point where I no longer even understood the simplest things.  All I wanted was to spend my days placing kisses in the folds of her soft dress with her pressed into me, just south of my wildest dreams. My gratitude for her is immense; I was perpetually dazed by her forgiving embrace on lazy afternoons.  Truthfully, I have never stopped dreaming about the curve of her mouth nor has the fire in my heart extinguished, but, as an honourable man, I could no longer accept her praise when she was blind to the knowledge of my wrongs, of that I was inarticulate. My intentions were not to break her heart but to set her free, for after careful calculation I concluded my offerings were not sufficient to sustain her happiness.  Through the tears, spilling from her fraught eyes, she will not see my parting was for her but in time perhaps she will understand.  There was a small part of me that desperately wanted someone to recognize a hole or a weakness of some kind, a small fraction of wrongness in this quarrel for leaving after watching the woman who trusted me with her with her heart, crumble.  In the end, it was the right thing to do, for each of us. 

THE COURTSHIP

Chelsea

I came to him, alone in felicity, content to pass off his eager utterances for a flirtatious encounter and little else.  He persisted.  He arrived at my door, hands full of pink cabbage roses, eyes of a willful suitor, an enthralled animal.  Waiting for love was an impatient endeavor.  And then he appeared, tempted me with noble passions, pleasures we could commit our innocence to.  Falling into true love is akin to delicate handwritten letters sent to Heaven, like fruitful bushels of ripe berries dropping over a lazy back yard fence, beckoning.  A delectable treat, inviting hunger.  A beautiful stranger became my companion.  I was blessed.

James

I set out to conquer her fawning face, burn her mouth with kisses, perfume her perfect skin with a tempting touch.  She resisted.  I replied to her mopes and sighs with fragrant flowers, cottons and silks, delights she could not oppose.  I won her affections slowly until she permitted me to crash my vessel into her mainland, shipwrecked, stranded, with only her supple sensations to ease me.  Love was a wound in my weathered body and her, undoubtedly, the immediate antidote for my ills.  Two people, afraid of each other, afraid of the promise, surrendered.  I allowed myself to lean into her, declare stubborn defeat and embrace intimacy.  A wretched boy nestled into her peaceful valley and emerged a temperate man.

THE PERSUASION

Chelsea

Together, we personified seductive affirmations, erotic quotients of poetic sexual renderings, one stanza by slow stanza, in salted sheets.  The slow sweep of his qualified hand revealed he was as perverse as he is gentle.

“I was born to scream your name,” he’d moan against my naked neck.

I blossomed under his fingers, he exceeded all expectations.  Ours were two bodies whose needs and vulnerabilities synchronized one blissful encounter after another.  In warm, navy blue air, lazily exhaling, flesh soaked of sweat, irises floating dreamily, we coupled.  As one.  I think I might die if I can’t touch him.

James

The play of light on the contours of her inner thigh defied the Heavens.  She willingly gave her breast to my eager mouth, her palm pressed into the back of my neck.  She was a wildfire, opening her body freely, losing consciousness to the uncontrolled abandon of want beyond all sensibilities.

She would whisper, the same time as her breath would shudder, “I want you beached deep inside of me, lover.”

It was exhilarating to see her so exposed, willing to be so defenseless and submitting, so filthy rich in desire.  To taste all the soft places of her body, dominated my Eros force, coerced my wholeness to come apart.  Over and over from the dark triangle of her femininity to the flush of her cheeks, she moved me, over mountains and wild carnal terrain.

The first line makes me feel as if I am about to endure a saccharine Hallmark romance but the intensity of emotion in the carefully chosen words prove otherwise.  This is no light-hearted venture; the story brims with devastating disappointment, enthralling twists and intense natures.  Whoever wrote this did so with thoughtful consideration to navigate the complexities of a broken heart underscored with the most crucial element of love, passion.  Having a meaningful relationship end myself, I feel the tale tug at my heart-strings.  Although I was the one to end it, I still identify with the emptiness, the desolation when you part ways with a person with whom you were intimate.  These characters, their doleful disposition for which my charity and sympathy pines for, astounds.  Our phantom wordsmith is a slow careful writer with a penchant for poetic sentiment.  I am moved by the story’s majestic pace, the power and urgency of the words, exceptional.   If Rumi wrote a modern day love story, this would be it.  Yet, the question still burns, who is this Rumi?

THE MISFORTUNE

They were never meant to be in the car together.  But, it was raining.  James drove slowly along Main Street toward his new apartment, he saw a familiar umbrella, a bright bloom of a painted nature inspired motif, a gift he had given her himself, ushering hastily along the sidewalk. She hated the rain, the woman he loved but could no longer be with.  He put the passenger window down a crack and called for her to get in.  She pretended to ignore him and scurried on.  He continued, “Chelsea, please get in the car.  Your feet are soaked.  You’ll catch a death of a cold, love.”

She stubbornly stomped her feet through the puddles and muttered, “Why are you so worried about me now, when you so clearly never worried before?  I’m fine.”

James sighed, still slowly following her while his windshield wipers declared defeat against the forceful rain, “Home is still six blocks away for you.  Please, just get in.  I’ll drop you off, I won’t breathe a word.”

A crack of thunder clapped and her umbrella blew inside out from a potent gust of wind causing Chelsea to almost lose her footing.  She gave in and flung herself in the car, stuffing her over-sized bag in at James and wrestled the mangled umbrella in with her before slamming the door shut.  “Just drive.  Don’t talk.”

James examined his water-logged car companion but she denied eye contact.  The rain thrashed down, James struggled to see through the windshield as he inched forward to take Chelsea home.  James reached for her hand watching her face turn into a perfect scowl on contact, “I’ll have you home soon …”

“No talking.  Please.  Just drive,” she spat pushing him away.

“I know things between us are strained but can we at least be civil?  Please?”

“You have no right to ask me for anything.  Do not speak to me,” her voice cracked, “just DRIVE.”

James inhaled a sharp breath from her tone, nodded and concentrated on the road.  It happened suddenly.  A flash of bright lights, the loud blaring of horn and the offensive crunch of metal, the impact lurching Chelsea forward and James toward her, a wasted effort to shield her. The force of the crash

What the fudge!?  An unfinished sentence mid-way down the page?! Is that it?!  I run to the copier to see if I missed a few pages, carefully rifling through my own to make sure they aren’t mixed together.  Nothing.  For whatever reason it is that I came into this rotting pear of a writer’s orbit, there is no excuse to print off and abandon pages of a story that is unfinished, it had barely begun.  It’s a strange complaint, but at least be considerate enough to not leave a reader hanging.  The writer rises beautifully to the occasion and then just stops in the most absurd place.  I understand the genuine heart of this writer, lyrical without being apologetic, someone who has built rich and beautiful characters, from what I can tell, with a very real struggle but it isn’t even a small act of charity to read a completed story, it’s necessary.  The end of a story is supposed to be transformative with the presence of keen insight or a realization, an epiphany even.  What starts out as a tragic and romantic read ended so abruptly, I feel cheated.  A storyteller’s primary responsibility is to entertain, so that the reader may derive small pleasures from the words, intellectual stimulation, emotional resonance, linguistic flare and aesthetic aptitude.  I was well on my way, experiencing all of those things and then with the sudden stop, I feel like I am under a thick canopy of heavy fog. I need to know what happened to Chelsea and James.  I need to know why he left her.  I need to know what happens in the crash.  I must.  My immediate mission, to delve into the superficial lives of office drones to try and determine who wrote this incomplete story.

I start at Janet Garrison’s desk.  I recall her telling me once that she wishes she owned a house and could live in the Palm Springs desert at the foot of the Santa Rosa Mountains where Ray Bradbury and the Rat Pack once lived.  That’s a literary reference, some kind of extended metaphor maybe so it seemed as good a place as any to start.  It’s safe to say that if you were to try and judge by her cubicle if she is the scribe there’s very little to go on.  While some don’t know how to keep their workspaces tasteful, Janet lacks the ability to decorate at all.  The dull white modular panels of her cubicle glare at me.  Her desk is generic, stapler, a neat pile of file folders, a pen, an empty blue bin for recycling and a 22’x17’ Blueline monthly desk pad calendar with not a thing written on it unless you count tiny red stars in the bottom corners of the squares every three days.  Only Janet knows what those are for.  In terms of clues, Janet’s desk is fruitless. 

I’m one hundred and fifty percent sure that it’s not Deezy.  I don’t even know the kid’s real or full name.  Just Deezy.   He’s our resident rocker, rife with youthful impatience, long scraggily hair that our boss insists he wear back in a ponytail.  He has a mini-fridge under his desk full of energy drinks and chocolate bars.  By day he’s an accounts rep, by night he’s a drummer for a heavy metal band called Scourge.  There is nothing remotely romantic about a cubicle decked out in Metallica paraphernalia.  Deezy is judged harshly by some of the folks on our floor for his unkempt appearance, often referring to him, behind his back mind you, as a hardened longhair with lesser intelligence, a guy who traded his moral compass for the Devil’s music.  In truth, Deezy is a decent human being.  He adores every piercing in his girlfriend’s face and he watches out for his Gramps.  Deezy is good at his job and has never called in sick in five years, even when he’s gigging.  He just likes loud, fast music and banging on drums.  No flies on that guy.  He’s no Rumi.

Patsy Simpson, could my Rumi be Patsy Simpson?  Her marbles are as loose as her morals and her décor is a direct reflection.  She has a red feather boa wound around her floor model halogen lamp, a phallic shaped shot glass strung on a pair of metallic gold beads dangles from the on/off switch, both items look well used, relics really, souvenirs I’m sure.  All of this to compliment her long painted blatantly fake nails, box bleached hair she wears in a loose shoulder length perm, her tights-are-pants policy, too tight sweaters, passé  pumps and a penchant for every crass shade of frosted lipstick.  Patsy enjoys Chippendale strippers, the occasional nude modeling job at the Art Institute, mechanical bulls, and Jager bombs.  The articles on her desk tell that very story.  Patsy’s bulletin board is full of pictures of her and like-minded friends and young shirtless men in various stages of shenanigans and undress.  It is improbable that the woman secretly known around our office as the village slut wrote a deep love story.  I think it is safe to say she is far too busy to find time for highbrow and heartfelt creative writing.  Is she Rumi?  Negative.

I doubt very much Arthur King is the man I’m looking for although stranger things have happened.  Arthur is what you would call a man’s man.  Around the water cooler, he often talks about his Chevrolet Silverado full size pick-up with boyish jubilation.  He comes to work wearing un-tucked button down shirts and jeans with the faint trail of Old Spice wafting behind him.  Arthur’s cubicle is decked out in guy stuff.  He took it upon himself to get creative and cover his white walls with camouflage fabric with a 2013 Duck Dynasty calendar full of chicken scratch hanging in the middle.  An avid fisherman, he has several photos of himself proudly displaying his catch.  There are ones of him holding up a bass and a trout, and an 8x10 of him with a catfish and a white perch in each hand, proud as punch.  In between he has a photo of a girl tucked in but you can only see her blonde bangs and her eyes.  You can tell she’s smiling.  I stealthily situate it so her whole face is showing.  Pretty girl.  It’s too bad she can’t influence him to be a bit tidier.  His desk is strewn with pens, paperclips, candy wrappers and half eaten things.  There’s also a sticky dark ring under his coffee cup that says:  A REEL EXPERT CAN TACKLE ANYTHING.  I don’t think Arthur is the creative culprit.

Maybe our writer is Maude Patch.  Maude is the matriarch of our office and a proud grandmother.  Her desk is plastered with photos of and artwork from all of her babies as she refers to them.  Her photos and their creations are displayed delightfully among her potted plants; heartleaf philodendrons, peace lilies and an impressive cactus, a knobby coat sweater rests on the back of her chair.  For a wide robust woman, Maude eats like a bird and prays a lot.  She has a rosary hanging off the corner of her computer monitor to compliment her other religious relics including a small army of Virgin Mary statuettes.  Could her cozy nanny image be a façade, a ruse to cover up burgeoning affections by way of Chelsea and James?  If so, I wonder how many times she would have to recite the Hail Mary after typing out erotic imaginings.  I did overhear a discussion she had once with our boss about whether or not Orson Wells re-invented cinema with ‘Citizen Kane’.  Her staunch argument was that he had.  My boss firmly disagreed saying the film was highly over-rated and dull.  Maude bit her tongue and took the high road.  Bless her heart.

Could someone who idolizes a golf-pro be a stunning romantic writer?  Braeden Thomas’s workspace is a shrine to Eldrick Tont Woods, better known as Tiger Woods.  His walls are outlined in golf green and everything is in its right place.  He has a strategically placed copy of How I Play Golf on his desktop and swears the autograph on the inside is from Tiger himself.  He can often be seen posing with a putter, checking his stance in a full length mirror hung alongside the end of his cubicle.  If I have to hear about Tiger’s perfect shot one more time I might clock him with his own driver.  The last time we spoke, it was a standoffish encounter in the lunch room while I was eating vanilla ice-cream and he was moaning on about the infamous moment, “It was a perfect shot I tell you, a 3-wood on No. 14 at Saint Andrews.  Man, I wish I could have been there.”  I rolled my eyes but he didn’t notice because he was too busy checking out what his behind looked like in his new golf pants in the reflection of the fridge.  I’m not sure a golf-obsessed narcissist with a self-imposing presence is capable of creating the formal elegance I discovered on those pieces of paper.

Alice Vogel is a potential suspect.  Alice, with her mellifluous voice is always leaving me tidy notes in her slanted handwriting to commend me on a job well done or to encourage me when I’m having a bad day or simply just because.  She is a former teacher so it is in her nature to be encouraging and root for her pupils, in this case her peers.  Bright-faced and tidy, Alice is a woman who seldom veers away from primary colors and loves her loafers.  She could potentially have the hutzpah to pen delicate love story.  A stickler for grammar and a lover of history, Alice can often be seen with a book in her hand a pot of tea hiding under a crocheted tea cozy on her desk.  She plays her cards very close to her chest, private and doesn’t share a lot about her life outside of the office.  The very fact that she is so guarded  allows me to visualize her stashed away with a laptop typing faster than she can think, careful no one is watching.  Alice wears slacks and wears her hair short, no jewelry, no sign of sentimentality.  Vanilla.  Sweet.  Mysterious.  Probable scribe?  Very probable.

Maybe it’s someone younger, like Caitlin Caldwell.  In my opinion, she’s the prettiest girl in the office.  Helpful and generous with her time, she has long luxurious copper penny red hair, big brown eyes and a faint spray of freckles across the bridge of her button nose.  Everything in her workspace celebrates every shade of pink; pink heart-shaped post-its, a bejeweled photo frame holding her wedding photo to a high ranking navy official, pens, elastics, a calculator, all pink.  Her daily desk calendar for this year is of glamorous designer shoes.  Our mailman, Kent, who likes to stop and soak up some of her pleasant personality, habitually comes by first thing in the morning to flip the calendar and reveal the daily shoe.   Certainly a girl smitten with Audrey Hepburn whose face adorns her mouse pad and whose quotes appear on her cork board, quotes like, “The best thing to hold onto in life is each other,” would be prime to outline the focus of unconditional affection, amorous pleas and the throes of human heartbreak in prose form.  Caitlin Caldwell is the top contender so far.  Also, the fact that her book shelf includes novels by Nicholas Sparks alongside her accounting journals and a Michael Buble concert ticket to commemorate the day her husband proposed seem like firm romantic clues.

I know for sure it isn’t our resident Star Wars nerd, Alvin Winston.  His desk is lined with action figures, Yoda, Boba Fet, Darth Vader, Hans Solo and a slew of white storm troopers.  You can often hear him say, “Into the garbage chute, flyboy!” when he sends something to the trash on his computer.  The interesting thing about Alvin is that he’s an anti-bullying advocate.  He has designed and implemented a support and advocacy group for bullied youth called Heads Up High.  He saves his vacation time and tours local schools with a clear message of fairness and equality.   Our receptionist, Kitty Lewis was permitted entrance to his lair one afternoon, frantic about her eight year old son’s encounter with a bully and asked for advice.  I overheard the conversation.  He said, “The first thing you need to do is model confident behaviors at home.  Kids are like little sponges, they look to us for guidance.  So, if for example you were having a hard time standing up to someone at work, don’t voice it at home.  They listen and they learn every single thing we do.  Spend some time talking about empathy.  If your kid understands that maybe the dude bullying him lacks self-confidence or is having a tough time at home, it could help.  Also, the way people treat us is a direct reflection of how they feel about themselves so teaching kids to not take things so personally is vital and then their self-confidence isn’t compromised.  Happiness is empowering, man.  Be positive at home and encourage an open dialogue so that your kid will feel safe confiding in you.  If he comes home and says, ‘So and so is really mean,’ don’t freak out.  Instead, mirror their statements and be calm.  Telling your kiddies you understand they are hurting and why they are feeling crappy means a lot.”  For a scrawny mathematician who spends his time quoting Star Wars, he certainly has his ducks in a row, it doesn’t make him my Rumi though.  I wonder if he said, “May the force be with you,” at the end of their conversation? 

The more I think about it, the longer I investigate my co-worker’s cubicles; Alma Watkins seems a likely culprit to have penned Love’s Diffidence.  She is a young olive skinned girl, a single mother who lives with her only living relative.  Gran Heddy watches over three year old Quinn while Alma works two jobs, sometimes three in the summer months to carry them through.  Alma’s story is sad.  She married a gorgeous firefighter, her high school sweetheart, bought a lovely house in the suburbs and then soon had their only child.  When Quinn was two weeks old, Adam Watkins perished in a violent blaze at a local nursing home while trying to get the residents to safety.  He was able to rescue all but one, the building collapsed before they were able to get out.  Alma is a suspect because while her work-space is semi-generic, she transformed her cork board into a vision board.  It is full of feel-good affirmations, positive life quotes, and magazine cut-outs of all the things she wishes for her life.  She explained to me once that her therapist suggested the idea as a way to focus on an optimistic future after such tremendous loss.  There in plain view is a glossy photo of a large farm house complete with a wide front porch and two cozy chairs, a pair of floral rubber boots, an antique sewing machine, a Vera Wang wedding dress, the Eiffel Tower, a smiling photo of Nora Ephron and a snow white dove I imagine to be a symbol of peace for her.  If I am to interpret her visions, she’s done well to set small attainable goals while looking ahead to achievements to flesh out the bigger picture which is obviously to someday marry again.  It is the Nora Ephron photo that causes me to wonder, to suspect.  Is she symbolic for her future desires or to be able to emulate the work Nora has created, writing romance for public consumption?  My suspicions are high.  Alma is eloquent and smart, it is indeed possible.

In theory, it could be anyone in this office.  Just because a person has a penchant for fast cars or wears crocs and knits doesn’t mean we should assume they are incapable of writing something beautiful and profound.  I can’t be sure someone who is full of themselves didn’t write it or accept that someone did write it because she owns heart-shaped post-its.  What a conundrum.

Imagine my royal surprise when I am ready to pack it in and moveto power down my computer when the resident rocker pops his head around the corner of my cubicle.  Deezy is decked out in his gig attire, tight jeans ripped and faded, Black Label Society t-shirt; his hair was as big as his goofy grin.

“Hi Deez, what are you doing here so late?  On your way to a gig?”

“Oh, ya.”  Deezy pats a pair of drumsticks in his back jeans pocket,  “Say Zelda, so I printed some stuff and I just wondered if you might have picked it up outta that there printer? “

Shut the front door.  No way. 

“Uh … well, there are these.”  I casually flash the pages.

“Wicked, thanks!”  He plucks them from my reluctant fingers, “I was noodling around this morning and was totally in the zone.  There was more but remember we had that freak flash power outage?  Well, I didn’t hit save for a really long time cuz like I was just bashing and bashing it out.  Lost almost the whole story.   Crazy what!?” 

“Oh no, that is terribly unfortunate.  I didn’t know you wrote.” 

Agog.  Mystery solved.

“Working on a little something for my creative writing class.”

“What a bummer that you lost some of it today, that’s unfortunate.”

Unfortunate for me.

“Ya, I know eh, wild.  Geez.  I hope I can remember all the stuff I keyed in.”  He rolls up the story in his hand and drums it on his thigh.  “Anyways, Zelda.  Thanks for holding on to my stuff.  Actually um I’m glad you had it.  Someone else probably might of tossed it out.”

“No problem, Deezy.  Happy to help.” 

Sweet lord above, how can a heavy metal drummer with such a poor grasp of verbal communication write such tender prose? 

“Have a good show!”

“Ya!  Rock on!”

“Hey, Deezy?”

“Yo!”

“Any chance you might let me read your story when it’s finished? “

“Oh man, ya, for sure!  Totally.  Be really awesome cool to get some feedback from ya.”

“I look forward to reading it.”

Write fast. 

“Cheers!  I  gotta get going or I’ll be late.”

Moral of the story, obviously, never ever make assumptions.

** 

I still see things that need to be fixed but I'm allowing myself to share this with you because I need to let go of it so I can breathe and move on with the other two stories that are nagging at me.  Well, three.  Lord knows when they'll all be finished but I need some space away from this one.  I loved writing it though and I had fun constructing the cubicles.  I think that was my favorite part.

I hope you at least enjoy it a little bit.

In propinquity,

Nic