Story Time
Have no fears, it's brief.
The morning rain was what most other people would call dreary, but Alfred smiled through it and inhaled deeply, treasuring the unmistakable scent of fresh rain on the slick city streets. He looked to the sky through the plexiglass roof of the bus stop and admired the deep, but vibrant grays and blues in the clouds, and the silvery strips of sunlight that would peek out just-so from the edges. It was a beautiful day, unmistakably.
Unfortunately, it was also another day spent on the bus. Alfred’s car was in the shop and, truthfully, working at Macy’s didn’t exactly leave him with enough spending money to rent a car in the mean time. Hell, he thought, he was lucky to have enough money to fix that stupid Corolla, the way they paid him there. And they were lucky to still have him, the way that stupid Mr. Fedoll sneered every damn word at him like being an assistant manager made him worth two Alfreds. But anyway. He couldn’t start thinking that way just yet. He’d have Dreadful Fedoll and re-racking Levis all day to worry about soon enough, but right now here he was out in the air (waiting for the bus, but still) getting to really enjoy the rain like he used to.
He wanted to be even closer to the rain. He wanted to be in those clouds. He thought about flying on airplanes, sitting in the window seat and having the sensation of drifting through the impossible landscapes of the clouds, and how once on a flight to Minneapolis to see his mother they had flown through rain clouds (“Very dangerous!” his mother had said when he told her) and Alfred could almost smell how fresh the rain was through the plane window.
Alfred kept his eyes on the clouds through the dirty plexiglass window at the bus stop and felt the sensation of that memory wash through him and tug him closer to the rain and clouds. He kept his eyes on them as he stepped out from under the bus stop and into the rain, and as the rays of the sun reached his eyes unmarred by the grimy plexiglass he felt almost lifted, lifted toward them and through them and away from Dreadful Fedoll and everything else.
Then the curb stopped just short and he felt himself losing his balance, teetering into the street and suddenly he was twisting down to the ground at eye level with headlights and ear level with blaring horns and the next thing he never knew there wasn’t anything anymore.
The sudden blackness did not break over Alfred like a wave. It did not seep into him and over him like a languid pool spreading from an overturned inkpot. It did not reach out from hidden orifices and corners like the long tendrils of silent, secret beasts come to claim him after these many years. It just was. Where once there was a bus stop, clouds, rain, headlights, and horns there now was nothing.
Alfred did not have any flashes of light. He was not beckoned, called to the end of a long tunnel into an ethereal light that would permeate and surround him with a kind of joy and completion and give him a piece of the god that would receive him. There was no final confirmation. Nothing, however beautiful or terrible it could have been, came to him at the last with that final message. “You’re dead.”
In fact, Alfred didn’t know that he was dead. He didn’t know anything. The sudden blackness that neither seeped nor crashed did not fall over him, it just fell. In place of him, maybe. Maybe in place of the world for him, but he did not receive it. But it didn’t matter, because as surely as Alfred was dead he could not think. These ideas of life and death and all that he had done before did not occur to him because nothing occurred to him, and it no longer mattered.
In a certain way, now it never did.
The morning rain was what most other people would call dreary, but Alfred smiled through it and inhaled deeply, treasuring the unmistakable scent of fresh rain on the slick city streets. He looked to the sky through the plexiglass roof of the bus stop and admired the deep, but vibrant grays and blues in the clouds, and the silvery strips of sunlight that would peek out just-so from the edges. It was a beautiful day, unmistakably.
Unfortunately, it was also another day spent on the bus. Alfred’s car was in the shop and, truthfully, working at Macy’s didn’t exactly leave him with enough spending money to rent a car in the mean time. Hell, he thought, he was lucky to have enough money to fix that stupid Corolla, the way they paid him there. And they were lucky to still have him, the way that stupid Mr. Fedoll sneered every damn word at him like being an assistant manager made him worth two Alfreds. But anyway. He couldn’t start thinking that way just yet. He’d have Dreadful Fedoll and re-racking Levis all day to worry about soon enough, but right now here he was out in the air (waiting for the bus, but still) getting to really enjoy the rain like he used to.
He wanted to be even closer to the rain. He wanted to be in those clouds. He thought about flying on airplanes, sitting in the window seat and having the sensation of drifting through the impossible landscapes of the clouds, and how once on a flight to Minneapolis to see his mother they had flown through rain clouds (“Very dangerous!” his mother had said when he told her) and Alfred could almost smell how fresh the rain was through the plane window.
Alfred kept his eyes on the clouds through the dirty plexiglass window at the bus stop and felt the sensation of that memory wash through him and tug him closer to the rain and clouds. He kept his eyes on them as he stepped out from under the bus stop and into the rain, and as the rays of the sun reached his eyes unmarred by the grimy plexiglass he felt almost lifted, lifted toward them and through them and away from Dreadful Fedoll and everything else.
Then the curb stopped just short and he felt himself losing his balance, teetering into the street and suddenly he was twisting down to the ground at eye level with headlights and ear level with blaring horns and the next thing he never knew there wasn’t anything anymore.
The sudden blackness did not break over Alfred like a wave. It did not seep into him and over him like a languid pool spreading from an overturned inkpot. It did not reach out from hidden orifices and corners like the long tendrils of silent, secret beasts come to claim him after these many years. It just was. Where once there was a bus stop, clouds, rain, headlights, and horns there now was nothing.
Alfred did not have any flashes of light. He was not beckoned, called to the end of a long tunnel into an ethereal light that would permeate and surround him with a kind of joy and completion and give him a piece of the god that would receive him. There was no final confirmation. Nothing, however beautiful or terrible it could have been, came to him at the last with that final message. “You’re dead.”
In fact, Alfred didn’t know that he was dead. He didn’t know anything. The sudden blackness that neither seeped nor crashed did not fall over him, it just fell. In place of him, maybe. Maybe in place of the world for him, but he did not receive it. But it didn’t matter, because as surely as Alfred was dead he could not think. These ideas of life and death and all that he had done before did not occur to him because nothing occurred to him, and it no longer mattered.
In a certain way, now it never did.