Julian stumbled into the kitchen. He was late for work and half-dressed and he squinted at the mugs in the dish rack. He tried to pick a clean one without the help of his glasses.
“You are a relentless egoist,” a voice announced from the other side of the room.
This was Bill, Julian’s housemate. Bill was going through a phase of extreme honesty. Guerilla truth, he called it. Rebel candor.
“That’s wonderful,” Julian said. “Just what I needed.”
“How do you feel about what I’ve just said?”
Bill sat rigidly in his chair, looking dressed for a job interview — hair combed, khakis ironed to a pleat.
Julian poured himself a cup of coffee and sipped at it and looked over the rim of his mug. “I feel worried about you.”
“I’m being completely honest,” Bill said. “Please afford me the same courtesy. What are you thinking right now?”
Julian thought that all Bill’s honesty would afford him was an invitation to move out. They planned to tell him tonight at a house meeting. “I’m thinking,” he said and closed his eyes, feeling the coffee steam on his face. “I’m thinking it’s a shame we only spend a third of our lives asleep. Do you think death is like sleep?”
He scurried out of the kitchen before Bill could answer. Julian knew comments like these irritated Bill, made him feel as if he were getting close to some truth, some dark, murky center. It was cruel to tease him, but Julian felt that underneath the honesty was a desire to see a person humbled.
Upstairs, Julian pulled on his sweat pants and a T-shirt, not bothering with anything clean since he would be changing into his costume at work. He set the coffee mug on a dresser crowded with similar mugs, some starting to fill with powdery muffin tops of mold. An uncut geode held a stack of phone messages in place. They were all from Ellen, his girlfriend of two months. She would be breaking up with him any day now, probably as soon as she could get him on the phone. It was just a matter of time. Everyone who dated him left within a few months, without exception. “You’re going to be a real heartbreaker,” his mother used to say, but it never came to pass. There was something unappealing about him that wasn’t apparent right away, a flaw that slowly bled through his skin, staining him. Now it was Ellen’s turn to give him the speech. She was nicer than most. He was sure she would be kind, which was, of course, the worst.
Julian dug his car keys out of an oversized ashtray filled with coins, matchbooks and other things he found in his pockets at the end of the day: a plastic car, a torn balloon. Outside, a bus rumbled past and shook the house, a lawn mower hummed in the distance. The world was waking up.
Julian wandered into the hallway and knocked on a closed door. “Katrina, don’t hog the bathroom,” he said. Katrina had lived there the longest. She owned most of the furniture and all of the hanging plants that filled the common rooms. They drooled puddles and cast scary, claw-like shadows that reminded him of insects with fluttery legs. “Hello?” Julian rattled the handle. It was locked.
“I’m shaving,” Katrina said.
“I have to brush my teeth. I won’t look.”
“Can you do it downstairs?”
“With what?” He searched his pockets for a breath mint and settled for a piece of chocolate stuck to a dollar bill.
A door opened across the hall and Rosy tentatively peeked around the corner.
“Where’s Bill?” she whispered.
“In the kitchen.” Julian popped the chocolate into his mouth. Rosy had clumps of dried paint in her hair. She was an art major and liked to depict movie stars and politicians as hand puppets controlled by other hand puppets.
“He’s driving me crazy,” she said. “I can’t wait until tonight.”
The bathroom door opened and Katrina shook a little pink razor at them. Clouds of shaving cream stuck to her robe. “Nobody says a word. You both promised.”
Rosy frowned. “If I have to be told I’m a narcissistic manic depressive one more time—”
“If I have to hear about my transference of repressed emotion onto a ‘flora-centric universe,’ I might have to beat Bill to death with a dictionary, but we need a united front.” Katrina said. “We don’t know how he’s going to react.”
“I can’t even get my breakfast,” Rosy hissed. “I want him out tonight!”
“Keep your voices down. Jesus.” Julian ran his hand through his hair. He had a a suspicion that the only reason they were friends was because they could all agree to dislike Bill. He didn’t really know his housemates. He had answered a newspaper advertisement and moved in only a few months before. Now they were all bickering like family, like he used to with his mother and sister, Mallory, when she was ill in the months before she died. It was the illness that united them, that brought them close enough to fight. Suddenly, Julian felt depressed. Only something awful could bring him close to another person.
“I’ve got to go. I’m late,” he said and squeezed past Rosy in the hallway.
* * *
Julian parked his car and snuck in the back door at the Chick Filet Barn. One of the prep cooks stood beside a canister of helium and a box of uninflated balloons. The room was long and dim. Bare bulbs dangled from the ceiling, creating more shadow than light. Wooden shelves bowed under the weight of canned pie filling and soup stock. A thick fog of grease hung in the air. “Late,” the man said and looped a balloon over the nozzle. Printed on the front was a picture of Holly Hen, the restaurant’s mascot. She was wearing an apron and holding a spoon. As the balloon filled, the picture pulled and distorted. The black lines became gray.
Julian pulled his chicken costume off a hook, grabbing it in feathery fistfuls. “Has it been busy?”
The man shrugged, and Julian couldn’t remember if they’d met. It was a new job; something temporary until his student loans came through. Everybody who worked here looked like somebody he had known before and he could only remember the false name, the person they were not.
In the bathroom, Julian propped the costume on the sink. The chocolate had left a bad taste in his mouth and he ran his finger over his teeth, then spit. His eyes were bloodshot, pink and watery like a slice of salmon. The light buzzed and sputtered and he felt a lingering sense of gloom, like he was always here in this tiny space and when he went home at night he was only leaving here to return.
Julian stepped out of his sweat pants and wiggled into a pair of thick, white stockings. They had not been washed and there was still a small shoe print from a child who’d kicked him yesterday mid-tantrum. Julian considered the stockings to be the most ridiculous part of his costume. He bought three pairs from a dancer’s supply store; the package was marked big and tall. Ellen coaxed him into trying them on, and she used a black marker to draw clumps of V-shaped scales. She said actual chickens had reptile legs. But the scales had looked unintentional, dirty like the shoe print, and Julian had thrown the stockings away. Don’t think about Ellen, he told himself, and slid the body of the costume over his head. It was made of chicken wire overlaid with felt and feathers and it hung around him like a giant bell, his knees were the clappers.
Julian leaned against the wall to keep the costume still while he adjusted the leather shoulder straps. Each one had a series of dark stripes, like rungs in a ladder, places where the buckle had rubbed. They hinted at the different sizes of people who had worn the suit before him. One of them was his sister, Mallory. She had worked at The Barn off and on through high school when she was well. She’d been a waitress but also the mascot at parties and special occasions. Julian remembered a picture of them standing in the parking lot. She was Holly Hen, and he was sixteen, tall and gawky. It was the year his arms grew before the rest of him. She called it his Cro-Magnon phase.
Julian knelt and tied the yellow felt spats over his tennis shoes. It was not an ideal job, he knew, but after seeing the advertisement he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He applied other places, a temp agency, a pizza restaurant, but the whole time he thought about Holly Hen sitting in a dark locker, waiting for him. He imagined Mallory’s sweat bonded with the fabric. All her tiny exhalations trapped inside the mask, the sighs of boredom, her voice. He imagined this job would take him back to those years when he was sixteen and Mallory lived at home, back to the afternoons when he visited her at work and smoked Luckies in the parking lot. It would be a reunion with a younger self who had been ignorant but unstoppable. A younger self to which nothing happened forever and something could always make him feel expanded-a hit of LSD, a nicely laid wheelie, or an hour spent standing in the dark, peeking into the boxy rooms of neighbors. He liked to share their dinners and quiet moments. He needed to know how the rest of the world spent the time it had.
Julian was fascinated with the insides of things. As a child he built shoe-box dioramas and terrariums for pets he never owned. Sometimes he built rooms described in books or seen on postcards, but mostly he worked from his imagination. He liked the improbable, the interiors that gave way to chaos and possibility. There were doors on ceilings, clouds on the floor, a single floating chair. Sometimes he gave the dioramas to Mallory and she used them as dollhouses. Now he collected geodes from local quarries and old riverbeds. An assortment of them lined the bookshelves of his room. He liked knowing there was a pocket of emptiness inside each one, a jeweled chamber.
The Barn called Julian back the same day he applied. The manager recognized his name and hired him on the spot, no interview. Julian showed up the first day, the second, the third. He posed for photographs. He tousled hair and shook hands, but the job was not a reunion with a past time. It was just a machine that turned moments into money. He didn’t see Mallory in anything, couldn’t sense her. He was not expanded. But the job had its perks. He enjoyed the way his face could be secret, like his thoughts.
Julian left the bathroom and carried his clothes to the locker. Several balloons had floated to the ceiling where they gently dribbled. One was caught inside a shelf of canned corn. Julian opened his contact case and fussed with the saline. Holly Hen’s papier-mache head watched him from the locker.
The night Mallory died, Julian and his mother stayed in the hospital filling out paperwork and sitting in a blue tiled room looking at her lying under a blanket. Julian had bought flowers at the gift shop, which sat in a heap on the floor. They were supposed to be for her recovery. The doctors needed to remove scarring on her intestinal wall. The operation was routine. He remembers being surprised by the normalcy of the people around him. Nothing stopped, meals were still served, nurses chatted in the hallway. All that night and the next day when Julian did something, he thought, this is the first time without Mallory. The first yawn, the first sunrise without her, the first rainstorm, the first day of the first newspaper.
Julian spent the morning wandering through the gift shop entertaining the lunch crowd as they waited to be seated. He handed out balloons and wore a frilly, purple apron filled with cheap toys and sharp edged lollipops. A parent had complained and now he carried both regular and sugar free. The gift shop itself was attached to the restaurant so customers had to walk through it on their way in and then again to pay the bill. It was supposed to look like a country store, barrels of candy, fruit preserves with squares of gingham tied around their lids. Children’s items were placed low to the ground where they could inspire the most longing.
Inside the mask, Julian’s breathing was loud and condensation ran down his face into the collar of his T-shirt. Through a wire mesh, he looked into crosshatched faces; the constant motion of the screen made him dizzy. He tried to divert his attention with little games. His favorite one involved picking M&Ms out of the beak with his tongue. He would fill the beak, then practice tipping his head back enough for the candy to slide within range but not enough to stick it to his face. The learning curve for this was considerably steeper than it was for the job itself. He had to account for the crooked inner shaping of the beak and it needed to be done in one smooth motion, no palsy, no overt thrashing of the head that would worry parents.
“And here’s a bunny for you.” Julian offered a toy to a small girl hiding behind her mother’s legs, her hand in her mouth.
“Have you been a good girl?” he asked. The girl reached for the toy. A long ribbon of saliva followed her hand like a drooping spider web.
“Hey,” the mother said. “Let me see that.” She squinted at the bunny, turned the pieces in her palm. “This is a choking hazard.”
Julian mumbled, made a slight bow and kept moving. Behind him the little girl whimpered, and he thought of Ellen, who worked in a day care center. She said a two year old had the intelligence of a cat.
Julian stood in the back of the gift shop and tugged at the paper mache head; the dispenser beak needed filling. He wiped the sweat from his face and tore at an M&Ms packet. He heard Ellen before he saw her.
“You make a nice hen,” she said.
“Thank you.” Julian turned and rubbed his mouth, worried about chocolate streaks. “Do I have anything on my face?”
“You mean egg?”
“Not egg.”
“No, you’re clear.” Ellen glanced around the store. “Are you too busy to have lunch?” She was standing in front of a window, and the light turned her dress into a transparent cloud.
“Well—” Julian felt a slight squeeze of panic.
“There’s only one right answer,” she said.
They walked to a diner across from The Barn. It was one of the last restaurants on the street that wasn’t a chain. The food was terrible and the tables were sticky, but still it lingered, kept open by the late night coffee-and-french-fries crowd. Julian ordered a decaf and six pieces of toast. He didn’t want anything heavy. “So,” he said. “What’s on your mind?” Casual was his angle. He had decided this on the walk over. He was going to be completely unmoved by whatever happened.
She shrugged. “Just wanted to talk.”
Julian occupied himself by peeling the foil on an assortment of jam packets. “Oh yeah?” he said, but it was almost a whisper.
“You know what Bill said on the phone today?” Ellen asked. Julian shook his head. “He said you were the kind of person who would never grow up — just spend your days reenacting heroic scenes in the shower.”
“There isn’t a lot of room in our shower. How heroic can it get?” He scratched at the stockings underneath his sweatpants. She gave him a sad little smile and he thought, here it comes.
“I’ve just been thinking,” she said. “And I know it’s not great timing with you being at work and on your lunch break and everything—”
“Bill’s onto something.” Julian talked fast as he could — trying keep her from saying the words. “Remember I told you that I went through a phase of almost dying? Almost flattened by a truck — or that time I knocked myself out jumping into the lake or when I choked on that piece of hot dog?”
Ellen was confused by his sudden enthusiasm. “Yeah.”
“And then my sister died and it all stopped. Remember, I told you that?”
“We need to break up,” Ellen said.
“I was supposed to die. It was supposed to be me, not Mallory. But then, for some reason, it was just easier to take her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What if Bill’s right and I’ll never grow up because I’m not supposed to be here?”
Ellen grabbed her purse. “See, this is just cinching it. My friends said I was an asshole to do this on your lunch break.” She seemed near tears and then, suddenly, she was crying. “It’s just that you won’t call me back and it’s too weird to never speak again.“
Julian held her hand. “You’re doing the right thing,” he said.
“I thought you were so sweet and just a little eccentric.” He handed her his napkin. “and the whole tragic sister thing was so sad.”
“I know,” he nodded. “It’s confusing.” The air-conditioning made a static filed of noise. He smelled the grease seeping out of the walls, the tang of old bleach on the table. Goodbye, Julian thought, and imagined himself far away, wandering inside one of the geodes on his dresser like Superman in his ice lair.
* * *
He hurried back to work, anxious to crawl inside that thick, smelly coat of felt and feathers. He dragged the costume into the bathroom and splashed water on his face. Don’t feel bad, he told himself. It was bound to happen.
He spent the rest of the afternoon panting inside his papier-mache head. He felt ill and chewed a square of Nicorette he found behind the cashier counter. The small hand of the company clock moved slowly around. A new helium canister arrived, and Julian stood in the back room, inflating balloons until they popped. Cobwebs sagged in thick, dusty strips from the rafters, swaying like seaweed in the rising heat. Julian listened to the chime of plates being stacked and sorted in the kitchen, the bright ping of a small bell, murmuring voices, the hiss of the deep fryer. It was the music of production. Julian wrapped a broken balloon around his finger until he appeared to have a new, brightly colored skin.
Mallory had been coming back to him recently, odd memories at odd times, and each time he could feel her as if she were really there. It was addictive. When these moments passed he wanted them back. He was afraid she was really fading, the intensity of memory highlighting the absence. He was aware that his love for her was becoming fixed, congealing into something like the perfection reserved for people who are not real. He was building a fictional past world with a perfect sister, a place where he had been safe and happy. But because it was fiction he would never live it, and this extended way of keeping her alive was a mutation of truth, just another way of letting her go.
The night of her surgery, Julian did not want to wait at the hospital. It seemed pointless and he had a party to go to. He fought with his mother while Mallory sat in the car, clutching a small backpack of supplies. Crohn’s disease wasn’t something people died from, and besides, he remembers saying, he “did his part.” Twice a week he took the car and followed her as she jogged through the neighborhood. “For safety,” his mother said. The Prednisone was making Mallory gain weight; she was tired all the time but unable to sleep. Once they were out of sight, Julian would stop and coax her into the front seat. It wasn’t hard. She didn’t so much jog as shuffle and besides, Julian was working on a pinball score at the arcade downtown. There was a certain player, initials TKM, that kept knocking him out of first place. He offered to buy Mallory any snacks she wanted but she only craved ice. “How can my fingers be fat when I don’t eat anything?” she asked. She held the little cup of change as Julian spent quarter after quarter, cursing and slapping the metal rim of the machine. He had not been not old enough to ask her real questions. He had been only old enough to spend the time he had with her in a reckless sort of selfishness. It was his mother fretted over Mallory and Mallory took care of him. He was last in the chain of worry.
Julian trudged through the afternoon, standing for pictures, distributing balloons. He tried to distract himself with the usual games, but there was a sick feeling in his stomach, a pudding that clung to his ribs.
“Sir.” A customer was patting him on the shoulder. It took Julian a moment to come out of his thoughts. “Could I get you two together?” The man gestured to a child asleep in a stroller. Julian stood next to the child and closed his eyes, waiting for the flash, not wanting to get that yellow square caught in his eye. Behind his lids he saw the little girl with the spider web of drool, the moldy coffee cups on his dresser. He saw Ellen’s body beneath the glowing dress. The images were piling up on top of each other like transparencies. They made a sickly ache in him that wouldn’t go away; and within that ache was a memory.
Mallory was sitting beside him at the dining room table. It was his birthday. He was ten and his mother was presenting him with an old leather shoe on a cake platter. They both stared at the shoe, burning candles wedged into the eyelets, shedding runnels of wax. He was afraid to move, afraid to ask his mother where the real cake was. It was one of her games. She liked to create uncomfortable situations, riddles to which only she knew the answer. It might have been a joke or maybe he had done something wrong, something to anger her. He watched the candles droop closer to the shoe. All he had to do was ask, but the moment was stretching on and on.
“Happy Birthday to you,” Mallory broke the silence. “Happy birthday to you . . .” She sang the whole song and Julian blew out the candles, forgetting to make a wish.
Julian left the Barn and stood outside next to the dumpster and the recycling bins. There was a slim lip of shade and he leaned against the wall, feeling the strength of the building behind him. He closed his eyes trying to hold onto the image of Mallory, her mouth open with singing, the candlelight making shadows on her young face. It would not stay. He slid down the wall, bending his costume at the waist. Above him, feathers stuck in the concrete as if a bird had collided with the building, mistaking a wall for a window.
* * *
Julian drove to a quiet suburb north of Langley. Pruned boxwoods and groupings of rhododendron flanked driveways and walkways. A few older trees towered over modest homes equipped with ornamental address plaques. This was Julian’s old neighborhood. He knew all the lawns, the shapes and hills because he had mowed them as a kid. Julian’s house was a small, two-story colonial at the end of the block. The television antenna was still on the roof, twisted like a giant bur. The paint was peeling slightly; it was the pale blue his mother had selected.
He parked the car in front and looked at the house. The scene was so familiar that everything new grabbed his attention. There was a Jeep in the driveway, a dog leash beside it like a red snake. A bike lay in the grass with a wheel sticking up, and a bird feeder dangled in front of a window like a lure. The curtains were new, a white gauze.
Julian knocked on the front door and a woman opened, wiping her hands on a towel.
“Sorry to bother you,” he said. “My car broke down. I was wondering if I could use your phone.”
The woman put her arm on the doorframe, blocking his way. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“Something’s loose, a hose maybe. I’m just guessing.” He heard the shriek of children inside the house, the mumble of the television. He stood a little taller and tried to see behind her. There was new floral wallpaper and a cinnamon smell, nothing familiar. “It won’t take a minute,” he said. “I promise.”
“I think you should go.” The woman quickly shut the door and drew the chain.
Julian looked at the little lighted doorbell. The screws were stripped where he had botched the installation. “Never mind,” he said. “I won’t trouble you.”
He sat in his car and watched the gauze curtains flutter as the woman peered out. The engine started easily and Julian drove away, confirming all her fears.
* * *
When Julian arrived home he was ten minutes late for the house meeting. Everyone was assembled quietly in the living room. Rosy tapped her foot, Katrina picked lint off a pillow.
“So you’re kicking me out,” Bill said. He sat primly in a chair, knees together, hands clasped in his lap. He looked at Julian.
“We’re not sure if you are a good match for this house.”
“Why?” Bill asked.
“Why are you focusing on me?” Julian looked to Katrina and Rosy for help. “I’m one of
three people.”
“Because you’re the biggest coward,” Bill said.
“Bill! Leave him alone.” Katrina stood and paced.
“I’m just being honest,” Bill said.
“How can you wonder that we are kicking you out!” Katrina smacked her hand against the tabletop. “You are confrontational, judgmental, and quite frankly, a bully.”
“I would never deny that.”
“Well your willingness to admit your shortcomings does little to compensate for them.”
Rosy walked out of the room with her hands in the air. “I don’t want to have this conversation.”
“You use your painting as an excuse to isolate yourself,” Bill called after her.
“I should have done a better job,” she called back.
Katrina followed Rosy into the kitchen. “You have until tomorrow.”
Julian stood and followed them, not wanting to be alone with an angry Bill. Rosy and Katrina were huddled at the kitchen table. “That went well.” he said. “To the point.”
“We’re not renting to any more boys,” Katrina said. “I’ll hang a flier up at the women’s bookstore.”
“We don’t mind you,” Rosy whispered and touched his hand. “But you need to bring down your coffee cups and wash them.”
Rosy and Katrina went to a restaurant to escape the house. Julian said he wasn’t feeling well and sat at the kitchen table listening to Bill stomp up and down the stairs as he collected his belongings in garbage bags. Julian didn’t want to move. There wasn’t anywhere to go and his body wanted to be ignored so it could relax. The clock above the stove ticked; a bus passed, shaking the house and all the mugs in the dish rack. An old message from Ellen was tacked next to the phone in Bill’s handwriting.
Julian closed his eyes and felt the gravity of the table pulling his head down to rest on his arms. He listened to Bill’s footsteps and thought about the birthday cake shoe. Later that night, Mallory pulled it from the garbage and woke him. She tied the laces together and wore the shoe like a necklace as they climbed down the side of the house. It was late. A few lampposts modeled after long ago gas fixtures shed weak puddles of light. Julian thought they should put the shoe in a mailbox, but Mallory said people expected to find things there. “It’s when something’s out of place that it becomes funny or frightening,” she said. In the end they buried the shoe in a neighbor’s planter box with only the toe sticking up like a black bar of soap. Julian remembered running down the street with his arms spread, the chirp of crickets, the joy of being outside in the night when everyone else was asleep. He was unwatched and unaccounted for. All possibility seemed to converge on those moments of freedom, and it felt good to stretch, to see that beyond his limits, the world was limitless.
Bill passed the door with several green, oily-looking bags. “You can keep my groceries,” he called.
Julian heard the sigh of sofa cushions and followed Bill into the living room. Bags like giant pods clustered in the middle of the floor. The hanging plants cast their frightening, insect shadows.
“You’re next,” he said. “Those girls only like you because they don’t like me. I make you look good.”
Julian smiled. “Who’s the egoist now?”
“People need someone to hate. You’re seeing at your future. That’s why you can’t stand to look at me.” Noodles hung over his lip and down his chin like a limp mop head.
“My future.” Julian poked at the side of a trash bag. The plants swayed in his peripheral vision. He flipped the wall switch and turned on the overhead light, then the two floor laps and the candelabra by the stairs. The shadows dimmed.
“What are you doing?”
“You know what?” He waited a moment for a reply. “There’s been a mistake, a cosmic blunder. Mallory is supposed to be here and that’s why everything feels like this, everyday feels unwritten — because I don’t have a fate. I’m unfated.”
Bill smiled. “You’re definitely next.”
“It means no one can fall in love with me, not Ellen, not even a little bit because my name isn’t on the books up there.” He pointed to the ceiling. “And down here.” He pointed to his shoes. “Mallory’s life is still playing out except she keeps not showing up, jobs aren’t filled, people are walking around wondering where she is without knowing her name. A house isn’t bought, just sits on the market forever. Dogs are waiting at the pound, never adopted. Some poor guy is left at the altar.”
“Who’s Mallory?” Bill yawned.
“They might kick me out,” he said. “Or maybe they won’t. That’s the thing. I’m free in the worst kind of way. There isn’t going to be any chain of events that leads to something greater, no misfortunes that happen for my own good. Not like you. You’re not standing in for anybody. Getting the boot tonight could lead you to better things.”
“I never took you for an optimist.” Bill slouched on the sofa.
“You don’t have anywhere to go, do you?”
“Doesn’t matter.” He waved his hand in the air. He looked rumpled, beyond acting. In that moment, Julian felt they might be friends in a distant, impossible sort of way. He grabbed the tied tops of two hefty sacks and dragged them towards the stairs.
“I don’t mind if you stay longer.” He thought of the shoe buried in the planter — the shoe that was out of place but had, at some point, lived in happy anonymity on someone’s foot. “You’re just out of your element,” he said.
“If you take those upstairs you’ll only make more work for me when I have to bring them down again.” But it was a weak protest, and Julian dragged the sacks up one by one. Some of them had a wooly thickness and others, sharp edges that pecked at his legs. He piled them in the center of Bill’s room. He had so few things, Julian had never noticed before. There was nothing on the walls, and only a bed and a chair.
He marched down the stairs, feeling buoyant. “Don’t worry about the girls, I’ll handle them. I’m sure they never meant for you to be without a place.”
Bill just looked at him, his eyes wary and slit. “I should thank you but you kicked me out. Sick isn’t it? You had to be mean before you had the opportunity to be kind.”
“You’re welcome anyway,” Julian said and walked out the front door. He stood on the porch and pulled his shirt off, hanging it around his neck. The air on his skin made him feel lighter, more real. He raised his arms and stretched. It was the first time all day he felt relief from himself, from the pressure of his mind. He thought of the little bathroom and the morning that was waiting for him, the pink eyes, the children, another day, another transparency to throw over the last, making the pictures blurry and distorted. This was a stolen life, a stolen time. These people he spent his days with, the days that had turned into weeks and years, they didn’t know him and were not his family. They didn’t care, and he couldn’t make them care. How did everybody else manage it, he wondered. How did they enjoy their little happiness, their meals, their goodnight kisses, in spite of themselves? Surely there were others like him, unfated, left behind. Julian spread his arms and listened to the leaves hissing in the wind. Life had a deep hold in his body. It wouldn’t let him go, wouldn’t acknowledge any mistake. He walked off the porch, drawn by the lighted windows of neighbors, their little worlds. He would look at them like animals in their cages. He would see their pageantry, their pleasures. Their lives could be a blueprint for his own.
