A Storm of Stories

by K B Jensen

  “Why is that?” the doctor asked.

  “Because of her,” Peter said. “Julie. I have to live for her, because she can’t live.”

  “Do you feel guilty about Julie’s death?” The doctor asked.

  Peter looked up at the wall, at the round clock in its glass case and wondered when the doctor would move on to the next patient. Time’s got to be up, he thought.

  “Look, if I hadn’t jumped in front of her car,” he said. “If I hadn’t…” He couldn’t finish the sentence. He choked on the words.

  “It’s not your fault,” the doctor said.

  “You’re a liar,” Peter said with a bitter smile. “You tell pretty, little lies to make people feel better.”

  The doctor left, and Peter read The Book of Impossibility. The days blurred together. Lunch came. Dinner came. Breakfast came. Lights switched on. Lights switched off. Trays came and went, cartons of milk, juice, and steak under the pink plastic covers on pink plastic trays.

  But he didn’t recognize a single story from the book the nurse had given him. In fact, they weren’t stories. They were card tricks. It had to be the wrong book. Images of kings, queens and jacks of spades.

  Write what you remember, the nurses kept telling him. So he grabbed his pen and paper. They had given up on taking away his pen. They seemed to embrace the idea now.

  “What’s the difference between brain damage, a brain injury, dementia, and a chemical imbalance?” He wondered out loud to his roommate Max. “What’s the difference?” he asked.

  “When it all boils down to it?” Max said. He wheeled his chair to the window and looked out. “Stigma. The old person with dementia is treated with some kind of dignity, most of the time.

  “There is no line separating the physical and psychological, not that we’ve discovered,” Max said. “In the East, they talk about a mind body connection. Here’s it’s compartmentalized, specialized, disconnected, and dissected, like an orchestra stripped of its various parts and sections and told to play together anyway.”

  “Are you a philosopher?” Peter asked.

  “I like to read them,” Max said, pointing to a copy of Plato’s Allegory of a Cave on his nightstand right next to the Bible.

  “How did you break your leg?” Peter asked.

  “I fell out of a window and landed six stories down,” Max said. His gaze was still transfixed outside, searching the pale blue sky.

  “Why did you fall?”

  “No reason,” Max said.

  “There has to be a reason.”

  “That’s the thing, there wasn’t any ‘reason.’ I wasn’t reasonable. You’re one to talk, walking into the middle of a snowstorm and jumping in front of a car.”

  “I didn’t have any place to go. So you’re a philosopher, then?” Peter said, pointing to Plato, changing the subject. “What’s in that book?”

  “It’s the story of these people who grow up in a cave and think the shadows on the wall cast by objects against the light of the fire are real. And then they go up above the ground, and they discover sunlight, and they can see the objects around them. But when they go back to the others and tell them, the others don’t believe it. It’s all about perception versus reality, you know, the kind of stuff crazy people like me like to deal with.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Peter mumbled. “Maybe Plato was crazy too. Do you think I’m really crazy? Sometimes I wonder if the girl in the car was even real? Or just a character I invented to get through hard times?”

  Oh, the disorder of it all, he thought. So he started to write. The tears mixed with ink. Sometimes there were no tears. He was just crying ink. When the pen stopped, the tears started again. And when he was done writing them he wondered which stories were hers and which were his. The words just bled together in his head. And she was a stranger, and it was impossible.

  Peter wondered if he were trying to bring her back from the dead, breathe the life back into that chest, blow up her coat like a balloon, reinflate her. He was a psychic after all, not a perfect one, but he could commune with the dead in his own way.

  “It’s my fault she’s dead,” he said.

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Max said. “I’m tired of reading Plato’s Cave. Can I read your stories?”

  Peter let Max read them. He was nervous about it, so nervous he bit his nails, fidgeted, and had to leave the room when Max was reading. He spent days in the rec room, putting together puzzles, trying not to play with his bandages. Julie was dead, and her stories had been entrusted to a crazy man. He wondered how she would feel about that.

  “I like it,” Max said, handing back the notebook. “But I gotta ask you why did you jump in front of the car? Why did you walk into the middle of a snowstorm? What happened?”

  “You know that story about Peter Rabbit?” Peter said. “Some of it was true. Not the part about the gunshot or the stolen truck, but the part about the bank. I was fired. I couldn’t pay my bills, and after Elizabeth left me, I wanted to die. I was suicidal.”

  “Oh,” Max said. “And what about now?”

  Peter hesitated for a moment. He knew this was why they had him in the psych ward and not the regular ward.

  “I changed my mind the moment I saw her face,” he said. “It was such a short time we spent together, but it didn’t matter. I don’t even know what she really thought of me, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re suffering from survivor’s guilt,” Max said. “Aren’t you?”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Peter said. “I killed a woman. She’d be alive if I hadn’t jumped in front of her car.”

  “You didn’t really kill her,” Max said. “An accident killed her. You should do all the things she didn’t get to do, have a family, grow old.”

  “Live a long and happy life,” Peter said, bitterly. “For her and for me.”

  He asked the nurses to see the book. It seemed to have disappeared.

  “There is no book,” the blond-haired nurse told him gently. “Just go back to sleep. You aren’t well.”

  “But there is a Book of Impossibility,” he said.

  “It doesn’t exist.” She took him by the arm, led him back to bed and switched off the florescent lights.

  “But it does,” he said.

  Anything is possible, he thought. He could hear Max snoring.

  As he started to fall asleep, he could see the images flickering in his head; her face cast in the snowlight and her hand clutching the steering wheel, fingers pale from the cold. She had long, shimmering, blond hair hanging under her hat. It looked like tangled silk and he wanted to reach over and stroke it.

  Dreams aren’t so different from stories, he thought. You go to the same place in your mind, the same destination.

  And they were on the plane now, sitting in first class in leather chairs with lowered backs. And he had a tumbler of scotch in his hand with ice clinking against the glass.

  “You wanted to be on the same plane of existence, I think,” she said with a smile.

  “Really?” he said, with a groan. “I wish they’d take a scalpel to my brain. Maybe all the bad memories would be scraped away.”

  “You have to learn to live in the now,” she said.

  “How the hell do I do that?” he said.

  “Damned if I know,” she said, laughing and taking his drink. “Good luck, my friend.” She took a swig.

  “I would’ve liked to have loved you,” he said. “It would’ve been so easy. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t read your fortune. I was too close to love.”

  “Well, it’s impossible now,” she said. “You know that. We are traveling in different spheres.”

  She gave him back his glass of scotch, and he took a gulp.

  “I always wanted to fly first class,” she said. “I always wanted to see what was on the other side of the mysterious black curtain, and now I have.”

  The engine hummed softly below them. There were no other passengers.

  “It’s a dream, isn’t it?” h
e said bitterly.

  “Isn’t it always?” she said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Where did you go, Julie? What really happened?”

  “I’ve been traveling,” she said.

  “Traveling where?” he asked.

  “All over the world and through time and space and the neural pathways of human memory,” she said.

  “That sounds crazy,” he said.

  “It is,” she said. “A moment is an eternity. Did I ever tell you the story about the dog? The St. Bernard?”

  “Tell it to me again,” he said.

  “It’s a true story,” she said. “This girl was babysitting this guy’s St. Bernard while he was on vacation and it died. And it was a hot Chicago summer and the dead dog started to rot. The cheapest place to cremate it was $200. She didn’t have any money or a car, but she had a credit card and was close enough to the El. The dog was hundreds of pounds and so she stuffed it in a suitcase and could just barely close the zipper. One of its paws was sticking out. The Brown Line station had no elevator and she was struggling up the steep, narrow, wooden steps. And this guy offered to help her. ‘Thanks so much,’ she said. He carried it up and they get to the top right before the train pulled away and he darted inside, the doors slide shut, and she watched him pull away with the suitcase with the dead dog.

  “You know why I told you this story?” she said. “A week before the blizzard, my cousin from Mississippi told me the same exact story.”

  “What happened to the dog?” he asked.

  “He’s been traveling,” she said, pulling a suitcase behind her and stepping into the El train. The doors slid shut. He sat down on the seat next to her. “He wasn’t even that special, you know. He was just a dog. I wasn’t that special either, but I’m traveling.”

  “You are special,” he said.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “It would’ve happened one way or another. It was fate.”

  “But I believe in free will,” he insisted. His voice rose like a child’s.

  “It’s both, my friend,” she said. “There’s only so much you can do with one or the other.”

  “I can’t forgive myself,” he said.

  “You did nothing wrong,” she said. “You were a friend in a dark time. Leave it at that.” It was strange to hear his words in her mouth.

  “Distract me,” he said. “Please.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s time to wake up. You get off at the next stop,” she said. “Ditch the baggage about what’s real and what isn’t. There’s truth to any story. The details don’t matter.”

  With that, she kissed him on the lips and he opened his mouth with a gasp, his lips parting like the doors to the train. “Monroe,” the automated voice said. “Marilyn Monroe.”

  And then he stepped onto the wooden platform at the Monroe stop and did his best to forget her. But how do you forget a woman like that?

  When he woke up, he wrote down all the stories they told each other. He wrote them one by one, again and again until he almost got them right.

  The discharge papers didn’t say what was wrong with him exactly, but he took the pills the doctors had prescribed. He took them and things started to focus again. It’s a funny thing how a prescription can change your vision, he thought. Reality changes from one moment to the next. A simple prescription can change your perception, like a lens at the optometrist. Do you like one or two better, five or six? The light shines on the letters. We are all just projections, aren’t we? He thought as he read the label on the plastic bottle. Isn’t it grand when you can play with vision? He was starting to sound like Max.

  As for the woman, as for Julie, all the pills in the world couldn’t make him forget her. She would live forever on his pages. The details didn’t matter. He would get it wrong. It would never be perfect, that wasn’t possible, but that wasn’t the point. It was just another short story of impossible love.

  About the Author

  K.B. Jensen is an author and journalist. Painting With Fire, an artistic murder mystery, was her debut novel. Jensen grew up in Minneapolis and currently lives in Chicago, with her husband, daughter, and border collie/lab mix. In her spare time, she enjoys teaching downhill skiing and traveling the world. For more information about the author, please visit paintingwithfirenovel.com.

  If you enjoyed A Storm of Stories, please consider leaving a review on Amazon.com or Goodreads.com and connecting online. It takes years to write a book and minutes to write a review that makes it feel worthwhile. A thousand thanks.

  @KB_Jensen

  kbjensenauthor

  www.kbjensenauthor.com

  kbjensen.author@gmail.com

  Acknowledgments

  No one ever really writes a book alone. I would like to thank all the people who have been involved with the evolution of this book. Without their help, A Storm of Stories would have been an impossibility. I’ve had the good fortune to know many other talented fiction writers who have helped shape my writing, including Matt Yaeger, Jennifer Bisbing, Anna Joranger, Kayla Gordon and Clayton Smith, among others. I’d like to give a special thanks to my editor, Jennifer Bisbing, who I highly recommend, as well as my many betareaders. I am also grateful to Karen Yaeger, a dear friend who is always there when it matters.

  Also by K.B. Jensen

  Painting With Fire, an Artistic Murder Mystery

  Copyright © 2016 K.B. Jensen

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the right under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Illustration by Zoe Shtorm

  www.kbjensenauthor.com

  ISBN: 978-0-692-66094-2