Failure As a Way of Life

by Andersen Prunty

  Unknown number.

  I think about answering it but glance toward Gus’s house and see him, Callie, Tarot, and Fee sitting around the dinner table, talking animatedly and laughing. I can’t help thinking I narrowly missed being a part of this. Some lingering shred of laughable optimism tells me it’s not too late.

  I press the ‘ignore’ icon and return the phone to my pocket. I go to a coffee shop and get an iced coffee, wonder when I’ll be forced to give that up too.

  Then I go back to the motel and pick up the trash in the parking lot and relieve Mr. Rangely at the front counter. I watch TV and doze on the sofa in the lobby. This now constitutes my nightly sleep. Nobody checks in that night so I get a lot of rest.

  Mr. Rangely relieves me at six a.m.

  “Supposed to get some bad storms later,” he says.

  “Huh,” I say. “I should have watched the Weather Channel.”

  “Don’t get stuck out in it.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  I head out to the Godwater campus, wondering if Mr. Rangely is correct because the sky is clear and blue and there doesn’t seem to be any humidity in the air.

  At the Godwater campus, I no longer sit in a chair and fill glass bottles through a positively charged quartz faucet while listening to music. Everything’s automated now. And earbuds are against safety regulations. The plastic bottles are set on a conveyor belt and filled with water that comes from some massive tank that appeared shortly after Jolly’s departure. Many more people work there but, aside from the office sales team, nearly everyone just packs boxes and loads trucks.

  The job used to be mildly irritating but quirky enough to be tolerable. Now it’s just an unendurable slog.

  That afternoon we gather on the loading docks and watch the wall of black roll toward us.

  Something inside of me wakes up.

  The pressure drops, the air cools down, and the breeze picks up, drying the sweat on my face.

  Lightning streaks across the sky, some of it horizontally, from cloud to cloud, punctuated with fat bolts from sky to ground and bone rattling thunder.

  It starts raining and the rest of my co-workers retreat into the building.

  I stay out in it.

  My clothes are soaked in a second and the wind feels like it’s pulling me along. I let it take me. Around the building and out into the field behind the campus.

  I let it take me all the way to the Well of Purity.

  I climb up on the wall surrounding the well. The grass around it is overgrown and it looks sad and abandoned. It’s raining so hard I can barely see anything and when the lightning flashes it’s so bright it bleaches everything and leaves neon tremors in its wake. I stand on the low wall surrounding the well and raise my hands above my head, trying to make myself tall but knowing I’ll never be tall enough.

  I step off the wall, over the well.

  I do not fall.

  I do not plunge.

  I do not plummet.

  I do not drop.

  I float.

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