Ordinary Souls

by J. S. Bailey

  It was a truth he never would have heard of had he not broken the law. How funny that some things in life worked out that way.

  Something inside his pocket moved when he shifted his leg. The necklace! He had forgotten it was there. He pulled it out and studied the T-shaped pendant again. Miriam had probably been wearing it when she died the first time. He had joked that it stood for Treviño, but now he understood that it represented the Truth for which the woman had been martyred.

  He put it around his neck.

  “Put your hands up!” A disgruntled police officer appeared in the doorway Hugh had left open. He was holding a gun.

  Kerry did as he was told. “I don’t have any weapons,” he said.

  “Just makes my job easier,” the officer stated in a flat tone. “Please step out of the vehicle.”

  Kerry stepped out onto the desert sands once more and saw Hugh being apprehended by two more officers some fifty yards away.

  The officer led Kerry to the nearest copter, handcuffed him, and urged him to climb aboard.

  Vapors. All this was vapors. He would not let this situation upset him.

  He heard shouting in the distance. Evidently, Hugh was being uncooperative. As always.

  “Sometimes the price we pay is worth the knowledge gained,” Kerry said, smiling.

  The officer scowled at him. “You can bet your sorry hide it is. What are you so happy about?”

  “Nothing.” Kerry felt his smile broaden, and for a few fleeting seconds he could have sworn he felt Miriam’s presence standing beside him. “Nothing at all.”

  IT WASN’T WHAT people thought.

  The oil painting was done solely in shades of white and hung at the far end of the gallery.

  The plaque on the wall beneath it read “Maria.” No artist was given credit.

  “Why do they call it ‘Maria’?” asked a narrow-faced woman whose art aficionado husband had dragged her to the gallery against her better preferences that afternoon. “There’s no one in it.”

  Her husband, who had dressed for the outing in a normal-looking gray business suit and a not-so-normal-looking necktie consisting of a red and green houndstooth pattern, clasped his hands behind his back and leaned closer to the painting so he might examine it better. “Well,” he said at length, “I’d say the guy painted it for his lady friend.”

  The woman pursed her lips. “Who says the painter is a he?”

  A shrug. “Maybe Maria is the painter, then.”

  “Like someone’s going to name a painting after herself.”

  Husband and wife continued to stare at the painting in silence while the other visitors to the gallery babbled on obliviously behind them. It was sort of a pretty painting, the woman supposed. The artist—whoever he or she was—had captured in oils a scene that at first glance appeared to portray a raging blizzard but could have just been random swirls of white, for all she knew. Amorphous shapes were visible through the snowstorm, like towers or trees or people.

  “Maybe Maria is one of the people stuck in the snow,” the woman said, poking a finger at an off-white blur toward the center of the painting. “The poor girl.”

  She started to step onward to the next piece of art when she realized that her husband hadn’t budged. “You coming?”

  She glanced to her left and saw that a peculiar expression had written itself over her husband’s face. “What snow?”

  “What?”

  “You mentioned snow. What snow?”

  “Don’t play the obtuse art critic with me. I was talking about the snow in the painting. What other snow is there?”

  “Sally, the painting is black.”

  The woman cast another glance at the immortalized snowstorm and forced a laugh. “Black. Do you need your eyes checked, or are you just trying to make me doubt my sanity?”

  She grinned, but the expression quickly faltered when she realized there wasn’t even the faintest hint of humor in her husband’s eyes.

  “Tell me exactly what you see,” he said, his tone cold.

  So she did—snowstorm, vague figures, and all. “What do you see?” she asked.

  By this time, her husband’s face had become ashen. “Like I said, it’s black. Lots of shadows, like it’s supposed to be in the back of a cave or something. There might be some kind of dark figure in the middle, but it seems different every time I look at it.” He cast her a worried glance. “I don’t see anything white at all.”

  “And I don’t see anything black.”

  They fell silent again. The other gallery visitors continued to ignore them, gliding from one painting to another without stopping to study the one that had so captivated the couple.

  “I get it!” the woman finally said. “It’s one of those hologram things. It looks different depending on where you’re standing. Here, switch spots with me.”

  They switched spots so the husband stood on the right, the wife on the left.

  The painting was still white.

  “It’s still black,” her husband said.

  The woman ran a hand over her hair. “It must depend on how tall you are, then.” She stood on tiptoe to match her husband’s height, then crouched down low to the height of a child.

  The painting was still white. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “I—I think we should just go.”

  Her husband made to walk away, but she grabbed his arm. “No,” she said. “We’re going to figure this out.”

  For the next ten or fifteen minutes the couple continued to examine the painting in the hope that he would see the white she saw, and she the black. Disinterested voices continued to babble on behind them until at last the woman turned and said, “I’ll ask someone else what they see.”

  “But Sally, I—”

  AFTER the gallery closed for the evening, Earl Cross pushed a giant broom across the floor, whistling a Coldplay tune he’d heard on the radio earlier that day.

  It never failed to amaze him how much dirt people could track into a place over the span of twelve hours. He’d have to bust out the mop once he’d swept all the dirt up. He should ask for a raise one of these days. With all he did around here, he deserved it.

  He made his way to the empty end of the gallery, and the tune he was whistling petered out on his lips. A hideous red and green houndstooth something lay coiled on the floor in front of the blank space where a famous Impressionist piece would be displayed when it was to be loaned out from a larger museum next month.

  Earl stooped and plucked up the thing with his left thumb and forefinger.

  It was a necktie.

  Earl let out a chuckle and looped the tie around his neck. “Looks like you’ll be spending some time in Lost and Found, buddy, but as ugly as you are, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone lost you on purpose.”

  TWO thousand miles away on a sunny beach, a local art festival was in full swing.

  A teenage couple meandered through the crowd along the boardwalk hand in hand, both of them dressed in black Converse shoes and covered in facial piercings that turned the heads of many adults. A temporary wall had been set up along the length of the boardwalk, and the works of amateur artists hung on it every so many feet.

  They stopped in front of a painting that had no artist credited. “Ooh, look at this one!” the girl exclaimed, tucking a strand of purple hair behind a gauged ear. “Jayden told me he was thinking about showing some of his stuff here. I’ll bet this is one of them.”

  Her boyfriend wrinkled his nose. “Why would Jayden paint that?”

  “Why wouldn’t he? He loves this kind of stuff.” She gazed lovingly at the depths of swirling blackness that seemed to suck her in the longer she looked at it. There might have been the vague shape of a person in the center of the painting, or it might have been an illusion. Pretty trippy. “It would be like him to paint a whole picture black.”

  “What do you mean, black?”

  “Um, hello? The painting is black. Like, totally black. I want to buy
it.”

  Her boyfriend’s eyes narrowed with confusion. “But Mindy, the painting is white…”

  YOUR LIFE IS perfect.

  You’re thirty-six years old and in great health. You’re thin, trim, and fit, and spend entirely too much time in front of the full-length mirror hanging on the bathroom door, admiring how good you look in that pale blue button-up shirt and black slacks. Sideburns and slightly-tousled hair make you look a bit like that fellow on television. The women would love you if they saw you. They always did.

  You’ve already paid off the house you bought in Mt. Lookout, that charming eastern suburb of Cincinnati. You’ve run a successful editing business for ten years. Some of your clients have even made it to the bestseller lists, and you’re quite proud of them.

  The house itself is beautiful. Ever since you were a boy you’ve held a fondness for attractive things, and your home’s clean gray siding, violet shutters, and white trim caught your eye the moment you saw it in the real estate listings. The yard is small, but you don’t care about that. Yards are for other people.

  You tell yourself your life is perfect, but one thing in particular puts a damper on your mood: a windstorm blew through two days before, knocking out the power, the phone line, and the internet, and you quite literally have nothing to eat aside from a stale box of saltines perched atop your refrigerator. Your cell phone is dead. With the power still out, you have no way to charge it.

  At first you’d thought it was just an ordinary windstorm. True, the house had groaned like it was about to lift off its foundation, but it was an old house, so you hadn’t worried, not even when the lights went out and plunged you into blackness. You’d patted around the kitchen until you found a dusty book of matches in the back of a drawer and then lit a candle to ward off the shadows.

  It was just a power outage. You had no reason for concern. It would be back on in no time.

  That was two days ago.

  Two very, very long days.

  Seeing as you couldn’t get any work done without electricity to power your laptop, you’d lounged around the living room with a book the next day, reading the entire thing in just a few hours in the light spilling in from the long windows. You went back up to the bathroom, took a cold shower, and put fresh gel in your hair, imagining what it would be like to invite some striking woman over who might appreciate the way you groom yourself.

  Now, though, you’re still in your navy blue silk pajamas despite the fact it’s past four in the afternoon. It’s just too cold now to take another shower without the benefit of a working water heater, or to take off your clothes to put on new ones. The windstorm brought an early winter chill with it, one that’s sinking into every pore and rendering you sluggish.

  Your stomach growls, and you peek through your bedroom blinds for the thousandth time. At least three immense oak trees along your street succumbed to the wind and came down across the power lines. One of them even came down on top of a bright red sports car four doors down from yours, and you’d seen the owner standing out in the street cussing the tree out as if it had turned his car into a pancake on purpose.

  A crew is still working on one of the trees farther down the street. A less inept crew would have had the job done already. You feel sad that trees so old have perished, but sadder for yourself. Those trees have made you a prisoner.

  Your stomach growls again—or maybe it hasn’t stopped growling. You’d planned on ordering groceries on the day the storm hit. You should have ordered them days ago. A client’s manuscript had absorbed every ounce of your attention, so you forgot.

  You go downstairs and check the cabinets and pantry again to see if they miraculously spawned food overnight.

  They have not.

  You pluck the wall-mounted phone out of its cradle and hold it to your ear. Still no dial tone. With the lines down, you hadn’t really expected one.

  Your frustration swells inside of you until you feel you must burst. You want so badly to finish those saltines, but you know you should ration them in case the phone line and power remain disconnected for another day or two.

  Gary, your understanding neighbor who cuts your grass and gets your mail and takes your garbage out and to the curb, is out of town. Cabo San Lucas, he’d said. He won’t be home for days. Gary can’t help you.

  The neighbors on the other side don’t speak to you, and haven’t since you moved in. Besides, you saw them leave in their car last night, presumably on their way to a place that hasn’t lost electricity.

  It’s times like this when you wish your parents didn’t live so far away. Life has been harder for you since they moved to Seattle. Sometimes you wonder if you’re the reason they left.

  Other times you’re sure of it.

  “Jeremy, you’ve got to get out of the house,” your mother has said more times than you can count. “You’re a grown man. You can’t keep relying on other people to do things for you.”

  As if you’d forgotten your age. She just doesn’t understand. No one does. They’ve never been inside your head.

  It didn’t used to be like this. You used to be normal, whatever “normal” means. You had a job in an office building and took your old laptop down to the corner café every chance you got so you could work on that story that had been brewing inside of you for years. You loved the sun and the sky and the smell of fresh air. You especially loved to make yourself look nice for the young women who frequented the café. And there were plenty of women. You were an incessant flirt. Some found you an annoyance, except for one.

  She started setting up her laptop near yours and would ask what you were working on, and the two of you would end up chatting for hours about stories and books and anything else you could think of.

  She brought an unimaginable light to your life. Eventually you took her to dinner and a movie, and after that she rarely left your side.

  Her name was Emily.

  You begin to pace back and forth between the bottom of the staircase and the kitchen. You don’t want to think about Emily right now. It took you so long to banish thoughts of her and what she had meant to you from your mind. Sometimes an entire month can go by now without you thinking of her, though when she does inevitably cross your thoughts you wonder if she dwells in forgotten dreams.

  A phantom twinge makes your chest hurt. You place a hand over your heart as if that will help. See, this is why it’s best to think of other things, to focus on your work. You’re not sure which hurts worse: the scars or the memories.

  But aren’t memories scars in their own way?

  If you were still writing stories of your own, you might have written that last thought down in a journal for later use. You only work on other people’s stories now, though. The part of you that found joy in creation died a long time ago.

  In your mind you see yourself walking with Emily down near the riverbank. The day is bright, but the wind is picking up and you can see a bank of clouds rolling in from the west. Emily tells you a joke and you laugh. Nothing could ever go wrong with a life like this.

  The two of you sit in the grass beneath a massive old tree to watch the barges float by on the river. You realize you’re more comfortable with this woman by your side than you’ve ever felt before. It would be nice for her to be there always, to be someone to come home to after a long day at work.

  To be someone to protect like a precious gem.You shiver. It’s gotten even colder in the house. The pipes might start bursting if it drops much lower than this. Nothing you can do about that.

  You go to the hall closet and stare at the dusty suit jackets and hooded sweatshirts hanging limply from the rod. When was the last time you wore any of this? You can’t quite remember.

  You pull a brown hoodie off its hanger and slip it on over your long-sleeved pajama top. With a certain level of sadness, you remember that Emily gave you this hoodie as a birthday present. You consider trading it for a different one but decide against it since it’s thicker than your other sweatshirts.

/>   If only Emily were here now. She would know exactly what to say to make you feel better and exactly what to do to solve your problem.

  She would tell you to go outside.

  Your chest tightens at the mere thought of leaving the house. You can’t go out there. It might happen again if you do.

  You close your eyes and rub at the scar on your chest. Some days, if you’re careful not to look, you forget it’s there. It’s easy to forget things when you’re distracted by work, but now that the power outage has taken away that one outlet that allows you to forget all else, it is all creeping back to you like monsters in the night.

  You go the window again for lack of anything better to do. Fat flakes of snow drift down from the sky and catch on crooked blades of grass. The clouds are gray and swollen, looking as though they might burst.

  The memory of creating snow angels with Emily flashes through your mind.

  You wish you could run away from the ghosts that haunt you.

  You know you can’t.

  “What am I going to do?” Your voice cracks as you speak. It’s been days since you’ve used it.

  You check the phone for a dial tone to no avail. The lines are still down—what else did you expect?

  In your mind Emily leans in to kiss you where you both lay in the snow, and your chest throbs where a bullet plunged into it on a different day when the snow was long gone.

  The world is a dangerous place where cruel men walk freely and loved ones molder in tombs.

  The problem with people like your parents is that they view what happened as a tragedy and nothing more, but to you it is a reality. They thought you should have moved on. You knew you couldn’t if you continued on as normal.

  The only way to survive was to shut yourself away and work, work, work.

  Which was fine before the power went out and allowed your demons free reign.