Glancing down the adjacent hall, he glimpsed upon the room that would never be opened again. His late father's room. Simon remembered him as a well-intentioned, but depressed individual. He wasn't sad all the time as a rule, but he was predominantly melancholy after Simon's mother left them, and just when their child was just starting elementary school. Simon barely recalled her- it was hard to attach characteristics to one who could be summed up as eternally disinterested in anything but herself in the here and now. Simon didn't remember any warmth from her. That she never cared to contact him even later in life was telling. What his father saw in her, he didn't know. But that was a story beyond his immediate scope, and not more than his second hand understanding to experience.
Dad was an alright fellow, he thought. Considerate, down to earth, but pained. It seemed like something integral inside him simply died the day he was handed divorce papers. And for all the time they spent together, he never liked to talk about it. Simon would in time learn to avoid the issue entirely, lest his father's mind wander in a bleak grey fog of existentialism. But even that wasn't avoided forever.
As his father grew more withdrawn, Simon took over more of the responsibilities of the house. Cooking. Paying bills. Working part time jobs outside of his school time. Outside of Jessie and Ramone, there wasn't much time for a fleeting childhood anymore. Just work. Responsibilities. Existing.
That room, where his father died, was a shrine. A place locked in time. He wanted to imagine his father would come out of there one day, good as new, able to respond to questions and have opinions of his own volition. But that room would never change and Simon found himself unable to mentally repurpose the room. So the memory of his father lived there from the past, an immaterial roommate, with all his dusty things lying within just as he left them. From the permanent closure of that door, Simon grew up quickly, but without hope or ambition. Only through his friends and their weekly forays into the unknown could Simon rouse himself from the mediocrity of being himself. It was always worth it.
Thinking about his father tended to leave him more grounded and less of a daydreamer. So, there were things to be done. The scrabbly front yard needed to have the leaves raked. Property taxes and the roof leak weren't going to pay for themselves. But for now, he had a moment of peace without red eyed natives or MiBs made of clay gunning for him. There were no shortage of obligations to tackle and now was the time. But something else haunted his mind. It was an earthly concern. It was nothing but a humble loose end of his own human interest.
Locking up the house, he fired up his ugly Vandura and drove to Shuck’s 24-Hour Convenience. There, he picked up a tall french vanilla coffee with a splash of milk, and then drove down the street into the suburbs. Parking his van near the bottom of a hill, he walked casually to the old rail line. He stood astride the tracks, sipping his coffee, and looked into the horizon from where the iron and wood came from. Particularly, he gazed in a very specific direction.
For an hour, he watched. There were no trains. No animals crossing the tracks. And certainly no woman dressed in red and black with a musical voice. He chuckled dryly to himself. What did he really expect? Surely, she didn't come around here every day and even if she did, there was nothing to imply she wanted to talk to him. There was no first date at five o' clock over coffee. Just silence. Maybe that was the message. Leave me alone, all of you. I'm not interested. You're not in my league. Your friend is a boorish idiot who would hit on anything with a pair of breasts and you're a loser with out of date side burns who drives around in a ratty van, delivering circulars no one actually wants.
Maybe he was as much of a stalker as he felt like he had been. Maybe there would be no closure and he would never know the real reason she didn't show up that day. Maybe it pointless and they weren't meant to be, let alone share more than an idle passing comment on the weather.
Sighing, he wondered why he honestly indulged this. Love wasn't something that was destined. It was something worked on. It could be illogical, hormonal, and fleeting. And if his mother taught him anything in her legacy of complete indifference, it wasn't something that would always be shared. He wondered how many times his own affections were a shiny bauble of value to no one else.
"Oh hey…" came a male's voice, suddenly, "You're that courier guy, right?" Simon didn't recognize it all. He glanced up to see a tall thin older man walking by across the tracks from the direction Simon had come from. He was dressed non-descriptively in a brown jacket, soda bottle glasses, and an old world fedora.
"I haven't seen you around lately. Well, I've been holding onto this little sandwich bag that I think you dropped last time over here." Simon glanced at a small crumpled bag contained a folded envelope inside.
"I think it's a tip from one of the neighbors you deliver to? Anyway, I've been holding onto it for you. Have yourself a good day."
"Huh? Oh… maybe? Thank you." The people around here typically didn't give tips for delivering circulars, except for the rare kind soul around the holidays. And the last big holiday wasn't recent. Simon took it, not thinking on it, except trying to place when he might have dropped it.
The man walked away across the tracks, vanishing into the sandy evergreen forest wood line, while Simon looked at the envelope. There was a shred of duct tape outside the bag and it looked weathered. How long was this out here, he wondered?
Setting down his coffee, he opened up the protective sandwich baggie and then did the same with the envelope. Inside, there was no tip. It was a scrap of lined paper seemingly addressed to him. The handwriting was curvy and bubbly looking, with tight condensed letters. It was a feminine style of print if he ever saw it.
-S.-
I wanted to apologize for the other day. It wasn't my plan to stand you up for our first date, but I realized only too late we didn't have a way to contact each other. Believe me when I say, I wanted to be there.
The day after we spoke, I busted my foot. I was on my way to a roller derby match to meet with my team when we met, actually. That night, I took a spill and got my ankle lodged in the support struts of the arena's guard railing. A girl on the opposite team ran into my shin while I was on the ground and forced my foot and ankle to twist painfully, so I wound up spraining it. I'm currently sitting here in my room with a big signed cast on my foot, writing this letter to you.
I hope this note finds you and explains everything you might have been wondering. I don't know how to reach you, so one of my teammates has been instructed to tape this to a post or a sign near where we first spoke. Hopefully, you found it and aren't mad anymore, if you were before.
I'd like for us to meet at some point and maybe have that first date, if you're still interested? Because I don't know if you'll find this first and not someone else, I can't include my contact info on here. Maybe you're willing to go a little further for this? My sprain will heal in a couple of weeks and then I'll be back to playing with my team again. Look up the schedule for the 'Dirty Jerzey Roller Derby'. My team is called the Daughters of Leeds. Yeah, yeah… it's not a great name. It has to do with the mother of the Jersey Devil, if you're not familiar? But hey, at least we aren't called The Wildcats.
Anyway, I hope to see you in the crowd after one of my games! We can talk then. And maybe get that coffee?
'Double K'
Simon read the letter twice and smiled. "Vikktorea…" he mumbled to himself. In just one envelope, a small wound healed and an opportunity was left open to him again. After a moment of savoring the correspondence, he carefully put it into his pocket, picked up his coffee, and went back to his van. Maybe today was a good time to look for work and tune up his resume. The mundane world wasn't always so bad, clearly.
As he watched the beat up Vandura drive away, the Good Samaritan who found the bag and note watched discreetly from the shadows of the trees on the other side of the road. He stood calmly in place, checking his watch, as a black Lincoln Continental drove by several minutes later. He noted the out of date clothing of
the occupants of that car with bemusement, as they went by him ignorantly, with only the distance of a few feet between himself and the car.
Opening up his cellphone, which had a small piece of deep red crystal attached to the back of it, he dialed a number and leaned against a tree. "Yes, hi. It's me, Professor… do you think you have the time to talk? Mm-hmm. Oh, I agree. I think it's time we met face to face, don't you? I'd say you've earned the respect at this point."
The End
Thank you for reading Desperate By Dusk! This was a project of love and I hope you found it to be an enjoyable and satisfying reading experience. If at all possible, please leave me a review on Amazon, good or bad, and let me know what you thought of it. It really helps!
Desperate By Dusk Page 35