Journal Sketch

Susie Patterson did not look through the window. She couldn’t. The glass was what she believed they called frosted, so all that could be seen through it was a softened bluish light and an occasional patch of shadow passing. 

Susie leaned against the door anyway, looking at the single pane of frosted glass, and through a haze of medications, guessed by the speed in which the darker patches moved by, which might be doctors, patients, nurses or visitors. 

This was not Susie Patterson’s first visit to this wing of the hospital. The Mental Wing, a coworker, Diane Billings had called it once. Diane’s father had been brought here, when his mind could no longer restrain the urges of his body and he was found one too many times walking the town square, naked but for his shoes, socks and oddly enough garters, held in place by his still impressive calve muscles.

Susie’s first visit—that’s what they called these trips, ‘visits’, although she had little say in her coming—her first visit had been when she was fourteen. Her mother had brought her, telling the doctors only that Susie had been extremely agitated lately, that she was having difficulty sleeping. Asking if maybe they could, ‘give her a little something’. 

In truth, her mother had found Susie several nights, sound asleep. Only not in her bedroom. Susie had been found in the back yard, curled into a sort of burrow she had dug out in the lawn, near to the tool shed, with her bare hands. 

Journal Sketch

The Sugar Maple his father planted for his mother, years ago, had been cut down, and without its mass out front as a landmark, Charlie Parker nearly drove by his old family home. Even now, parked at the curb across the street, he did not recognize the place and repeated the address in full, several times in his head, matching it to that of the now, stone-clad mailbox at the end of the drive.   

The Maple’s stump had been removed, the yard leveled where the earth once rose to the tree’s heavily knuckled roots, the scar seeded and healed over a slightly darker green than the rest of the lawn’s grass. 

1241Primrose Lane, Charlie found himself repeating against the doubt that lingered in his head. 

If Charlie Parker understood one thing about himself, it was that he knew he was capable of convincing himself that a thing was true, even though it was not. Once, as a boy, he had convinced himself that he had been born on Christmas Day, had argued the point with his best friend until his friend settled the issue by calling his mother. 

‘September twenty-fifth, Charlie,’ his mother had said. 

    Charlie saw the address repeated on the front porch, the numbers descending from a white coach lamp there. He had helped install that lamp, handing up screwdrivers, needle-nose pliers, wire nuts, black electrical tape, to his father, three steps above him on a paint spattered wooden ladder. 

He remembered thinking, when he and his father had finished and stood beneath the shade of the now-removed Maple, admiring the lamp, that when his friends saw its cut glass and diamond-shaped elegance, they would wish his father was their father. He remembered, too, how the light, left on at times after he had gone to bed, shone a soft amber at the frame of his curtained windows, and how he would fall asleep those nights with thoughts of cars, slowing as they passed to approve of the lamp, the drivers in a whisper saying how the Parkers must be doing all right.