Subscription

It struck Pearl as peculiar, how purposefully the boy seemed to have come to a stop in front of her home. How, without so much as a glance in her direction he had dismounted his bicycle, leaned it mindfully against the pickets, opened the gate and let himself into her yard.

A blonde boy, he carried over his shoulder a large canvas bag, ink grayed, with the word TIMES printed where it bellied, bold enough that Pearl did not need her eyeglasses to read.

    Coming up the walk, the boy removed from the bag what looked by the heft of its roll to be a Sunday newspaper, which he offered to Pearl at the foot of the stair.

     His eyes were the bursting blue of cornflowers and Pearl leaned forward in her rocker as much to better see them as to make out what the boy was saying.

It’s free, was what she thought she had heard and so asked the boy, ‘Free?’

‘Yes, maim,’ he replied, and one, two, three, up the stairs he came, placing the rolled newspaper into Pearl’s outstretched and unsteady hands.

‘Just this once,’ the boy said. ‘You see if you like it. And if you do, then you can subscribe.’

Pearl looked away from the boy’s cornflower eyes. She studied the newspaper. Felt its heft. ‘I didn’t think ...’ she began.

Hadn’t her daughter told her that newspapers were a thing of the past. That everything was online now and if she wanted to read the News, she would need to get a computer.

But Pearl didn't want a computer. She didn’t want to read the news either. Any part of the paper for that matter. That was Harold’s joy, and Harold was gone. Pearl only wanted to hear the regular morning thump of it on the porch, to witness on occasion the backhanded toss from the street, the paper’s slow arch and spin, the nearness of it to the doormat.

She smelled the ink now, the warmed canvas of the boy’s carrying bag. She wanted to subscribe. ‘Let me get my coin purse,’ she said, and made to rise.

The boy offered his hand, ‘Don't worry about that now, ’ he said, helping her to her feet. 

Peculiar, she thought, how strong he is, and looking over his shoulder, Pearl could no longer see the bicycle, propped beside the gate.

Quick Sketch of a Tall Reader

Charlie had often heard that shorter humans live longer than taller humans do. Something about the addition work required of the heart to get the blood to those more distant extremities. 

Being six foot five, this sometimes worried Charlie and he would have to remind himself of family members who had lived well into their nineties at heights that, while not freakish, would not be considered normal. 

He was a thin kind of tall, with large hands and large feet, large ears and a hawkish nose that seemed bent on removing his eyeglasses whenever he put them on to read, which Charlie did often.
    He had always been a big reader. His mother used to say that it was words that had made him grow so tall, as Charlie ate no more than she absolutely required, only read and read and read. Even at the dinner table. He would fork in his peas, his roast beef or mashed potatoes, never taking his eyes off the book beside his plate. Read, methodically chew and every third sentence, push his eyeglasses back up into place.  

                                                                                                        

A Tidbit About Walks and Flowers and Signs of Pie

Head down, watching his boots appear and disappear, the puffs of dust in their dropping, Carl had not seen the little road and was startled by its sudden presence, as if it had been a snake he had come upon walking and not merely a jog to the west. 

The road was half again as small as the road he walked, converging at a fair angle to make a tight wedge in which clouds of elderflower hung in a thick of thistle and daylilies, a sort of sunset, Carl mused, of lavender and orange fire. Planted in with the growth there was a sign, a whitewashed clapboard on which black letters had been carefully executed to indicate that fresh eggs and seasonal pies could be found up the little road in less than one mile’s time. 

Carl had no need for eggs at the moment, but had never turned down an invitation of any sort for pie, and curious as to what might be seasonal, veered from his northward course, west in the direction the  well-painted sign had so meticulously suggested.

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.        

Sketch of Weeping Crabapple

With the swarms of buttercups, peach blossoms and hawthorn, vibrant, he would forget each spring the quieted beauty of the weeping crab until she bloomed in her bustles at the head of the drive, hunter and dusty rose, stunning, the glance from beneath the tilt of her parasol.

Sketch of William and a Fern

Poured into a thimble, William’s knowledge of plant life would fill so very little of the thumb cap, it could be placed onto the back of an anxious mule and carried over the roughest of terrains without a single droplet lost to spillage, such would be the headroom. 

     All flowers, William classified by their shape, as a sort of Daisy, Lilly or Rose, depending on which the blossom most closely resembled. Evergreen or deciduous, trees were simply trees. Whatever crept was ivy and whatever sprung from pasture or lawn was grass, be it clover or Timothy. 

     It was a deliberate thing, William’s lack of plant knowledge. Oh, he would have liked to spout off in Latin the names of each and every bit of flora he encountered. He would also like to be able to verbally show his appreciation for a good wine as well, and point out by name even the more minor constellations. But according to William, there was only so much time in the day and space in one’s head. He had to work for a living. ‘Let’s see how much a botanist knows about the transmission of a ’76 MG,’ he would say to himself when the discussion arose, which it quite frequently did. 

     William was a mechanic. Vehicles were what he knew, were what the space in his brain was reserved for. Perhaps when he retired he’d be able to carry with him a plants-at-a glance book, know-your-stars, your wine. Until then, everything was a sort of Daisy a Lilly or a Rose; a Port or Sherry, the Big Dipper. And William, for the more part, was good with that. 

     What he was not so ‘good’ with, were the papers referring to him as a mechanic and amateur plant enthusiasts, after his discovery of a fern thought to have been extinct since before the dinosaurs roamed. It wasn’t true. And while William was fine with being ignorant of some things, a deliberate lie, he was not.