The Stanger's Gift

I had pulled myself together and walked a full two blocks from the house before the tears started up again.  So by the time I reached the underground station, I was gently sobbing, as usual.  The platform was neither deserted nor crowded, and I took up a position equidistant from other people.  I knew it was impossible to effectively hide that I was crying, but I thought at least this could help me remain inconspicuous.  With my head down, I pulled out my phone and pivoted away from the nearest person.  It was 6 minutes to the next train and everyone stood in that odd, elevator silence.

I scrolled fairly mindlessly for at least a couple of minutes, my shaking providing an unmistakable tell, before someone a polite distance behind my shoulder spoke up.  An older man’s voice said, “I went through a very hard time, once.”

Crazies here are everywhere.  You can’t speak to them or make eye contact without getting yelled at, lectured, or worse, and in my condition, I had no energy for such a trial.  I didn’t react at all.

“There was so much pain that I… I just … couldn’t keep it inside.”  There was nothing in his voice that sounded crazed or drug-addled. But he was, nevertheless, clearly talking to me. I remained unflinching, but I listened.  He paused.

“So, I just cried.”  He spoke in an easy, slow fashion, like a grandpa telling a story in no particular rush.  “I especially cried at home, of course.  But when I couldn’t stop and still had to go out, I just cried when and where it happened.  At the grocery store, while walking the dog."  He paused again, this time for several seconds.  “On the train.”

He was pointedly violating the social etiquette of ignoring a crying man in public, and I would have been annoyed had his voice not been so patient, so open.  I turned my head.  Not to face him, but just to let him know I was listening. 

“It was like that for a long, long time.”  He sighed, sounding not of grief or regret, but of bittersweet memory.  “Too long.”

“One day, ” he started. The meter of his speech was picking up. “I was walking by the lake I loved and realized I had missed a season.  Hadn’t taken my favorite walk in months.  Maybe two seasons.  I had missed the flowers.  I had missed the birds.  My pain had kept me from something I loved for so long, and that realization brought a wave of hurt so sudden that I had to stop where I stood and just cry across the water.  Like it would understand.  Lonely and still, that it would reflect or absorb or… something… and I wouldn’t have to feel it.”

I was listening carefully enough at this point that my own tears had waned, but as he paused for the next chapter in his story, this unseen man’s breathing halted, was ragged for a moment, as though he were there by that lake, feeling his pain as freshly as I felt mine.

He gathered himself and continued, brighter, “and then a passerby stopped.  She awkwardly hovered for a second, and then asked if I wanted a hug.  I could never had said yes to a stranger at any time in my life before that, but I needed it so badly just then.”

There was no doubt what was coming next, and I was so horrified yet grateful.  So when he asked if this was that moment for me, I turned.  His body was already open to me, and I hugged him. 

It was a hug like my father gave me when I was a little boy who had skinned my knee.  It had none of the social distance Dad and I had put up when I was a teen, or that we had now as adults.  This stranger didn’t pat my back or indicate he would give up on me, and I clung to him. 

Then the dam broke, and I sobbed in the man’s arms so hard for what seemed like so long, and he said only, “I know how much it hurts.  You are not alone, and you’re going to be OK.”  He intoned it repeatedly, and I held him and shook as I cried.  After a time, I started to recover and remember I was hugging a strange man on a subway. I started to let go, and he did the same. 

I didn’t look up, but noticed he held an open hand out to me.  In his palm there rested a small bird’s ragged flight feather.  He said, “I thought you might like to have this.”

The train was arriving.  The doors opened, people started getting on.  Time seemed frozen, but rushed in the same instant.  His outstretched hand hovered there while my mind's stopwatch counted down the moments till the train's doors would close.  Confused and conflicted, I took the feather from his palm and got on the train, leaving him behind. 

I have no idea who he was; I never looked him in his face.  The ragged little feather is safe in its own wooden box.

Adam's Last Drive

Adam mopped more of the tears from his face with the heel of his free hand, managing to keep enough focus off his loss to stay on the road, but only just barely. Despite his bleary vision and bloodshot gaze, flecks of light flashed across his eyes that were not reflections of the streetlights passing by him as he drove. The dash instruments of his decrepit Datsun went out.

His body shook terribly with each sob and he turned his face upward as if to beg some deity for lenience or reprieve. His mouth gaped with such agony that his lips pulled tight over his teeth and when any sound did mange to emerge, his cry sounded like a frightened animal.  All the while,  his eyes flashed as though they reflected a distant fireworks display unseen in the night's somber sky.

The blown speaker in the right passenger door buzzed loudly before it made a loud pop and the battery on his flip phone sparked and hissed and oozed ominously. The lights on his eyes swirled like deep sea, luminescent shrimp escaping a predator.

Fragments of language travelled across his mind's surface. "Mark, why!" "Please?" "How?" "But... We!" "You...I...no!" And incomplete and incoherent as they were, even if the unfinished thoughts never reached his voice, those eyes shone, and flickered, and danced, and the world around them quivered, too.

A stoplight blinked from red to black as he sat unnoticing at it, until a car pulled around him, stopped, then went through the darkened intersection. He pulled into motion again and when his old truck listed too far right before correcting, a street lamp it passed under grew suddenly brighter, then exploded, showering glass onto the shadowed sidewalk.

Apartment buildings along Adam's slow and unsteady path flickered or went dark, an approaching Pruis went quiet and crawled to a stop before it could even pass him. A transformer on a street corner exploded gloriously, showering sparks into the blackness that could only briefly rival those that seemed to play across his vision.

He did not notice. He was no longer accelerating and the old beater drifted slowly toward the sidewalk, gently resting against a dull, mauve Taurus. A pop and hiss could be immediately heard under the hood of the sedan next to him, and then three loud bangs fired the pistons from Adam's engine clear through the truck's hood and as near to the stars as they could climb, leaving perfect little exit holes in the warm metal.

Save for the sounds of his crying, the evening became utterly silent. The flashes of brilliance playing across the surface of his eyes exploded into a galaxy of supernovas that were now visible even through Adam's closed lids. He held his head and moaned Mark's name like a futile prayer, and his gas tank exploded.

Three days later, Mark arrived at Adam's service late enough not to face the other people who'd loved the man. Mark's new lover was not at his side.