Author: Ridley

This is a draft I knocked out on the airplane coming back from New York.  The dialog doesn’t really work and the POV is all over the place, but I was in an emotional place and I really wanted to write from that for the first draft.  I hadn’t originally envisioned this as a cycle, but, at least in this form, it appears to be heading that way.  Curious…    Long Division An Ed and Dawn Story ————————– Ed stared alternately at the receipt he’d recently pulled from his wallet and his cell phone. It was rally too early to call on this hazy-filled Sunday morning. It felt oppressively muggy to Ed, sitting Indian-style on his bed, surrounded by a ginger tabby, a matte-black laptop, and the aforementioned receipt and cell phone. It wasn’t, he suspected, really humid at all, but lack of sleep and nerves always played hell with his body’s ability to adjust to the climate, even in his home town. His gaze went back and forth between the white slip of paper and the thick, black phone. He’d called after he played a game of solitaire and beat it. Or maybe he’d call after he checked the soccer results from six time zones away. Or perhaps after he…well, it didn’t matter. This was the game he played to distract himself from facing up to unpleasant tasks. In happier times, when he was only looking for a job, he’d become so good at manufacturing distractions and excuses that he could burn the entire day without ever having to do whatever he was avoiding. He was good at it. But in time, he’d become too aware of the man behind the curtain for the game to work in a satisfactory fashion. The red, LED-ish, digits on his bedside alarm clock read 9:46. He’d been awake for two hours without leaving the bed. He woke up, fired up the laptop, took a look at his wallet, and his heart stopped. It had a funny way of stopping, in that it felt like it was trying to burst from his chest via the shortest route available, ribs be damned. But stop it did. He could neither move, nor think, nor stop thinking. It was a stasis that a programmer might describe as an endless loop, He closed his eyes and simulated an uncountable number of responses to what had just happened, found none of them to be acceptable, and ran them all again. After an eternity, he looked to his right: 9:48. There was no point in avoiding it. He would be here until he made the call. Dawn hadn’t been a morning person for long so, while she did routinely awaken before 8:00 on weekends, she hadn’t developed the routines that a natural-born morning person would have to use those early hours when her past self would have still been cuddled up in the bedroom. Instead, unable to sleep despite, or perhaps because of, the gentle, nagging reminder that she’d had one margarita more than she ought the previous night, she popped open one of her laptops and caught up with her online world. She had just finished responding to the overnight traffic on her social networking sites and was about to dive into celebrity gossip and jump in the tub when her phone started to vibrate. She looked at the number and frowned slightly. She hadn’t spoken to Ed in weeks. She’d been slowly pruning their mutual networking connections, not entirely sure whose benefit she was doing it for, and she hadn’t seen him face to face in two months. Their contact had been limited to various forms of text in brief, awkward spasms that she suspected he felt compelled to draw out even though they obviously cost him dearly. Her feelings on the subject were, to say the last, complicated. She’d told him that it would be easier on her if she could hate him, which she realized was a curious thing to say to the person you’d just left. She knew she wasn’t very good at breaking up, but she was trying, and there are bound to be a few missed notes when you’re learning a new song. There was no evidence of Ed being online, so she suspected he probably wasn’t at home. They’d been playing a weird sort of hide and seek in the Yahoo chat. She’d appear online, he’d pop up, and then she’d suddenly disappear. It was awkward but, honestly, there wasn’t much they could do that wouldn’t be awkward. She was playing it by ear, trying to do her best and having no clear idea of what that meant. So, it was unusual that Ed would be calling. She picked up that phone and tried out her latest pleasant-but-emotionally-neutral greeting. “Yo.” “Hey you,” said Ed, also attempting a Swiss neutrality mixed with normality. If Dawn was struggling finding the right notes, Ed wasn’t even on the right page. “Sup? You sound like shit.” Dawn was deservedly well known for her lack of diplomacy with people who were close to her, but in this case, she was just stating a fact. Ed did sound like shit. “We need to talk.” “Ok, we’re talking.” “No, in person. We need to talk face-to-face.” “Ed, I don’t think that’s a good idea. It won’t do any good. I know you want to talk, but drawing it out like this won’t do either of us any good. We need to move on.” She only called him by his name when she was irritated, although she didn’t appear to be aware of this. “I don’t want to talk, but we need to talk. We need to talk face-to-face. I don’t care if we do it at your place, or my place, or some neutral ground.” “Why do we need to talk, Ed?” “Something happened last night. I haven’t told anyone else. I need to talk to you first.” “Ed, no. Just no. I’m not your girlfriend anymore, Ed. I’m not the person you need to be going to with your problems. You need to get past that.” Ed almost laughed. Maybe he did a little, but no phone yet invented would have picked up a sound that faint. “Babe, we need to talk. You know me. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important….

It was here, four years ago, that we stopped being friends. We’d met a couple years prior to that night, but we’d just been friends.  You were involved and I was trying quixotically to get involved with a doe-eyed girl who wasn’t having it.  We’d only seen each other a couple of times, keeping in touch over the phone or with e-mail. That all changed, four years ago tonight.  You were in town for a school contest, staying in a cheap hotel with what looked like a dozen of your classmates.  We met up and headed down to my favorite bar for a few beers and the best burgers this town has to offer. That night, at the end of the bar, we stopped being friends. I can’t say I wasn’t hoping for just that.  I’d been seeing a girl, a perfectly nice girl, but just a girl, you know?  When I heard you were going to be in town, that was the end of that.  She deserved better, but she wasn’t going to get it from me.  I just wanted to make sure there weren’t any loose ends,  just in case.  I’m weird about that.  I don’t believe that anything that starts badly can work out in the long run.  You know me:  I’m all about the long run. After that night we stopped being friends, we saw each other as often as four and a half hours distance would allow.  That’s quite a lot if you want it to be, and we both did.  You bravely changed the course you’d mapped out for your life and moved here to be with me.  And stayed.  Nothing’s perfect, and not everything that’s good lasts.  We were really good for three years or so, but the last year was tough.  I don’t understand what happened, but it doesn’t really matter whether I do or don’t.  You didn’t want to be with me anymore, and that’s all that needs to be said. So tonight, I walked into that same bar.  Four years to the day from when we stopped being friends.  Three weeks to the day from when you left me.  Funny-it’s not the same bar.  Not really.  There’s no smoke to hide how tawdry the place looks when the daylight sneaks in.  The food is no longer worthy of the reputation.  And the end of the bar, where the two of us stopped being friends, is nothing more than the end of the bar. 

This song very much captures the mood I want for the second half of the story.  It is joyful and sincere and maudlin and always just on the verge of bursting in to the ecstatic.  It is the sort of song I’d love to have for the first dance at my wedding. It is “Go Places” by the New Pornographers – WTF   Yes a heart will always go one step too farCome the morning and the four corners I seeWhat the moral of the back story could beCome with me, go places And a heart will always stay one day too longAlways hoping for the hot flashes to comeFor the glue to dry on our new creationCome with me, go places Come head on, full circleOur arms fill with miraclesPlay hearts, kid, they work wellLike classics play acesStay with me, go placesOnce more for the ages Yes a heart should always go one step too farCome the morning and the day winding like dreamsCome the morning every blue shade of greenCome with me, go places Come head-on, full circleOur arms fill with miraclesPlay hearts, kid, they work wellLike magic, play acesStay with me, go placesOnce more for the ages Come one now, come all yeThis story breaks free hereTales from the back pagesFrom somewhere, EncidaDeus ex machinaGood morning, ChrstinaCome head on, full circleOur path blocked but sure we’llMake records, then set themMake copies, win racesStay with me, go placesOnce more for the ages

This short story isn’t really a story at all-it’s the backstory for the story. It’s sort of a warmup exercise to give me an idea of the story arc and thems that I’m working on. -WTF Ed always knew how he would die. When he was very young, too young to make letters, he was angry at his parents and he drew a picture of them on a napkin and then angrily crossed them out with thick strokes of black crayon. Looking at what he’d done, he imagined his parents being gone. He imagined the hole that their absence would leave, and he felt a terrible pain and began to cry. He remembered this event for the rest of his life, knowing he would eventually die of a broken heart. Surely, there were other things that might have ended his story prematurely. Ed thought of himself as a bit of a risk-taker (and who doesn’t?), but in truth, he was fairly cautious in how he lived his live. He didn’t drink much or smoke at all, and he avoided drugs because he was afraid he might like them. He ate too much, and he wasn’t the most attentive driver in the world, but, in looking at him, you wouldn’t see anything that would suggest an abbreviated lifespan. There were times in Ed’s life when he was rich with love, and he felt it was like walking through an oasis, abundant and full of joy. Sometimes he would walk this path alone, but more often than not, he had a partner to share these times. He was always happiest getting to share these green times with someone, to see the beauty and wonder reflected in their eyes and back off of his own. When his life was full of love, Ed’s road was easy. For every oasis, though, there was a desert. The road was hard, and it could easily turn two people against each other. Sometimes, one or the other would decide that this road was not one they wanted to walk, and they would turn away. Sometimes it was Ed who would choose to turn away, but most of the time it was not. When in the desert, love had to be nurtured and protected and fought for as though one’s life depended on it, or it would die. Most often, Ed walked the desert by himself. For some people, the desert wasn’t so bad. They scarcely noticed that love was absent, because they had other things on their mind and moved on. For Ed, the desert was brutal. The desert was no place of self-discovery for him because he knew who he was. The thing that moved him to cross the desert was the very thing that was absent there. Because of this, the trek became harder for him as he grew older. He knew he had to cross the desert, but he had more and more difficulty convincing himself why. It was great fortune, then, that he met Dawn. There were innumerable things that he loved about Dawn: Her quirky smile, her evil sense of humor, her great capacity for caring while at the same time sharing Ed’s less-than-social tendencies. The list could go until all the world’s ink was spent and the list would still truly capture why he loved her. However, no matter what form the list took, one item would surely be underlined: She would cross the desert with him. Ed and Dawn made many journeys across the desert together. The crossings weren’t ever easy. Their love was tried and, at times, found wanting. They fought, they cried, they separated, they reconciled. Ed would have been hard-pressed to explain exactly why they made it. There was no magic to it. The desert is where the magic doesn’t work. Dawn just fought harder, and loved harder, than anyone Ed had ever encountered. Shortly after Ed’s 88th birthday, Dawn passed away. She was incapable of doing anything she didn’t care about, and when she did care, she gave everything she had. Eventually, that took its toll. She had never looked forward to being old anyway. She’d led a marvelous life full of adventures that you never would have imagined someone with her background might have known. At least, you would never have imagined it if you had never met her. Those who had knew better. So once again, the desert lay in front of Ed. There was nothing but sand and sun as far as his eyes could see. He knew that, eventually, he would find another oasis if he forced himself to make the trek. “Not this time,” he thought to himself. One last night, he put himself to bed in his now-empty house and closed his eyes. It was with great relief that he lay down and let the desert claim him at last.