Interminable: A Short Story

He recycles monthly, an endless march of bottles and cans across his kitchen counter, dancing their way into plastic bags fresh from the grocery store that recently carried fruits and vegetables. He knows he should buy recycled bags created from old soda bottles, but they are $15 apiece and he hasn’t that much money this week. His sister visits and chastises him for believing that he can make a difference in the world. “One person against society is like a needle in a haystack.” He maintains that one person can provide the change we can believe in. “What I do is like dropping a rock into the middle of a pond.” Neither one ever gives quarter to the other and neither one expects the change to suddenly appear. They are set in their ways although they are both exceptionally young.

He grows a beard because he is too lazy to shave. His coworkers believe this to be a fashion statement, that he’s finally ready to be a man. This is, however, quite far from the truth as he has never been in a serious relationship and he doesn’t plan on it anytime soon. Not that he is happy with his solitary existence. Far from it. He wishes he could get a woman he’s interested in to be interested in him in return, but this has never happened during his 26 years of existence. He thinks he might possibly have something to offer someone in a long term deal, but he doesn’t have the collateral to even get more than one date. So perhaps the beard will do what his lack of money has failed to do.

The playground down the street catches his eye with its sharp angles and frank honesty. It does not lie. He walks there often, the only one who spends any significant time there, although the town put in completely new equipment just two years ago. He figures that the town’s underaged denizens are inside playing Wii and XBox 360, or they’re sitting on their beds texting each other until the wee hours of the morning. All of these exploits keep them, he believes, from enjoying the fresh air that he craves. Which is fine with him because he lives for solitude sometimes, when the night is yet young and the air is fresh with possibility. He sits at the top of the slide willing gravity to take him down its cold surface, but to no avail. Fear like an iron vise holds him in its sway and he is powerless against it.

He visits his mother once a week, but never on Friday nights. It would seem too pathetic to show up on a Friday night, even though she often expects him to come then. He wonders if she knows he has no life. He wonders if she realizes he’s already dead, the first 26-year-old walking corpse in history’s wide circle. When he leaves her house he knows she pities him. She. Pities. Him. An irony that is not lost on him, considering he should have the realm of possibilities spread before him and her life should be over. Yet she is remarried to a man who seems to love her, has money to spare but he could never ask her for any, and she even makes her own beer. What he wouldn’t give for a cool draught right now.

He looks out his dusty window, wishing he could do something to make his life different, but he knows he is just as shadowless as the ghosts he chases, casting no glow on others, living each day for yesterday and not for tomorrow. He closes his drapes and a layer of dust falls down, slowly sifting through the air before settling to the drab olive green carpet below. He stares at himself in the bathroom mirror, lathering up with foam before applying the razor to his face. Hoping to take away his shame along with the hair that has built up longer than it should have. His phone rings but he’s too busy accomplishing a purpose, achieving a goal he never knew he had before. But in the back of his mind he knows it’s pointless. The phone rings through to voice mail which he cannot hear while he’s leaning over the sink. Beep. “I got your number off myspace. You seem cool. I was hoping we could meet sometime.” A message he’ll never get because that was his second beep and she’s speaking to dead air. A meeting he’ll never attend that could have been the beginning of the rest of his life. Instead now he is hairless like a child exiting the womb for the first time, a baby emerging from his shell to find out that the world has not changed.

He rinses his razor in the tepid water, oblivious to the turn his life could have just taken, turns out his bathroom light, and climbs into bed naked, drifting away to a dreamless sleep.

Sam