Category: Short Story

“Oh, the distance is not doable in these bodies of clay, my brother. Oh, the distance makes me uncomfortable. Guess it’s natural to feel this way.”

The bus is crawling down Market Street at a snail’s pace as we sit here wasting time that could be better spent. Right now I’m thinking about how I would have probably already been at the office by now if I hadn’t thought it was good luck that the bus reached the corner at the same time I did. That hadn’t happened in months, so I was momentarily blinded by it as I climbed aboard and swiped my Transpass through the reader. Now I sit here in the middle of the bus, regret etched across my features. And I’m not alone.

When I moved to the outskirts of downtown Philadelphia I thought I had it made. It meant less commuting time and more culture. Of course part of the tradeoff was the declining sense of safety that had shrouded me living in the suburbs, ensconced in all the trappings of distance. See, distance is all it takes to feel secure, distance from where most crimes take place, distance from people who walk everywhere they go, and distance from the type of crazy you can only find in a city’s center. But I moved anyway because the pros outweighed the cons, or at least they did on my checklist.

But as I sit here, and the clock keeps on ticking, I’m starting to rethink why those pros weighed down the scale a few short months ago. It helped that the apartment I was in wasn’t mine, that it was ours, and that he was gone. It just felt haunted ever since he vanished, one day there and the next gone. Continue reading “The Distance”