A Short Story, By Eric Duffy
I felt like going for a walk around the town of Rhinebeck. I went for a cruise in the van instead.
How To Make A Short Story Long, By Eric Duffy
At a friend’s apartment on the couch crash tour in Rhinebeck, I had an itch for some fresh air. I decided to go for another walk and continue to explore the town’s sidewalks. In between putting my jacket on and walking out the front door I changed my mind and decided to go for a drive instead. I hopped in the captain’s seat of my new van and fired the engine. I had no destination, no plans, no rhyme or reason what-so-ever, until of course, a thought.
Coffee. Time to get a coffee. But where? I could go to that gas station just out of town, fuel up the chariot and grab a coffee there. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.
I passed the Workers and Dreamers store on my way out of town.
Workers and Dreamers.
Workers.
I’m a worker.
I have found great joy in working outside, scaping land, playing in the dirt so to speak. It’s nice operating simple machines or tools like a lawn mower or a spade shovel. There’s something Zen like about cutting grass and digging holes. I cut the most green grass and dug the largest holes at cemeteries. They’re quiet places for the most part. They exist in Anytown, USA. Lawns filled with monuments marking humanity’s existence, proof for ourselves that we were here for a little while. Engraved stones stand so the remaining people know some-body was some-one.
“Make it look good. Some of these stones, the only visitor they’ll see all year is you,” my boss said to me, the first time I mowed a cemetery.
There was a baseball cap with an ‘M’ on the driveway at a cemetery I mowed. I picked up the hat and tried it on. It fit like Cinderella’s glass slipper. Score, I thought. Seconds later I noticed there was a fresh grave stone with some baseball memorabilia around it. The hat I had tried on was actually part of a memorial which somehow had migrated away from its stone. I walked up to the stone. There was a picture of a kid wearing the hat that I tried on.
“Sorry... I thought someone had dropped it,” I said, placing the hat back by the stone. I laughed a little. I wondered if he laughed with me.
At another cemetery while mowing an aisle of stones I saw two plastic cases holding stuffed animals. I looked at the engraving on the stone. It was a little girl’s. She was five when she died. I wondered what of. I wondered how her parents were doing. I thought about the stuffed animal I carried around as a kid. I thought about how my parents still have it in storage at their house.
On another visit at the same cemetery while mowing one section, I saw a large piece of garbage leaning against a stone in another section. I disengaged my blades and rode the mower over to the stone to remove the trash. But when I arrived at the stone, what I thought was a piece of garbage was actually a handmade cardboard sign someone had left. It read:
[This Man] raped me when I was twelve years old.
I looked at the stone. I looked at the cardboard sign. I left it there. A week later, at the next mowing visit to that cemetery, the cardboard sign was gone. I wondered if the wind blew it away. I wondered if a family member visited the stone to be met by a shocking revelation. I wondered if the woman who left the sign was okay.
I was weed whacking once and came upon a gravestone overgrown by an evergreen bush. While trimming underneath the bush, the string from the weed whacker yanked out a framed photo. I powered off the trimmer and got down on my knee to pick up the photo and brush off the grass clippings. It was a picture of a girl, couldn’t have been any older than twenty. Her smile from the picture pierced through me. I looked at the date on her stone. She could have been my age but her life was cut short. There were other pictures there too, of her with friends. Thirty seconds prior I never knew this girl existed. Thirty seconds later I began to cry for her, for her friends, for her family. I wondered who she was. I wondered what her dreams were. I placed the frame back down, tidied up her memorial, picked up my trimmer and moved on.
Workers and Dreamers.
Dreamers.
I’m a dreamer.
I daydreamed a lot when I worked in cemeteries. Surrounded by monuments of the inevitable, the mind rolled toward the strange thing that we all have to face some day. I think the inevitable leads to my dreams of utopia, world peace and freedom from suffering. It leads to daydreams of building the greatest society in the world, of the world, and for the world. A place where we all hang for a while, do some work that matters, talk about our dreams together, talk about the collective human dream, whatever that means, whatever that could mean, where we could go together, before we go... Before we go...
Where do we go?
Back to rolling in my dream van right past the gas station I meant to stop at because the mind rolled on. No big deal-I didn’t really need gas. New plan. Hit up Dunkin’ Donuts in the next town over to catch a coffee, then cruise back to Rhinebeck. I blew past the Dunkin Donuts by accident, then thought back to the initial loosely laid plan, I’ll just cruise up to the gas station on the corner, juice up the chariot and catch some coffee there. As I got to the traffic light next to the gas station, I saw that all the pumps were occupied. I made a U-turn.
I headed back towards Dunkin Donuts, pulled into the drive-thru and up to the speaker box. I ordered a coffee, pulled to the next window, paid and was served. I made a right out of the lot and was suddenly in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I put my still unsipped coffee down in the cup holder and continued inching forward in the van. A bunch of emergency vehicles started showing up, sirens blaring, lights strobing. Traffic amassed. Commuters U-turned. I pulled into a parking lot just before the scene of an accident. I parked and stared out at the accident. If there was a winner in this accident, it certainly wasn’t the compact sedan with the crushed doors from what must have been a violent side impact. An ambulance arrived.
“Please, be with them,” I said.
I put the van in drive, turned back around towards the Dunkin Donuts, and started heading back towards my friend’s apartment in Rhinebeck, a roundabout way. I wondered: What if I hadn’t passed those gas stations or stopped at the Dunkin Donuts? Would that have been me in a wrecked van waiting for an ambulance? It’s strange knowing that accidents happen every day. Yes, every day tons of people are wiped away from the face of the earth for no good reason. A bad roll of the cosmic dice lands human beings into a plot at those cemeteries. The Day the Music Died, Ritchie Valens won the last seat on an airplane that crashed by the flip of a coin. Happenings like that cast strange light on fate and free will.
Life is strange. It gets even stranger when you start inquiring into the mystery of life or existence itself. Here we are. Here I am. Quite possibly, if I wasn’t thinking about existence I wouldn’t have passed by the gas stations, and hence pulled into that Dunkin Donuts and ‘beat’ the accident.
I picked my cup up from the cup holder. And the first sip of the coffee confused my senses as the taste buds were met by the flavor of hot chocolate. I was disappointed for a millisecond, but then thought I’m alive, I’m here and though I ordered a coffee, the hot chocolate tastes great. The mind rolled on.
This is one strange place we live in. A bunch of people trying to find a reason, a purpose, making a series of choices in a choose-your-own adventure role-playing game that so many don’t realize they’re playing until...
Until..?
Until they have to look back on it all. But revelations can arrive sooner in the form of tragedy, these moments where lives are taken for no good reason have a way of awakening the survivors. Tragedy has a way of putting into sharp focus the profound realization that we’re alive, that this, all of this, is life. And some people won’t ever have that revelation until they have no choice but to say good-bye to their body and this waking state. And some people realize it sooner by getting through a personal tragedy they’d never wish upon a sworn enemy. They’re left, sometimes alone, to wonder and ask the “what ifs?”
What if I did this instead?
What if I did that differently?
Could I have changed any of this?
Is it written?
Is nothing written?
Is this a mathematical equation?
Is this some strange simulation?
Should I pray for divine intervention?
Is there a higher power with a strange plan, a plan filled with triumph and tragedy for both the individual and the human race?
Maybe there’s a reason that there are two masks on the theater bill, one for comedy, one for tragedy. Maybe Shakespeare is right. This world’s a stage, filled with human beings playing out the human drama met with paradoxes, often unseen. Some are given more of a chance but never take it, others overcome every obstacle to succeed in the end. Life is created. Life is destroyed. Life’s stuff, through all cultures, through all ages, continues to prompt human beings to ask those age old questions until...
The End.
The end?
How do you make a short story long?
By wondering about things like ‘the end.’ By wondering about how this all came to be. By talking with friends. By talking with family. By talking with coworkers. By talking with random strangers. By talking to a bunch of human beings, being human who are way more than the mere title of friend, family, coworker or stranger. By wondering just what the hell all of this is that seems to be happening here on earth.
I passed a bunch of lights in the woods on that roundabout way back to Rhinebeck. The lights looked like large tops or dreidels, some were red, some blue. I’ve passed by them numerous times before. I always wanted to take a closer look at them. I decided to turn around at a fork in the road. This fork in the road is actually marked by a giant oversized fork sculpture. The Man had posted a sign prohibiting a left hand turn, so I made a right at the fork to hang a quick left into a church parking lot. I made a U-turn in the lot and pulled up to the road again, ready to pull out of the lot and backtrack to those lights in the woods. Then a thought, maybe I should check to see if I have my camera on me so I can take a picture of these lights.
I put the van in park. I fumbled around the dash and found my camera. Nice, I thought. And then I looked up. The headlights of my dream van beamed across the road, illuminating a cemetery with an iron fence around it. The headlights shone directly on a sign. I hopped out of my van, walked across the road and took a picture of the sign on the cemetery gate.
NO PERMANENT PLANTING
I looked up at the sky and said, “Funny...”
