She pointed to the bed like a police detective would the scene of the crime. “Okay, nevermind Tyler,” he said, “this guy you’re gonna marry, you ever had any doubts about him?” She moved her hair out of the way as she fastened her bra. Melanie rolled her eyes, accustomed as she was with his equivocating ways. “’Course,” Landon said, “it’s a surprise.” Let’s spend it together, the three of us, way we used to.” “His birthday’s coming up, when, Tuesday.” “Nevermind Tyler, don’t bring him into this,” she said. A boy should grow up with his dad, don’t you think.” “Y’know, I been thinking,” Landon said, immediately putting Melanie en garde with that last word, thinking. A change of status that he didn’t want to be associated with, as he’d always learned to keep it positive, if only to alleviate the feeling of being constantly cursed. It was almost as if he felt shame for the deceased, like they’d suddenly lost their day jobs and were soon found roaming down Skid Row at night, glugging a slug of Skol out of a brown bag. “Thanks for coming.”įunerals always filled Landon with a sense of embarrassment he couldn’t quite place, and his father’s funeral was no different. “I’m sure my old man appreciates that, wherever he is,” Landon said. “The truth,” Melanie said, “had to go to a funeral.” Major events nestled in like rosary beads, one for their brief courtship, one for the wedding, one for the pregnancy, one for the birth of their son, one for the divorce, and now another bead for her engagement to a man he loathed. The blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things, yet a span of Time containing most of his adult life. Melanie looked even better now, he thought, than when they’d first met ten years previous. He turned to study her as she picked her clothes off the floor, the yellow light making her look like a Greek goddess in some bucolic Arcadian landscape. “What did you tell him?” Landon asked the naked woman lying in bed. He’d constantly worked at embellishing the tattoo and, if not for Time, it’d probably end up covering his entire body like some kind of Buddhist version of the Illustrated Man. That wasn’t the craziest thought to ever cross his mind. He was about sixteen at the time, lived for rock ‘n’ roll and thought, with the innocence of youth, that a sound-of-the-universe symbol on his neck would curry favor with the music gods. He got the seed of that tattoo not long before he left the roost and went to conquer the world. There was an “Om” tattoo on his neck, forming the centerpiece in a flower-of-life type of symbol. Well into his thirties, Landon fancied himself a man of the world. Perhaps another fateful day for Landon Briggs, in other words. He could read the signs when dialed in, as he was now, and he was quickly overcome by the portents of a nefarious presence floating in the air around him, an Asura monster poking at the outer edge of the visible world. He shielded his eyes in defense, annoyed by the intrusion in what would otherwise have been a rather complacent state of mind. He parted the drapes and a flood of California sunlight nearly blinded him where he stood. The mattress squeaked, followed shortly by light footsteps and then complete silence, that grim augury before a major earthquake, which is what that moment felt like to him, a life-long Los Angeleno.
A deep sigh flushed out like the last words of a mute. In the pitch-dark room there were signs of life. “Now the time has come for you to seek a path.” Rainbows & Widows: Brokedown in Dodge City Linear Meditation on “For Eleanor Boylan Talking With God” by Anne The Expiration of the CARES Act–Eviction Protection Jim Daniels for “ ATTACK OF THE KILLER ANTZ, THE RICE METHOD OF RECOVERY, AND OTHER