Random snippet

A languid derelict sits casting the cobalt shadow of a boulder hanging from a cliff in twilight. Stacks of papers surround him and his whirling typewriter. The room is dark, largely empty except for a small desk behind which the distraught figure does nothing but contrast with the background in a faint bluish gray. From his window, he can see the snow begin to pick up and obscure the landscape. Weather is something he had always felt strangely in tune with, almost forcing himself to recognize even the slightest change in barometric pressure, temperature or humidity and then to construct a reaction accordingly. The temperature gauge outside his window reads 12 degrees Fahrenheit. There is nothing on the page issuing from his typewriter except a single line that reads “To you, my aphelion,” His eyes follow the browning contours of the stacks of papers that grow from his table and he feels that he had never wrote them, not one word, instead that all those words randomly materialized on paper before him with help from some cosmic order that arranges the nebulae and the stars. Pencils, pens and notebooks litter the floor around him as he sits in stolid stasis of the bustling cosmic order pushing and shoving things slowly into place around him. His mind drifts back to college and the bright idealism he held forth for all to see and hear, his stomach churning in a warm solution of ethics and buoyant youth. They had the means to change the world for the better and it seemed everyone was overflowing with words like “revolution” and “freedom”. Now, after these flashbacks have faded into the distance like a thunderstorm they left behind halitosis and indigestion that could last for hours, days even, without some arbitrary activity taking hold of the foreground to cleanse his pallet. He would take walks, play with his dog, but recently he found these activities left him wanting. A sense of anxious recollection would well up inside him and eventual consume everything before his eyes. His condition made him develop a new habit, something he discovered to be the only thing that offered solace from the blinding acuity holding him hostage. He called his new habit “ran-dying”; it consists of randomly dialing numbers out of the phone book. After teetering on the edge of malicious recall for a few days or so he would flip through the yellow pages and pick a name then call it from an old MA-BELL pay phone he found in a dumpster behind a gas station some years ago that he rigged up to the LAN line in his house. He would pick up the receiver, drop a quarter in and wait for the distinctive click in the dial tone of the phone accepting the quarter in its mechanical innards, then hold the receiver to his ear with his shoulder and flip through the phone book, avoiding the blocks of Smiths and Johnsons until he came to a name with some pep then followed the dots over to the number and dialed it. Should the other end pick up even after not recognizing his number on their caller ID he would start off the conversation with a carefully calculated tone of haste, such as is found in the voice of federal workers who sit in tiny cubicles with attachable ergonomic shoulder rests stuck to the backs of their work phones and who have developed through years of practice a lightning fast dexterity of the fingers when it comes to dialing unfamiliar numbers. So with this tone stitched through his words he would claim to be from the department of so and so, inserting an official sounding accolade in front of the name he made up from jamming together first and/or last names of characters in the broad spectrum of literature he had acquired over his years as a student of English in college and later on as a published writer of fiction. A light headed rush of extreme clarity over takes him as he pieces together his moniker and lets it roll off his tongue thick into the receiver before a faithful reply of acceptance tinged in slight concern comes transpiring back. This must be the sentiment of the jackal, he thinks, as it cackles, peering through the brush at the soggy remains of something that once was alive, but can now only provide sustenance for the living. After the conversation is over he would hang up the receiver and use the screwdriver he attached to the side of the phone via twine and duct tape to pry open the metal seams of the phone and retrieve his quarter unless he felt the conversation truly warranted the payment, in which case he would leave the quarter in the dusty mechanical innards of the phone and sit back down at his little desk between his browning stacks of paper with the contented bliss from his hearty smorgasbord still ringing in his ears.

The blizzard has knocked the phone lines down for an amount of time he doesn’t want to remember. Outside the snow falls in ragged white clumps that streak in a rapid static across the windowpane.