I make myself sick three times today before running into her this evening.
The first is in the morning. Standing in front of my mirror, paralysed with indecision over what to wear. I feel this cloying need for comfort, I want to bury my body under thick layers of fabric but my jumpers are worn and old, everything tired and used up and repeated and stale. I stick three fingers down my throat and heave my morning coffee into the toilet. My day begins badly. I brush my teeth again.
I decided not to publish the book I wrote about him. I know you want me to, Eymen, but he wouldn’t forgive me for it. Not when he’s trying so hard to get better, to be better. Not when he’s cooking me eggs with the sunny side up, the yolk just the perfect consistency of a semi-ripe apricot.
He’s approaching me now, his circular, friendly belly leading the way. He’s cut up pears for us. I don’t like pears, but I take a slice anyway. I smile. “Fresh from the trees?” I ask.
As I watch children scurry by my iron gate, I recall how I started doing the same thing when I was their age, nine, maybe ten, hurrying past this same house, pumped full of Halloween sugar, ready to jump out of my skin at any unexpected sight or sound.
At thirteen I summoned up the courage to open the creaking gate – rusty even back then – and knocked on the door, my pals cowering in the shadows. Their loss. The old crone who drew it open seemed pleased to see a brave young fellow coming to call. She put out her hand and, before I could grasp it, a dove fluttered from her gnarled palm. I stumbled backward as the bird flew up the stairwell, then perched on the banister.
The club only ever had two members: Eric and me. There were plenty of other weirdos at school – techno-geeks, nerds, gamers, Goths, those who went geocaching in the woods at weekends or played the glockenspiel in the school orchestra. There were even a couple of stamp collectors and a lone plane spotter. But we agreed that although they were all outcasts in their own way, they weren’t in our league.
Eric and I started partnering up in lessons, mainly because nobody else wanted to work with us.
‘We misfits have to stick together,’ Eric said.
He lingered on the borderlands between the bar and the raucous scrum that resembled the pub proper. His was the liminal space that lay in that strange realm, watching and feigning participation. As always, he was SOBER – that dirty word. He had abstained for five years now and planned to remain that way for many years to come. He was happy with his status. The decision had been made, all that time ago, to live without a drink. His life before, one he often thought of as a strange, fever dream, was like a completely different world to him. There, he had spent the time striving toward drunkenness. His weekend had been awash with booze, often commencing on Thursday evening, forsaking the hope of Friday, and then devouring the weekend like a famished animal. Treating it like an odd hobby, rather than the destructive force that it really represented for him.
But that was years ago.
A water molecule veered from the jet’s vapor trail as the cloud of exhaust dispersed into the stratospheric winds. The molecule floated freely for several thousand meters before condensing onto a rain cloud. It then joined with a droplet and fell through the haze blanketing Everytown, gathering speed to eventually smack lightly on the forearm of the man who, had he known the molecule’s origin, would have proclaimed it to be the spawn of a government-funded, mind-controlling chemtrail.
The man–alias Fowler–reclined in a lounge chair on the porch under an aluminum awning, his frame in shadow from the neck up. Long legs stretched out from vermillion shorts, pushing the limits of a plastic stool.
Josh Rank is a debut writer with guts. In his first published novel, The Present is Past (from Unsolicited Press), he tells the story of Mary, a middle-aged teacher whose life has been thrown into disarray by dementia. Whilst less courageous writers would perhaps tip-toe around the subject of cognitive decline, Rank immerses the reader in disorientation – the story is dream-like, infused with magical realism, blurring our concept of memory and pushing the limits of reality.
Rank was kind enough to answer some questions about his writing process and how his own family’s experience with dementia prompted him to write a book about it.
It’s Saturday night, but Mac doesn’t have any plans. He pours himself a glass of whiskey and settles into his recliner to watch the Adam Sandler movie marathon playing on cable TV. There’s a warmth to Sandler’s performances and Mac laughs for a few hours, making it through Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, and some of Big Daddy, before passing out during the scene when Sandler teaches his roommate’s son how to urinate in public.
Ellie left him almost a month ago. His family and friends back in Pittsburgh warned him that moving to Denver with a woman he’d only known for a year was foolish, but Mac was in love and ready to start the next chapter of his life. He knows now that she never loved him the way he loved her, yet he can’t keep his subconscious from stirring up memories of Ellie as he sleeps, ruining even his dreams.
“I can’t take this heat anymore,” I said, pushing back strands of hair that blew free from my headband. The open car windows did little to bring relief from Louisiana’s thick, oppressing air. “Might as well be holding a hair dryer up against my face,” I added for dramatic effect.
“For someone who grew up here, you sure complain a lot about the heat,” Daniel said. He poked me in the thigh.
“Well, we had this thing called air conditioning and it actually worked,” I said, returning a double jab to his thigh.
Idle Ink 