Stuck in Time-Short Story

There comes a time here when sunny days are the only ones that feel real. Too bad they don’t come around often. All other days feel more like a picture in a frame, edges blurred and still, with no wind in them. It makes music sound pale and turns peoples’ words into dead weight; language falls out of mouths like rotting apples left up long past harvest and on into murmuring winter. It’s a place of non-weather they say, always about 50 degrees and overcast. It’s where weather comes to die, or at least comes to lay in its open casket, inanimate, in a grey suit. I don’t like thinking about death, even in personification. Especially in personification. It makes me feel like it’s all-encompassing.

I frequently feel like I’m stuck in time. Like God has his viewfinder on me and I’m always about to walk out of the frame. It’s a pretty picture: One leg in view, the other up to its calf in black unknown. I frequently feel like I’m stuck in time. John tells me that thinking things like this are—what is the word—impractical. He says it is pointless to think too “deep” on some things. He says it just like that; he’s too realistic for adverbs. John embarrasses himself though when he says stuff like this. He thinks it makes him sound down to earth. I think it sounds more like a man telling everyone right off the bat that he has a pool they can swim in but that it only has a shallow end. I don’t know why I still hang around with him. Maybe I like the look of my reflection in the water.

John orders another beer, Fat Tire, always Fat Tire and a song comes on. My drink still sits there three quarters empty. That is how I like it. The song playing reminds me of a night I sat out on my patio in Texarkana with my mom. I remember mainly because my mom let me smoke a cigarette. It made me feel like we were two college friends, sneaking out of some bright house party to talk about Virginia Woolf in a soft cicada night. It made me feel like both of us had our whole lives out in front of us, that we would have joint engagement parties together or spend our next couple of years out on the town playing with men’s hearts and sneaking into jazz clubs to order gin and tonics underage. The streetlights would dazzle us even in the rain and the leather bums on the corner, the men in black suits, would remind us of New York City and the promise we made to go before the days started to look longer. I played this song while we talked. When it ended I remembered I was her daughter and she was my mother.

“Move on to another day, to a whole new town with a whole new way. Went to the porch to have a thought. Got to the door and again I couldn't stop.” I hear it through the cracked and dusty brown speakers perched like barn owls in the ceiling corners of the bar. This song makes every scene look to me sun-tinged and pink, summertime sad and beautiful. Whenever I hear it, no matter what time it is, the sun is setting behind the skyline at Gasworks park with me watching it from the top of that green fantastical hill and great blue and red kites dance over me like huge exotic birds. Then everything turns purple (around the third stanza) and I watch blonde children in slow motion with stripes on their shirts running towards some body’s open arms and I turn smiling at them in a white sundress, laughing at their chocolate ice cream spots and my grass stains. It’s near the end and the clouds start to shift in violet shades. The sun, as it goes down behind the white-peaked mountains, is an egg yolk going back into its cracked shell to be reborn. The last notes resonate. My face drops and suddenly I get terribly sad, so sad that it feels like it’s not just the day ending, but it’s like life itself is ending. Then my chest starts burning and I fear that the sun is falling away for the last time. That the earth will just go spiraling off into gaping blackness and I’ll be left without any light to see any one’s eyes before the seconds run out. I get this feeling every time a clear day ends. It always makes me wonder if it’s some kind of intuition and that maybe I’ll die the next day. I don’t like to think about death though. One of the waitresses switches the song.

John knows I’m not listening anymore, just nodding. He knows I’m thinking on something and I can tell he thinks I’m musing over something too deep again. He sighs. It’s starts to drizzle outside. I think about how at least it’s weather. I am aware of John now, but I stare off into space a little bit longer just to piss him off. John’s talking about peanut butter allergies again and how he doesn’t believe in them. Unfortunately, I’ve heard this one before so I can catch up. “Don’t you think they would choose not to have an allergy if it was possible,” I say. “From what I’ve learned you don’t pick allergies, they pick you.”

That night I smoked a cigarette with my mom we talked until four in the morning. My favorite part was when she told me about a night in college when she snuck off with a boy that was not her boyfriend to watch the snow fall off John Weeks Bridge. She smelled like Harvard tweed jackets and periwinkle nights and big oaks with icicles as she told it. After she went to sleep I ran into my father in the hallway. I told him about our conversation and he smiled. “Your mother is really something isn’t she, when she isn’t spending her time trying to teach you something,” he said. I realized that was the problem I had with almost everybody I knew.

Later, that night I went peeking through their old scrapbooks up in my mother’s office. Inside the aging protective paper, I found a picture of my parents sitting on a white deck at the family home in upstate New York, my mother in a brown cotton sweater and my father in a plaid shirt. This was before they had gotten married. Neither of them were looking at the camera. My mother was looking down and my father was looking at her with an easy smile, like he had already spent his whole life with her and still loved her. I stole the picture that night, slid it in between the pages of the book I would read on the plane back. I keep it in my wallet now, as though they are my children and I want to show them off to my friends. 


It starts to pour outside. I ask the waiter for a refill. When I open my wallet to pay, the picture falls out and I hurry to pick it up before John sees it. He eyes it as I slide it back inside its leather pouch. John asks me why I carry it on me. “A bit sentimental isn’t it?” he says. I ignore him as I get my change back from the waiter. “I carry it as evidence for people as to why I’m so beautiful,” I say and then quickly gulp my drink down to three quarters empty. John accepts the smart-ass answer. He does it more because he thinks what he plans to say next is more interesting than he does out of a respect for my privacy. As John brings up his views on Rogaine, my mind begins to wander again. Before I know it, I’m answering his question in my mind. I keep it there for when I need to feel something, I say to myself. I keep it there to remind myself of time.