Joester wasn’t able to sleep. Something was bothering him. He rose before dawn, swallowed three ibuprofen with tap water, and, then, took his dog for a walk. Because it was early, he wasn’t in any hurry. He let the dog linger where the scent interested her. He walked slowly, the dog switching sides in front of him, right to left and back again every few feet, nose to the ground. The way was longer than his customary route. This loop passed through a residential neighborhood, then, down along the edge of a park where there was a shelter and bandshell between the river and a small pond against a wooded hillside. He found the laurel wreath on the lawn near the bandshell. The dog sniffed sweat on the wreath but was only briefly interested. Then, the sun rose.
Joester had just finished a short story that he planned to send for publication. After walking the dog, he expected to work on revisions to the story, improving it so that it could be printed. He didn’t often send out his stories to magazine editors. The rejections were too painful. Once, an editor wrote to him that his story was poorly written and that, if he wished to continue with this craft, he should attend a MFA program: “Your prose isn’t good enough to be published in its present form, but with some additional refinement, perhaps, you could write something that would interest someone.” The dog pulled against her leash. The memory was irritating and Joester tried not to think about his failures, at least, not this early in the day, before the sun was even above the horizon.
At first, the route through the houses had been a bit gloomy. A white-tailed rabbit started from within a bush along the stucco facade of a home. The dog tugged so hard that Joester was almost pulled off his feet. The sidewalk was dark and the increasing color and brightness in the sky wasn’t yet an influence on the terrain around him. At an intersection, a pickup truck turned and its headlights swept across the green lawn. On the hill leading down toward the picnic shelter and the bandshell, Joester saw mist rising off the river flowing in its murky trench along the side of the road under trees still solemn and winter-bare. A number of trucks and SUVs were parked in the small lot behind the picnic shelter. Hammer blows sounded inside the stone walls of the shelter. The building had once been a small church but was too close to the river and, therefore, frequently flooded. The city park authority acquired the ruined sanctuary, tore down its Sunday school wing, and poured a utilitarian concrete floor between the heavy ashlar walls of building. Gothic windows that had once supported stained glass were converted into entry-ways with gates that could be padlocked shut. Pounding continued in the shelter but Joester didn’t see anyone. Perhaps, Joester thought, someone was removing decorations from a festival from the night before.
The bandshell was about sixty feet away and his dog first discovered the laurel wreath. It had been dropped beside the sidewalk. The laurel leaves were no longer green but greyish brown and withered. The wreath had a celebratory shape, the kind of thing that a hero or poet might wear on his brow. Joester followed his dog onto the grass and took a couple steps toward the wreath, then, prodded it with the toe of his shoe. The dog smelled traces of geese that lived in the park in the green under her nose and she tugged again. The pounding in picnic shelter seemed to be coming from far under the ground.
Joester thought that if he were ten years younger, he would stoop to retrieve the laurel wreath from the dewy grass. But bending over might be hurtful at this time of the morning and his joints felt raw and sore and, so, he turned away and yanked the dog back to the sidewalk.
The way home was uphill for another two hundred yards and the sun rose behind him. The raking beams of light cast Joester’s shadow far ahead of him. The shadow was slender and immensely elongated, stretching, perhaps, 80 feet with a strange pointed angle atop the dark column of his body. As he walked up the hill, the angle of the sun’s rays changed and the shadow shrunk to a moving blade of darkness tapering to an anonymous cone.
Joester didn't know what the laurel wreath meant. Many of the things that we see are mysterious. Maybe, we aren't supposed we aren't supposed to see such things.
No comments:
Post a Comment