A Bright House

In a crystallized fragment of perception, split two ways, the elastic elusive definition-resisting power of “time” held both Ray Townes and Jenny, rapt. Synaptic speeds beyond thought and language to convey thought, funneled their two into one frame of three dimensional stillness.

She held his gaze until her eyes felt moist, then looked at his hands as they were placed flat atop the table, thumbs touching along their length, fingers splayed out in a fan. The top of each wide hand held a beautifully rendered tattoo of a Viking rune shaped in the letter ‘B’, and each symbol was inked to be read by those who looked upon mister Townes. Jenny stepped in closer to the table, admiring the delicate green weave of vine curling in and ’round and through the runes, terminating in narrow lighter green waving shoots that disappeared into the wrinkles of each finger’s middle knuckle.

“Berkana” he said, quietly.

She found his eyes again. Felt a dizzy relief that he had actually shown up as hoped. Felt an even keener confusion at her relief. Dimly became aware of the floor beneath her shoes, the ambient city sounds, her deep intakes of breath.

“Berkana?” she managed to keep her voice level, flat, the rising question barely inflected.

“Growth”

She nodded slowly, looking again at his hands. He lifted them from the table surface to clasp them behind the base of his skull, still leaning back against the plaster wall.

“Coffee. A fried egg sandwich on brown, a glass of water, please...” he smiled.

His eyes smiled, too. Jenny fell into them for a split second before returning the expression with another head nod, turning away to compose herself while pouring his coffee. How odd that, even as her insides felt rattled, her hands were steady during the walk back to his table. His simply showing up, even though disappointment had no logical reason to exist within her, had calmed the most unsettled region of her mind.

Will Pritchard reaches the old Mill Creek bridge. He stops for another coffee refill and spends quiet minutes sipping, remembering, sliding back through the years of youth, perhaps all the way back to when he was young Bradley’s age. A bridge not unlike this one, near his home town of Allenford, and the gatherings of young teens who would jump from it into the Saugeen river. It was reminiscent of toboggan rides inside the old quarry; the exhilarating speed rush followed by the arduous climb back up the slopes. At sixteen, Pritchard was already a man’s body. He could grow a full mustache, had hair under his arms and down below, on his sturdy legs, his chest... he was an alpha male and didn’t mind reveling in it at school or on the tiny main street, though he was not attractive to the young ladies. Will’s features were rough hewn; his hair was an unruly mop that forced him to keep it shorn “down to the wood”... he had a prominent nose that reminded others of Walter Matthau, though they were careful not to let him hear the comparison. Will Pritchard spent his later teenage years in a reckless proving ground; bravado, abandon, high speed back roads in a hopped up GTO...

this moment of backward reflection is interrupted by a high pitched cry some distance ahead

Pritchard looks skyward above the rim of his raised thermos cup, over the west half of the divided forest growth. He catches peripheral movement just above the tall pines but can’t identify what it is before it vanishes. Was that a bird cry? A jackrabbit’s death wail? It had been too sudden and fleeting... he wants to hear it again. Dumping the last of the coffee and capping the thermos, Will begins to walk at a steady pace between the rail tracks, stepping on the ties where the snow has been melted away. He keeps his eyes on the top of the tree line and silently curses himself for the leaving behind of field glasses that would have been more than helpful in this moment.

Estimating the five hundred yard distance beyond the bridge, Will covers the gap and stops roughly where Bradley fell from the rail that summer day. The icy breath in his lungs is sharper somehow. He stands dead still between the rails. Listens for another cry, hears only his pulse, feels a heat building in the lobe of his right ear. He reaches for the binoculars that aren’t around his neck, catches himself and then rubs through the wool cap, that burning ear.

The snow blanket is deep between where he stands and the line of forest, but thaw and renewed steep temperature drops have formed a layer of ice crust that will likely hold his weight... he decides to move toward the trees, to where Whisky was allegedly seen being swept up in the talons of a massive raptor. That part of Bradley’s story didn’t ring true for Pritchard... he suspected something a little more teenager oriented; some form of misconduct that resulted in the dog being lost, left behind. Though... that large bird of prey held a nagging too-coincidental echo to the case of the missing driver near Allenford. Will’s first dozen steps are held by the top layer of iced over snowfall. With each step after that he begins to feel ill, starting with a spread of heat throughout both ears and down through the back of his neck, gradually culminating in a spinning nausea within his core. He stops in a sudden sheen of facial sweat, looking around at what appears to be the same landscape that he’s been walking through, and sinks to his knees. The small tote bag in his hand hits the snow with a crunch. He sags forward and down, bending at the spine to rest his gloves flat against each broad thigh, head hanging, bile churning in his throat.

A bizarre pulsation seems to be moving through the ground beneath his knees; not what he would assume to be an earthquake’s signature, but something strangely electric, buzzing or whirring, and Will Pritchard tastes his fear. His eyes, watering through the boil of his guts, find the trunks of tall coniferous witnesses to the shift in reality as he experiences it. Silently in a blue shadow thrown across unmarred snow within the untamed forest, a huge and stunningly beautiful bird threads its way through the trees, broad wingspan tipped in a splay of feathered daggers, savagely hooked beak and talons, the intense gold flecks in focused eyes of prey as they lock onto Pritchard’s kneeling form.

As suddenly as he sees this... before he can react in any way other than to stare in disbelief at its size and grace when it clears the last of the tree trunks... it seems to fly into a shimmer of air not unlike the dance of heat over asphalt horizons; Will hears a high pitched cry from it, that at once fades back as the bird itself disintegrates before his eyes, like pixels and grain fusing instantly to replicate the original empty vista of forest and snow.

Pritchard promptly vomits all over his lap.

Bringing Ray his coffee and water, Jenny kept relative control of her countenance. She was aware of his energy when setting down the glass, then the saucer and mug; it was the sense of him wanting to say something but containing it. Their eyes met briefly, this time without the pregnant pause and elasticity of dimension, and her heart began to hammer into a thick rhythmic... knowing. The type of knowing that doesn’t adhere to articulation, description, thought patterns. It was molecular. It felt carbonated within her bloodstream. The startling power of it took her aback, and that must have flashed across her features, for Ray opened his mouth to speak, but didn’t. She went back to the front of the diner slowly, remembering the dream, in that moment sure that she had made astral visitation to an actual occurrence.

During the interval between bringing him his coffee and water, then carrying the egg sandwich to the back of the room, Jenny shuffled through an entire gamut of emotions that seemed weighted in favor of not speaking her feelings... she didn’t know quite what they were... foremost within them a sense of urgency because he would eat this light meal, drink his coffee, and be gone. She would be left alone with yet more questions. Jenny had been so silent, so removed, for so damned long, she didn’t remember how to engage her needs...

and right then, she needed to tell him something.

He, with his poker face and almost annoyingly calm exterior, seemed both vulnerable and impervious to injury. He had the dichotomous layering that cloaks so many strangers when they first capture the attention of others, with their attractive auras and alluring appearance, but the caveat of “buyer beware”... prepare for letdown... see through the veneer of your needs as you liberally apply it to this latest hope, embodied.

If not for the strange experience in her tub, followed by the intensity of the dream, Jenny would not have suffered the confusion of her thoughts toward this man. He was one of so many faces that came and went through the theatre of her life. He was not Scott, and he couldn’t bring Scott back to her no matter his bold claim of the day before; that he could “help” her... with what haunted her... no matter his wildly luminescent eyes and maddening calm air...

“So, Ray like the sun...” she heard herself saying to him as she brought his bill, but even that trailed off into a defeated feeling. He looked up from the table, once again pushed back against the wall. His eyes were softened. She could see that he was wide open to her. There were no barriers and he was very real inside his gaze. When she merely stood over the far side of the table, looking down at him, he nodded to himself.

“Jenny, it may be forward of me to ask, seeing as we don’t know each other”

(her heart hammered in syncopation with the last five words)

“I’m wondering what time you are off duty today...”

(her mind squirmed into loopholes and crevices and found no retreat)

“Because I’ve got a little shopping to do and then after that, nothing”

(her mouth of its own volition wanted to break into a tiny smile)

“I’d love to drop by and meet you. Maybe we could wander for a few hours.”

(her voice didn’t feel attached to its body)

“I’m done at four” she said. “That would be lovely, Ray.”

He smiled that same radiant warmth of the day before, eye corners crinkling.

“Like the sun” he finished the thought for her, having perceived it.

And so it came to pass, for that pivotal Saturday in two lives on the cusp of a day’s indelible stamp, that Jenny would meet Ray outside the Logan Street Grill at four o’clock.