Two Stories

1. ABOUT A MAN

I knew a man like that once. He had no values, which obviously meant that he was a dreamer as a child. I didn’t know him to be anybody. He was hardly able to be anybody, to tell you the truth. 

He killed a child, once. They found the body buried in his front garden, with head by the mailbox and feet by the feet. So he had to have picked up a shovel and dig up two holes. But if you ask me, he didn’t have it in him to do an honest man’s job. 

He went to prison, but his house waited for him. And when he came back, he was a much reformed man. He would take his time then to smooth out the fertile soil and plant some weeds. He didn’t use any gardening tools, only his hands and eyes. 

And he would demand from his front garden, ‘What is it that they have left to want? What is there left to be picked up like art of garbage and desired? What’s left? To believe? To feel? To be?’ And he wouldn’t stop when people crossed the street, nor when they halted in front of him, gaping with their eyes open and their minds accepting of his sermon. He wouldn’t stop because that was proof in itself that something was left. That although the words themselves didn’t pretend to carry the meaning, the still required to be uttered. They were all that was left. 

My wife was a quiet woman because she didn’t care much for others’ business. But she did ask him once, calling to him from our front garden, her voice strong enough this one time that it carried mercilessly across the empty street over to his laboring form: ‘Why did you kill it?’ she asked. I hardly remember any flavor of emotion in that question, perhaps a bit of conceit. 

“I killed him so you would’t have to,” came the reply, strong enough to carry back across the empty street and beyond. It was an empty threat. We knew as much. 

2. ABOUT A GIRL

She almost didn’t remember the precise reason why she took it off, but then the memory suddenly reappeared as a dead body from a deep lake, only surfacing after the anchor was untied. 

She remembered now that in fact there was a night when the clasp broke while she was washing up her hands. She didn’t have much time then to deal with it, so she just quickly placed it inside her wallet. She could have thrown it away, of course—the bin was just there, under the damp paper towels for which she reached automatically. But that thought somehow didn’t even occur to her. She had no idea why not. 

She wouldn’t have minded to be rid of it, really. It’s not as if she had to keep it close to remember something that never was, and never used to be even when it was. Perhaps she kept it for that very reason—keeping it close to her meant that she wouldn’t think about it. Only the absence of the bracelet, it’s ultimate fate to end up buried in trash somewhere, miles away from her, would make her remember. And there was much to remember. 

For the bracelet wasn’t a testament to love, as anyone would have thought. It was a testament to her power over him. She basically forced him to buy it for her. She persuaded him that love was all about that. She gave him a false idea about the world, the reality that she occupied. And for what reason… He went and did it. She didn’t know it then, not consciously at least, but only his defiance would have saved them then. As it so happened, she received it for her birthday. A couple months after that, they were a history.