John Swinburn

Four in the morning is the time of day when one is free to think unthinkable thoughts. It is a time of day at which sadness and loathing intersect with fear and rage. Depression and a multitude of other forms of mental anguish spring from the unsavory freedoms of four in the morning. Hatred. Crippling self-doubts. Fear of rejection. So it is not surprising that the seeds of Devian Qualls’ reprehensible plan sprouted just after four in the morning that November day in Devian’s musty house. Devian Qualls—a man cursed with a round, rubbery, paste-white face, thick neck to match thick glasses, and two hundred pounds more than his skeleton was meant to carry—intersected with four in the morning in a most unpleasant way.

Fog turned to icy drizzle and then to sleet shortly after Devian awoke. He traipsed back and forth in front of the French doors from the living room to the kitchen, stopping occasionally to stare out into the blackness of the morning. His thick nostrils flared as the pace of his pounding march from one side of the room to the other quickened with each circuit.

“Damn sleet! I’ve either got to go soon or I’ll be iced in here for god knows how long!”

He was the only one who heard his voice. His wife of nineteen years, Charmaine Qualls, had moved out three weeks earlier and, by the time Devian was cursing the ice gods, she probably was busily planning to change her last name to that of her wealthy suitor.

Devian slowed his pacing, then shuffled to his desk and sat, drinking strong coffee and staring at the empty computer screen. The chair moaned at every movement of his three hundred and thirty pound frame. He placed his sausage fingers on the keyboard and typed a few words:

‘I have done some things that were wrong, but not because I am a bad man’

He deleted the incomplete thought and began anew:

‘My multiple attempts to engage in extramarital affairs must have been prompted by’

He flipped that paragraph away, too, switching the object of his typery to his wife:

‘After trying so many times to have relationships with other women, Charmaine’s infidelity really caught me off guard’

Again, the words disappeared with a click of the mouse button. After several attempts to begin the story of his failed infidelity, and his surprise at learning of his wife’s success at the adulterous endeavor,  he withdrew his plump hands from the keyboard.

What if, he wondered to himself, the objects of his inappropriate carnal desires, each of whom had rejected his overtures, had instead been receptive? What if he had successfully engaged a dozen women in extramarital affairs? And what if he could rub his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s nose in those trysts? The seeds of his appalling plan began to take root.

“All right, then, I can pursue a lot of justice with this,” he said aloud, smiling at the empty empty grey computer screen bathing him in ghostly light.

“I’ll get those bitches. I know they had affairs. I just know they did. I wasn’t born yesterday. Sure they had them. They just didn’t have ’em with me. But I’ll make it look to their husbands like they did. And I’ll make it look to Charmaine like she bailed on somebody every other woman who set eyes on him wanted. That’ll kill her!”

Discomfort and solitude , coupled with simmering rage and a sociopathic lack of morals and empathy morphed into ugly desiderata that day.

[Yeah, yeah, yeah. My foreshadowing here told the entire story. The unfortunate thing is this: it’s implausible, uninteresting, and predictable. Or maybe not. But to my ADHD mind, it’s old news and unworthy of more fingerwork. But I’m posting it anyway, just because I might one day want to come back and borrow from it. I really need to get to know all these people I write about, though. Once we become close, I’m sure their stories will ooze out of me like blood leaking from a loosely wrapped bandage.] 😉

Once upon a time, an old Norwegian fisherman took his granddaughter out in his fishing boat. His boat was not the pleasure craft one sees so often today among men who call themselves fisherman. Rather, it was an old workhorse of a boat, a no-nonsense assemblage of nets crusted with salt amid ropes carefully coiled in their proper places on the deck.

Only an hour into the trip, the girl had become impatient with the cruise and began to complain.

“Morfar, let’s go back home. I’m bored. There’s nothing to do here but look at the water.”

The old man, his gentle eyes resting on the girl’s beautiful blonde hair, replied in soft words meant to sooth and calm her growing discontent.

“Datterdatter, the water gives you the life you live. The sea’s bounty is lifeblood for your mother and me and, now, you. There are far worse things to do than look at the water. But, don’t worry, soon there will be more to do than look at the water. Soon, we’ll begin casting nets and, if fortune is our friend, pull them in, laden with fish.”

“Well, I am not interested in fishing, Morfar, so let’s go back home. I have more interesting things to do than catch fish.”

“Ah, we will go back home in good time. First, I will show you how I catch fish. Next, I will show you how I sell some of the fish I catch to put pickles and vegetables on our table. Finally, when we are back on shore, I will show you how I smoke fish to make the meals we eat.”

[This began as a children’s story. What? John writing a children’s story? Yeah, but you see he gave up midstream. I’m not so good at allegory. I may finish this some day, well before I become a Norwegian grandfather.]

I watch her, as she sits on a comfortable spot near the ocean. I see her eyes scan the horizon. She seeks answers in the waves and the clouds. She peers intently into the distance, striving to bring the answers that hover over the water into sharp, clear focus. In her mind, words form. They blossom into phrases and sentences. She captures them on her fingers, binding them to a linguistic art safe. She smiles as she thinks of me. I hope it’s me who triggers the grin on her face, though I can’t be sure she is thinking of me; but I see it and hope I launched that silent laugh.

Does she know I am watching her? Does she know I see her sitting at the waterfront? Does she know my eyes are riveted to her form, her hair, the way her every breath fills her with beauty as stunning as the sunrise that brought the day to us?

I should introduce myself before telling you more about her. I am Gideon Fleeman, the fifth son of Cartwright Fleeman, whose father was Jeremiah Fleeman and whose mother was Sharona Scott Fleeman. My mother is Cassandra Webster Fleeman. She kept her married name even after she remarried Blaine Cooper two years after my father died in a farming accident. All of these names tell you little about me, though. That’s my point. We’re all products of people most of the world never see. I could go on and on about my youth as a farmer’s son. I could regale you with the stories my grandfather used to tell. But, in fact, I did not know Jeremiah Fleeman, nor did I know Sharona Scott Fleeman. They died before I was born. I barely knew Casandra Webster Fleeman, at least not the woman she became after marrying Blaine Cooper. And I knew very little about my four older brothers. They had left home to make their ways in the world before I came along, unplanned and unappreciated, just days before my mother’s forty-fourth birthday. I grew up as if I were an only child, in the shadow of a woman old enough to be my grandmother. Except for the teasing by the school children, I wouldn’t have known it was odd to have such an old mother. But the children made me painfully aware of it. And I learned that their parents were the ones who talked about Cassandra Webster Fleeman in hushed tones, hissing soft tirades between one another about what the woman was thinking, having a child so late in life. I’ve loathed those children and their parents ever since. But that’s dusty history. I’ve grown up and followed in my father’s footsteps. Not as a farmer, but as a drinker. I learned from him that drinking can blunt the pain of making irrevocably bad life decisions. But even that’s history now. I am seventeen years sober and five years into retirement. And yet somehow I am hopelessly in love with her. It pains me when she’s away. But I watch her; through my mind’s eye.

You may have guessed that I don’t actually watch her. She’s miles away, on holiday with her husband. But I believe she thinks about me, though I don’t know precisely what is on her mind. Maybe I don’t want to know. But maybe I do. That’s the thing. I imagine her looking into my eyes when she returns. And I imagine her stealing a look around her to make sure no one sees before she kisses me. I want to tell you more about her and I would if only I knew more about her. If I knew the thoughts that flow through her mind. If I knew whether she shares my heretofore secretive longing to be together. By now, you must be thinking I am a rogue, to be in dreamy pursuit of a married woman. I suppose you would be right, especially in light of the fact that I have been married to my second wife for nearly fifteen years. Yet, let me suggest you should not be so quick to judge. You don’t know the history behind any of this. Were you in my shoes, I suspect you would be in exactly the same predicament in which I find myself. Your choices would be no different from those I have made. And if my choices make me a scoundrel, then you, too, are a scoundrel.

Ah, that’s no way to be speaking to a guest, is it? We barely know one another (though you know far more about me than I about you); please forgive my churlish behavior. It’s not like me. Not like me at all.

[A play?]

If you could see inside my brain, if you could see the images of you that reside there, coming into sharp focus several times a day, you might know. You might understand how much you still mean to me, even after all these years, if you saw the pictures I see—your smile, your laughter, the way your eyes sparkled when we were happy together. The depths of my depression from your forgetting me, having expunged me from your life like words wiped clean from a dry erase board, could be real to you if you experienced what I do. But you don’t see inside my brain. You don’t understand how thirteen years of intensely happy memories compete with these sixteen subsequent years of aching pain, pain that still gnaws inside me today and every day since you withdrew from my life. We never were meant to be together. I know that. You had been married nearly half your life when I met you and I had been married eight years. You had a ten year old child. Now, you’ve been widowed eight months and you have grandchildren. You didn’t know I knew about your husband’s death, did you? Well, I stayed abreast of your life, even though you extinguished me from yours. Remember, I told you I’d love you forever? Those were not desperate words thrown at you in a futile attempt to keep you from ending our relationship; I meant them. I still do. And that is why I am writing you now at what is the beginning of the end of my life. I suppose it’s selfish of me to want to leave you with an imprint of my love. I’ve always been selfish that way. You know that.

I’ve not spoken to you in ten years. Those few times we spoke after you ended our relationship were uncomfortable for you, I know. For me, they were embarrassments; me stooping so low as to beg you not to let me disappear into history. But you were strong then, too. You knew I would keep crawling back if you buckled. And so you didn’t. But I did, my sweet love. I buckled and cracked and turned into the sniveling bastard I was always afraid I was at my core. I became the man you needed to run away from, the man you knew resided inside me, beneath that dual persona of strength and vulnerability. There, at the core, I was a pitiful wretch. You did not need that in your life. You were right to pull the plug on our illicit love affair. But your decision ruined my life. I know, I would have ruined it all on my own, but you accelerated my demise. And, now, my real demise is at hand.

I’m sure I should not be writing this letter. It is the epitome of cowardice. But I think it would be equally cruel were I to let you learn of my death after the fact and leave you wondering whether the words I spoke so long ago were true. They were. They are.

I only wish I knew more about your life since we were one. I wish I knew whether you thought of me from time to time. I wish I knew that your decision really made you happy. You deserved happiness. You still do. There’s so much I don’t know about your life now. But, then, there’s so much of mine you don’t know, either. It’s a pity that neither of us will know the sweetness again that we once experienced when we shared everything with one another.

And so Stegner’s last letter rambled on as Stegner always did. He mailed his letter more than three months before his death. He never learned whether she opened it. I wish I could have told him she did. I wish I could have told him she wept when she read it. I wish so many things that, now, can never come to pass.

Agostino, struggling to escape  a frenzied nightmare, awoke to a choking swirl of thick brown and beige dust. His wife, Bernardina, lay motionless beside him in the bed, the upper quarter of her body beneath a slab of broken stone. Stone rubble and plaster pinned the sheets to the two of them. Broken bricks and pieces of shattered glass covered the floor and the overturned dresser beside the bedroom door, torn almost completely free of its hinges on the twisted and cracked frame.

“Bernardina! Bernardina!” Agostino tugged at the stone on his wife’s body to no avail. It was far too heavy for him to move it; he could not make it budge. And he knew his efforts were fruitless, anyway. Bernardina was dead. As he stared at his wife, the dim light from the bulb in the hallway suddenly popped. Darkness. Utter and complete darkness.

The earthquake has struck with no warning. It was as if there was no beginning to it; the shaking was enormous and instantaneous. The world around them simply imploded; there had been no time for fear, no time even to awaken to experience the devastation taking place around them. Agostino and Bernardina had been sleeping and then, in an instant, Agostino’s  nightmare ended, only to be replaced by another one, far worse.

Two days after the horror that took his wife’s life, Agostino remained trapped in the debris, a prisoner in a tiny pocket of air that had been a bedroom. He heard the distant sound of heavy equipment laboring to remove the thirty foot deep pile of wreckage under which his pocket of stale air kept him barely alive. Occasionally, when the equipment fell silent, he heard faint voices: “Qui è un’altra. Ella è morto.” And then, at the announcement of having found another lifeless body, the voices hushed as the rescuers observed a moment in honor of the victim.

Agostino had almost given up hope when the rasping sounds of metal against stone and the growl of a diesel engine intruded into his stupor. A loud groan escaped the debris where the bedroom door would have been. Light poured into Agostino’s pocket prison as the dust from the machinery entered his lungs, causing him to cough weakly.

A rescuer shouted he thought they had found a live victim. “Penso che abbiamo un vivo!” Suddenly, a swarm of men invaded Agostino’s pocket. They put Agostino on a stretcher and carried him out into fresh air, where he could breathe again. But Bernardina remained behind, a victim who soon would be placed in a body bag and carried solemnly into daylight.