fiction for busy people

Without knowing it, she stepped out of her front door as herself for the very last time. Unchanged, unmoderated, unadulterated for the majority of her adult life, she could not return to the threshold of that reality again. Looking back on it now, the she - she was to become would have caught the nuance of a leaf falling from the sky onto her head at the exact moment her key turned in the lock of her car door, the only moment of the day she spent in utter silence. Before starting the car, she stared at a scrap of paper, an index card torn diagonally to replicate an inverted triangle, writing covering every millimeter of it with blue scrawl scribbled by a furious hand. Sighing, she turned the key, forcing the engine to obey her command and turn over.

In the near-silent hum of a white room, he arose to a calm and quiet mind. Bare walls reflected his resolve in all its grim starkness, and the room's transient air stood perfectly still. He stood gracefully, his feet planted solidly on the floor immediately upon waking, the world beneath him rotating around his feet with all the determination of refined subtlety; superior centrifugal force asserting itself in such a way that only someone quiet enough to hear it might feel his breath catch momentarily. Looking at the man through a window, a neighbor might have chuckled to witness the time when, each morning without fail, the man paced his flat with the onus of adulthood on his shoulders. He lived a quiet life, good and productive, but today would be different. He felt it in the air but could not quite identify it. Today he would wonder if the path he had carved out so carefully for himself really mattered much at all. A neat list positioned on the corner of the counter top reminded him of all the day would require of him and for a sharp, passing instant he felt the weight of it all; the endless patience and the simple calm he alone could bring into any room he entered, the decisions affecting those in his care made with a stoic, rational mind. Normally, he took pride in his responsibilities, gladly shouldering burdens too overwhelming for most with the peaceful assurance that he made a difference in this world. He stopped feeling this peacefulness briefly, though, and it was replaced with a sensation he would feel again when he first saw her: the serenity of his halcyon existence disrupted ever so gently, not altogether inharmonious or unpleasant, but enough to signal him that the solitude he treasured as precious could no longer fulfill him.

The rain fell then, soft and cool and carried by the summer wind so faintly that only someone who lived in the region long enough could detect it; the way the still, stagnant air began a slow movement so benign that only the faint smell of honeysuckle arose from a blanket of red-clay earth into an invisible wisp directly into the nostrils of passersby too consumed in their own lives to care much. That's the thing about small towns: despite a real sadness behind everyone's eyes, well-mannered people prefer to dwell within the guise of white cotton dresses and madras shorts endearing only to those with the specifically acquired taste and clutch their umbrellas in harried resentment through the unbearable weight of specifically southern summertime air as the rain slowly beats down harder, its force insistent. Years later, it was this insistence they both remembered most clearly.

The man and the woman had both felt this, each running through the rain into different doors on opposite sides of town, but neither had been too concerned with what such an insistent pounding could indicate. It was rhythmic, though - there was no denying that - and they were, in fact, the only two people in the town to notice it that summer morning; she, briefly disarmed by the rhythm's melodic thump-thump on her bare forehead, reminding her of a low rolling tympani or the soft, unsettling meter of a trochee, so much so that she was glad she had, once again, forgotten her umbrella; he, surprised by the laconic measure of the rhythm, its gentle thumping alluring precisely because he had never stopped to notice the sound of rain before. For the first time in his life he lowered his sensible, black umbrella and felt the soft rain on his face.

Eventually, she was confronted with silence at the most inopportune time. At her desk in the space she considered sacred, surrounded by the objects she loved, her music abruptly and inexplicably stopped. At first she didn’t notice; she continued writing, absorbed in thought and the indescribable joy of the motion of her hand flowing fluidly across the page, but when she paused for thought, the quietness was astonishing. Suddenly, she realized that for one very brief moment, her thoughts were completely still: no words ran through her mind, no rhythm tapped out from the back of her consciousness through her leg and down to her foot (which could generally be found drumming out a soft beat at any time of day)… no nothing. Initially, this was disquieting to her when she became aware of it; the small, silent space became sharply suffocating, the books on their neat shelves creating a wall around her, the page in front of her filled with carefully meted out words that honestly amounted to nothing. This absurd nothingness consumed her and she felt that sinking feeling again, the esthesia of water rushing around her as she gasped for oxygen that simply did not exist. She felt very small and very alone until she realized that for that fleeting moment, her mind had been absolutely blank. Bewildered, she immediately felt a weight lifting from her shoulders, a lightness she had never known. Her mind had been clear, silent; the sensation was ethereal, albeit brief, and for that instant there had been nothing but her and her nothingness which, for once, was not disconcerting. She would not know this sensation again until she saw him for the first time. Of course, her thoughts began spinning at once, messy synapses connecting at random to string seemingly unrelated thoughts together, and her moment of cerebral liberation passed more quickly than it had come.

He, on the other hand, had become quite adept at compartmentalizing things, and it was this skill he credited for surviving his humdrum daily routine. Recently, he had become aware that his existence was passionless; without something to really live for, his days blurred together into wake, work, home, repeat. Frustrated by this thought while driving home from work, he swiftly jerked the steering wheel and pulled his car into a parking spot in front of a small café in an attempt to thwart the monotony of entering his own front door. Pausing only to flex his fingers and shake off the apprehension building within himself, he exited the car and walked toward the door of the building. It was then that she exited, her own fingers flexed around a stack of cold, white papers piled haphazardly at skewed angles that contrasted against her soft hands; it was these hands that initially caught him off guard, the way they wrapped around the preposterous pile of precariously perched papers with an awkward confidence, but in the quick moment it took for him to look from her hands up her arms and into her eyes, the morning’s sensation returned and he was taken completely aback both by her surprised look and by his own immediate need to reach out to her from his solitude. His breath stopped and his heart raced as his thoughts reached a crescendo, all white noise and scrambled static, his neatly arranged plans swimming through his skull like so much nonsense. She, startled by the encounter, merely broke into a wide smile and laughed nervously. The flood of hurried thoughts she had become accustomed to was silenced as she looked into his eyes and again that calm, weightless sensation permeated her every cell as she experienced the exhilaration of thinking nothing but feeling everything with absolute clarity. Without warning, one warm wind swept softly then, and the scent of honeysuckle filled the air as two blank pages fluttered slowly to the ground, landing at their feet while the couple stood facing each other, their small solitudes colliding in one harmonious moment.