Short Story: Sadboi and I
Sadboi and I meet up once a month and only once a month. He lived far away, in a small town called Dirt, where ironically everything was pristine and sterile. You would drive through the bumpy dirt roads of Victorville and then come to Dirt, where suddenly everything became smooth and quiet. Even the pigeons just stared at you when you stopped by the nearest gas station, and it would be as if they saw everything about the world and were contemplating their own existence as well as yours. These were intellectual pigeons, unlike the ones in from Victorville.
These visits were always somewhat spontaneous, but they were for some reason, always only once every month. It were as if an internal clock would tick and then ring and when it rang, either me or Sadboi would suddenly appear at the front door with a bag of ciabatta bread.
And he would always say to me, “It is good to see you.” And I would reply, “It is good to see you too.”
There would be no catch up. Instead we would go to the nearby stream by his apartment complex and we’d walk in silence and then find some flat shaped stones, and keep them heavy in our pockets and then throw them away into the small trickling sand and water. And they would make that clunking sound, as it skid the water, once, twice, maybe three times. And we would never get past three times, no matter how hard we tried. The universe at Dirt seemed to never get past threes. The pigeons came in threes. Even the fish swam in groups of three. There was something mysterious about the inhabitants at Dirt.
And that kind of silence and mystery would permeate everything we did. Little by little, like one of those stones dropping into a very deep and dark well, searching for the end, but falling forever and ever and ever.
I began to wonder whether Sadboi was changing too. Changing shape and form. He got a recent haircut and it looked clean and crisp, almost like cut grass. Was it cleaner and crisper than his previous haircuts? Perhaps. But Dirt seemed to permeate into his bones only so slightly. It was a very different life from Victorville, and Sadboi began to embody it in his walk. It was a walk that shrank in view and was a kind of insular bubble that held everything inside like a snow globe and that snow globe world was the only world that existed.
It was as if Victorville and all the other cities were at a far distance in geography and in his mind; all that existed was Dirt and it’s threes and its contemplating pigeons. Life, but small and thin like paper, shaken and stirred like a snow globe.
And at the end of the day, with an empty bag with only crumbs, he would always say to me, “Man, it was really good to see you.” A fact, a plain statement. And I would reply, “Yeah, me too. It was really good to see you too.”
We’d step onto our respective porches and disappear into the doors we’ve been used to until the next time we showed up to meet each other with ciabatta bread in hand and pocket full of river stones.
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