Crickets droned softly somewhere in the black brush against which the silent fireworks display of mating lightning bugs unfolded. A lone frog, startled by the young man’s footfall, darted quickly into the marshy water beside it, producing a single melodious plop. He (the young man, that is) wore ill-advised flip-flops as he plodded along, their muted clicks beating time to the swaying of his arm against the side of a too-tight sleeveless shirt.
Heading in this direction meant illumination in the distance, the summer evening’s grayish purple disrupted up ahead by the streetlights which began at the village limits and paralleled the nearby train tracks on their way into the heart of the sleeping town. The night hung quiet and not quite uncomfortably warm, and it was hard to believe that a storm might really be about to break.
It wasn’t at all clear what he hoped to accomplish, out here in the dark. It had been many weeks since his last excursion, and he no longer had any idea what fifteen minutes looked like in this town. So fifteen it would be, and hopefully it would get him at least as far as those streetlights, because any less would be too depressing.
Just three short weeks ago, and fifteen minutes would have carried him to the old furniture store, just shy of North Broadway. He’d have passed the bakery, the used car lot, three bike stores, the occult shop, the McDonald’s, and the two mediterranean eateries, all under the gaudy brilliance of city streetlights and perpetual traffic. Fifteen minutes burst with life, sound, and light there in the city. But here, fifteen minutes…
He reached the first streetlight, and inspected his phone. Sixteen minutes. Sixteen steady beats of darkness dotted with fireflies and nothing else. He stopped walking and stood, alone in the yellow light. To his left, a sign protruded from the damp ground, announcing that a music festival was happening at the nearby park on…he checked his phone again…yesterday.
Half-heartedly looking all four ways down empty roads, he crossed the street and examined the sign proudly emblazoned with the logo and meeting time of the rotary club, in the same park. He looked past the sign into the entrance of the park, its sad gatehouse devoid of a gate, and though the darkness swallowed much beyond the gatehouse his childhood memories sprang the silhouettes to life, and he knew every silent shadow like an old friend.
A proud blue and yellow plaque to the other side of the entrance admonished that this park’s history stretched well beyond the young man’s memories. It had once been a YMCA — he knew this well — but had served its time earlier in the military, an air force camp in the second world war. Horses had been trotted out in the same space a century earlier.
His phone chimed several times in succession, jarring his wandering mind back to his body. He smiled mildly as he slowly headed back in the direction whence he’d come, and read what his friend had to say about getting together. The friend had recently been impregnated by nostalgia and given birth to a website, the aim of which was post-educational education. His friend yearned for academia, a place where wisdom crafted guidance for those whose minds are willingly enlarged.
A searing pain cut through his smile, brief and then gone, leaving the sensation that he had been shot but no visible wound by which to verify. The specter of the city lingered again on his mind, for he too missed academia. Constructing syllabi, fostering learning… He’d found the bullet: his friend’s new hobby was his own old job.
Now that he was on the other side of the street, it was safe for the frog, who honked reproachfully from its watery refuge as he walked by. Heading away from the village plunged his world into darkness, and only the silent bursts of bugs like so many flashbulbs lit his path. From time to time he would hear the steady rumble of an approaching engine, and a few moments later the road would explode into light, his shadow extraterrestrially thin and long stretching impossibly ahead of him and then quickly condensing itself towards his side as if to correct for the mistake. Then, just as quickly, the engine would roar past, his shifting shadow extinguished, and the car’s headlights would race along the trees to create the illusion of a leaf-laden tunnel. A half-mile or so later the silence of the night would resume.
The light at his back, his mind wandered to other things left behind. He thought of good friends who were laughing in bars he’d once frequented, sitting on porches he’d once shared, behind the doors of apartments he’d once dropped them off in front of. He thought of good friends and he wondered with somber detachment how many, if any, he would ever actually see face-to-face again. And in the heat of the still summer night, he shivered.
A car approached, gradually blinding him with high beams stubbornly left on, and dust clouded around him as the car whooshed past, not two feet from where he stood. Just three weeks, he thought. Then the math caught up. Seventeen…eighteen. Eighteen days. Damn, not even three weeks since everything had changed.
It had felt like a vacation at first. But then, the night before, he’d thrown out the name tags and the stationery which had so recently adorned an office he no longer occupied. Then he’d gone online and seen photographs posted by friends, and knew he’d never be in their photos again. And there, with echoes of a former life reverberating off the sight of his own name in a trash can, reality sunk in, and the vacation was over.
He’d swallowed his tongue bitterly behind grinning teeth at church that morning, when a well-meaning man referred to him as “Mr. University.” After the service, another man had stopped him. “You’re out at that place, right?” And the young man had explained that it was complicated, but no, not anymore, to which the other man replied, “It’s not complicated.” The young man’s doubtful expression prodded him to continue. “That was then. That’s over. This is now.”
“Simple. Not complicated.”
And perhaps, the young man thought as he returned to the driveway of this small suburban house he’d long called home, it really is simple. He reached above his head and pulled the garage door noisily shut behind him, walked into the house, and extinguished the garage lights. The mechanical resistance of a deadbolt signaled the finality of his return, while outside, below the silent fireworks display of mating lightning bugs, crickets droned softly somewhere in the black brush.
