Get me a volleyball and some red paint, and I’ll be great.
Reaching for my sketchbook, I flip it open to a clean page. There aren’t many of those left; I’m going to have to get a new pack of them soon. I brutalized the last three pages with pen and marker in the first week of using these stupid patches.
You know what would work a lot better than a sticker?
A fucking cigarette.
Pencil dusted along the surface of the paper offers the bones of the piece, set into place with pen after the fact. In some areas, a watercolor marker fills in soft color, a deeper shade lending their shadow to finish it off.
After an hour of drawing and shading, I’m left with the image of a cow’s skull, a hole blown open at one side of it and a luna moth perched on the other. A minute with a carefully-brandished pair of scissors frees the image from the page, and I tape it onto the wall with a handful of my other pieces.
In the window ahead of me, a body moves through a wall of white toward the shop’s door, and I bolt up from my chair to pull it open.
CJ steps inside, brushing water off of his soaked-through coat, and I help him out of it as quickly as I can. Outwardly, he seems unharmed, but the sparse pieces of flint-colored hair glued to his face with water make something sink in my stomach.
He’s never seemedoldto me, but the shiver in his bones as we peel off every drenched layer of fabric and the exhaustion behind eyes that are starting to cloud hit me like a slap in the face of mortality.
For a long time, we don’t say a word to each other. Every glance toward the raging storm outside sends that feeling back into my gut, and I can’t seem to talk over it.
My eyes flick between CJ, the square patch stuck to my bicep, and the cabinet at my station, where an emergency pack of cigarettes is waiting for me. Instead of answering their desperate call and fucking up all of the work I’ve done to only use these stupid patches, I push off of the couch and head for the back office to heat up the leftover Chinese food sitting in the fridge.
The old man chooses the set of chopsticks in my hand as his utensil, leaving me with a plastic fork as I pop open the containers of our reheated lunch. I don’t even know who left it in the fridge. I’ll pay them back for it tomorrow, if the weather’s decent.
“I did the gum.” The first words either of us have spoken to each other in the hour he’s been here are accompanied by a chopstick pointing toward the patch stuck to my skin. In a smooth motion, he rolls the end of it to rest between his index and middle fingers. “Having something to hold onto and chew on helps. I was quite happy with a straw. ‘Course that was, oh, twenty years before I came outside.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever asked you how long you’ve been out there,” I admit as I stab my fork into a spring roll.
If I said that I didn’t feel like an asshole over that, I’d be lying.
His hand shakes as he sandwiches a roll between his chopsticks, and I can’t help my body lurching forward when it teeters in his grip. He’s careful as he pulls the roll toward himself, and I find myself inching toward him, worrying that his knotted fingers may quit on him.
I wait while he munches through the roll, mulling over each thought in his head or maybe pulling together a timeline. When he finishes, he reaches for the other container on the table and pulls it into his lap.
“It will be five years, come February,” he finally tells me.
“Your daughter didn’t offer you a place?”
Lowering his chopsticks into the container, he pulls out a healthy portion of the noodles, stuffing them into his mouth before resting the now-emptied vessel onto the table in front of him.
“She asked me to stay with her,” he explains, “but I can’t leave my wife.”
“Oh. Sorry,” I say. “I thought—”
“My Lucy passed fifteen years ago,” he tells me with a chuckle as my eyes shoot toward the window in search of a woman I’ve never seen or met before. “We shared thirty years in this city. I couldn’t leave her behind.” A wrinkled hand gestures toward the ring wrapped around my finger. “You understand it.”
Outstretching my fingers with a flick at the corner of my mouth, I concede with a nod.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I get it.”
I haven’t even been able to give up this one building because of someone who matters to me. I can’t imagine being asked or expected to leave behind an entire city. After everything Jules and I have lived through in only a little more than half of the time that he had with his wife, it would be an impossible ask.
The worst of the storm seems to pass with the ending of our meal, leaving only spattering drops of rain slapping against the concrete as the system starts its path away from us. That seems to signal to my friend that it’s time for him to leave, and before I can stop him, he’s standing to pull his still-drying clothes over his arm.
“You can stay,” I offer. “Get some sleep, wait for it to dry up a little.”
“No,” he chuckles, full of nostalgia. “Go home toyourLucy. Give her my love.”
A hand drops onto my shoulder with a gentle squeeze as he offers me his unnecessary thanks. Stepping past me as he slides the worn strap of his backpack over his shoulder, he takes hold of the door handle to push it open.
