Dark Railroad
and
Other Tales
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer A. Ellis
All rights reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Tales
Preface 4
Red 5
We All Got Regrets 6
Phoenix 13
Noemi 14
Memories 16
Dark Railroad 17
Zero 21
The Warehouse 24
About the Author 34
Preface
The following is a small collection of short stories that have been floating around for a while. Most of them appeared in a truncated form during a blog challenge called Blogging from A to Z April Challenge that I participated in a few years ago. I was unable to let the ideas go, and eventually I expanded on them until they ended in the form seen here. There are other tales from the Challenge that I haven’t quite gotten a handle on yet, but they’re waiting to be uncovered, I just know it.
Please enjoy, and Happy Reading
Red
Red.
It’s everywhere I look.
So much red.
I told her to leave me alone. I told her I wasn’t well, that I was sick. I could feel it coming on, like a fever. It starts as creeping sensation on my skin, and then it moves on to a jumpy nervousness. I can’t stay still. I have to move. I have to do things.
She knows to leave me alone when I’m not well.
She followed me. She ambushed me. She kept asking why. “Why? Why? Why?” Her voice was so needy.
She should have listened to me, because as I stood there listening to her asking “Why? Why? Why?” everything turned red.
And when I opened my eyes the red was still there.
Red on the white snow. Red in her short blond hair. My brown hiking boots have red spots on them. I can even feel the red on my face, drying in sticky streaks on my cheeks.
It’s her fault everything turned red. She should have listened.
We All Got Regrets
It was supposed to be a gloomy day, with clouds filling the sky and a cold drizzle on the mourners' heads and shoulders. Something to match what they should be feeling. Instead, the sun was out, warming them, making them close their eyes and turn their faces to the sky, relishing the first real day of spring.
Xavier stood behind the crowd, watching them as they bowed their heads in prayer. He listened as first his daughter, and then his son, stood before the small gathering to share their eulogies. Carol had been fully prepared, as always, and read her remarks from a small sheet of stark white paper. Dan did what he always did and rambled for ten minutes, saying whatever came into his head. Both of them said the kind of things he would have expected them to say.
When the children - who were far past childhood - finished, there was another prayer, and the casket was lowered into a hole in the ground. Then the mourners, a small collection of friends, coworkers and family (Xavier took note that his ex-wife wasn't present), filed past the hole, dropping clumps of dirt that landed with soft plops on the casket. The whole thing took forty minutes. Nobody cried.
After they left, two men with shovels came and removed the tarp covering the displaced earth and sod, and began to fill in the grave. Xavier leaned against a massive stone angel and watched them until they were finished tamping the last square of grass back into place. Then he moved closer. There was no headstone yet, only a small plastic marker with a number on it. He sighed as he stared down at his final resting place. Now what was he supposed to do?
When the doctors worked on him, pounding on his chest, squeezing air into his unresponsive lungs, shocking the heart that had tendered its resignation, Xavier had stood by, saddened and embarrassed. He looked like a giant baby on the table, naked except for a pair of boxer shorts, pale legs splayed and round belly protruding. Even at sixty-six, he hadn’t thought much of his own mortality. Despite his doctor lecturing him about his weight, he hadn’t felt sick. Maybe he wasn’t as quick as he used to be; maybe his knees hurt and his fingers were beginning to crook with arthritis; maybe his vision was just beginning to go cloudy with cataracts; but he wasn’t dying.
Well, here he was. Dead. He knew there was no way he was going to squeeze himself back into that old baby body.
It was a heart attack. That’s what they told Dan when he had arrived at the hospital. Xavier – well his body, anyway – was in the next room, covered with a white sheet. Xavier inspected some hospital literature: “Recognizing the Signs of a Heart Attack” while Dan nodded, then covered his face with his hands. His son didn’t cry, but that was only because Xavier could tell he was desperately shoving the tears back inside himself.
The sun was setting before he came to the realization that hanging around his own grave was beyond morbid. He tried to think of what he would be doing at this time if he was still alive. Relaxing in the recliner, and watching TV with a slowly emptying bag of Lays potato chips in his lap, while Roscoe slept on the table beside him, probably. Then he began to think of what others might be doing. And then he was in Dan’s apartment, standing in the kitchenette, watching his son microwave a bowl of Spagettios.
That was the thing he hadn’t gotten use to yet. The ability to suddenly teleport to places he was thinking about. Whether he wanted to be there or not. Could he learn to control it? Would he be around long enough to learn? Wasn’t he supposed to be walking towards a bright light by now? Or was that reserved for those who actually believed in the light?
And Spagettios? Dan was thirty-five years old, for Christ’s sake. Why was he eating like a five-year old?
Xavier moved out of the way as Dan took his bowl of kiddie food out of his small kitchen into the small living room. Xavier didn’t need to move out of his way, he knew this after a few days of being dead. It wasn’t as if Dan would have bumped into him; but his son wouldn’t have simply walked through him either. He would have just maneuvered around the space that Xavier currently occupied. But old habits die hard, and Xavier found himself pressing against the counter to make room. He followed his son into the living room, and lo and behold, there sat Roscoe on the recliner, daring Dan to move him.
Xavier smiled at the stubborn old orange tabby who was starting to show white on his paws and around his whiskers. The cat flattened his ears and slowly slid off the chair when Dan shooed him away.
“Hey, Fuzz Butt.”
Roscoe turned towards him and flattened his ears against his skull, twitched his tail, but he didn’t hiss or yowl. Neither did he move to greet him.
“Do you see me?” Xavier asked.
“What are you looking at?” Dan said.
“He’s looking at me.” At that point Roscoe proved how much he cared for his late owner and stood up, turned his back, made a show of pointing his butthole in Xavier’s direction, and stalked out of the room. “Screw you too, buddy.” Xavier said, smiling again.
His smile faded as he looked back to his son. Dan was watching an episode of Law & Order, slurping bright red sauce and pale Os out of a plastic bowl between sips of beer. He was beginning to resemble Xavier in the more ways than a doctor would deem healthy. His flushed face told the world that this wasn’t his first sip of alcohol tonight, and his stomach was beginning to round out, bulging over his belt. Xavier had been able to quit drinking
by simply quitting when he’d had enough of the fuzzy nights and hung over days. Would Dan be able to? And that belly wasn’t going away. He knew that as a fact.
“You should take better care of yourself,” he said to his son, who of course didn’t hear a word of it. “Otherwise, you’ll be me in thirty years. You don’t want that. Too bad you and Sam couldn’t work it out. I really thought you guys had something good going there.”
His son’s divorce had come as a complete surprise, unlike his own. In fact, he hadn’t even found out until they had been separated for two months, when he called the house and his daughter-in-law (former, daughter-in-law, of course), laid it out for him. Dan had been living in motels and on friend’s couches the whole time; never told him, never asked for his help. That was two years ago, and luckily it had been more amicable than many divorces. Dan didn’t lose his shirt in the divorce, and was able to land on his feet, more or less, financially. What had caused the dissolution of his son’s marriage? Xavier never knew. There didn’t seem to be any adultery, or estrangement, no abuse. He had never seen or heard of Dan and Sam fighting. The one time he asked, Dan had given him a look and simply said, “We weren’t in love.”
We weren’t in love. Not We weren’t in love, anymore. Simply not in love.
Roscoe had returned to the room, and was alternately licking a paw and glaring in Xavier’s general direction. He was sure the cat could see him, but it had no interest in greeting him, or otherwise acknowledging his presence. Just as when he was alive. The more things change…yada, yada, yada.
A commercial came on with a familiar jingle. Xavier winced. It was the theme song to his career in insurance sales, and it had played at every faculty meeting, every industry conference, and in the last few years at the beginning of every shift over the PA system in the building where he worked. He hated that song. Dan mumbled a few lyrics:
“…we’re always there for you…Capital State is always true…” He raised a spoonful of Spagettios to the TV. “Here’s to you, Dad. Even if you weren’t as reliable as Capital State.”
Xavier found himself standing in the parking lot of his old apartment building. It was full dark, no moon or stars overhead. He was the only soul in the lot, and he realized he was standing in his old parking space. He looked up to the second floor, at what used to be his bedroom window when he had lived there. The window was dark, and he figured they hadn’t rented it yet. He doubted his belongings were still there. Dan or Carol – most likely Dan – would have taken care of that. It was all probably in a storage unit somewhere, waiting to be auctioned off or thrown on the curb when Dan inevitably stopped paying the fees. Staring up at the dark window, he felt a sense of sadness – No. It was more akin to emptiness. Nothing of him truly remained on this world. Nothing but his kids, and did they even count?
He couldn’t think of why he had jumped to his old place, but he knew he had wanted to leave Dan alone. He wanted to be alone himself. He knew he hadn’t been a great parent, he just had never heard Dan say it out loud. Carol, on the other hand, never let him forget it.
Now he was standing in Carol’s bedroom. His daughter was half undressed, wearing just a bra and the black slacks she had been wearing at his funeral. He gasped, and spun around to face the wall, but not before noticing how much she looked like her mother in a similar state of undress.
Carol. Five years older than her brother. There were individual strands of silver in her dark hair, glinting in the lamplight. Other than that, she looked young for her age. He glanced over his shoulder at her. She was rummaging through a drawer, and pulled out an old over-sized t-shirt. His gaze snapped back to the wall when she whipped off her bra and pulled the shirt on over her head. The whole time she was talking on the phone.
“It was just sad,” she was saying. “There were maybe ten people at the funeral, and maybe another ten showed up at the viewing. No wake.” She paused as the other party spoke. He couldn’t understand the words, but by the pitch and the cadence he knew immediately who she was talking to.
“Nobody expected you to come,” Carol said when it was her turn to speak again. “Least of all Dad.” Pause. “I don’t know. Dan took care of it all. It’s all in a storage unit. I didn’t bother looking through anything. There wouldn’t have been anything I wanted.”
Xavier moved about the room, each step meant to avoid Carol’s pacing. He stopped paying attention to what she was saying to his ex-wife. They had always been close, and when the divorce came, she had been firmly on her mother’s side. He didn’t blame his daughter for that. If it had been him, he would have done the same. Even twenty-five years later she hadn’t forgiven him for breaking the family apart, even though Katherine had been the one who filed the papers. If it had been up to him, they would have stayed together, despite his attempts to sabotage the whole thing.
Carol stopped pacing and sat on the edge of her bed. She was wrapping the call up, uh-huhing and welling her way to the inevitable goodbye. When she had finally weaned her mother off the phone, she dropped it beside her on the comforter and sighed. She was still wearing her slacks, and she unbuttoned and unzipped the waistband, but didn’t pull them off. She sighed again, stood up and went to the dresser where her purse was. She reached into the bag, pulled out a bunch of womanly things, finally coming up with a faded photograph. She went back to the bed and sat down with the photo in her hands. Xavier moved stealthily, as if he needed to sneak around, and stood behind her, looking over her shoulder. The picture made his intangible heart skip a beat.
Fourteen-year-old Carol, arms wrapped around a much thinner, more hirsute Xavier. Her broad smile was distorted by the braces on her teeth, and her eyes were magnified behind thick-lensed eyeglasses. She was wearing her volleyball uniform, and in the background there were other teenaged players meandering about, frozen at that awkward age. It was the day Carol’s JV team had won regionals. It was, as she described it later that day, the best day of her life. Only Xavier was in the picture; Katherine had stayed home with Dan who was sick with the flu. Although, in hindsight Xavier was sure she was meeting with her lawyer. After all, the papers had been presented to him only a week later. The Wildcats had lost their finals match. Katherine blamed it on Xavier. Somehow, it had been his fault she sued for divorce right before the finals.
“I’m sorry,” Xavier said to his daughter. “I guess. I don’t know.” Frustrated, he couldn’t find the words. He was sorry, but it was deeper than sorry. A regret so deep it burrowed to the depths of his being and coiled there like a lazy python slowly squeezing the joy out of him. He clutched his belly at the sensation. It had always been there, he realized, but it took death for him to notice it. “God damn it, I’m so sorry. You guys deserved better than what I gave you.”
Because after the divorce, after the papers were signed, he’d simply dropped out of their lives. He didn’t fight for custody, and visitation could only charitably be called sporadic, more from his own disinterest than his ex-wife’s spite. He loved them. Loved them all, but the love had been buried under years of resentment and self-loathing. For Xavier, love became a habit instead of an emotion.
Carol sighed once more – all the sighing, just like her mother – and placed the photo, face down on the bedside table. He wanted to sit beside his daughter and put his arm around her, just like he had done when she was little. He tried, but his arm slid off of her, just as he knew it would, as if she was covered in some super slick material. He had no sense of skin to skin contact, and she gave no indication that she felt him.
His grave was near the back of the cemetery, away from the mausoleums, the office and chapel, so the flood lamps that lit them had no chance of reaching him. He looked down at the slight mound of sod and the white plastic marker, and he wondered if there would be a headstone for him. Of course there would be. Carol would see to that; despite their problems, it would be unseemly to her for him not to have a permanent marker. Probably one of those flat metal plates, all modern and respectable, b
ut not too showy. An actual headstone or monument would make it look like they’d had an actual relationship.
“Are you done with your regrets yet?”
The speaker was a young man, with dark hair and olive skin. He was leaning against the angel Xavier himself had leaned on earlier as the grave diggers did their job. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a dragon untastefully sprawled across it.
“Are you dead too?” Xavier asked. The man shrugged. Xavier took that as an affirmation. Otherwise, how would the man be able to see him? “How do you know I have regrets?”
“Man, we all got regrets. Me, I made my mom cry more than once, but she didn’t cry at my funeral. How messed up is that?”
“My kids didn’t cry at mine.”
“Yeah, but your kids are adults, right?” The young man looked him up and down. “Unless you were gettin’ down in your later years. Moms are supposed to cry for their kids, right?” This time, Xavier shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose they should, unless they’re terrible people. Or the kids are terrible people. My mom is a good person, though. So, I guess we know who the bad one was.”
“I’m not a bad person,” Xavier said.
“You say that, but you must think you are. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”
“Here. You mean this limbo?”
“No, man. Here. Standing over your grave and moping and shit. Happens every time.”
“Every time what?”
The young man snorted. “Every time you visit your mom, or your kids, or whoever. And you start thinking about how you messed up your life, and how it messed up other people’s lives. Then you’re back here. Moping.” Pause. “And shit.”
“Moping and shit,” Xavier muttered under his breath. “How long have you been doing this?”
Another shrug. “I don’t know. A while. My little sister’s about to graduate high school. She was just starting ninth grade before. She cried.”
“Is this it? Am I stuck here?”
Another shrug. This guy shrugged like Carol sighed. Each one had its own meaning. This one said, “Sure. Whatever.”
“Is that yours?” Xavier asked, pointing to the angel.
“Hell no. I’m over there.” He pointed in the general direction of the darkness to the left of Xavier’s plot. “Just saw you over here and figured I’d see what’s up. I kind of like to see who’s around.”
“There are others?”
“Oh yeah. Bunch of us. There’s this old lady who comes up here crying her eyes out every night. I don’t know what her deal is, she won’t talk to me. I think she’s been here forever, because she’s wearing like a seventies pant suit with a giant collar. Brightest yellow I’ve ever seen. Her place is way up at the front.”
“So, we’re all stuck here. That doesn’t make sense. If that was true, I’d be seeing people all over the place.”
“I never said that everyone comes around. I’ve seen lots of people buried who never come back. There are also lots that used to come around who don’t anymore.”
“Where did they go?”
Shrug.
Roscoe was squatting in the litterbox next to the toilet in Dan’s bathroom. Xavier could hear the plop and smell the stench of the cat’s turds as they hit the gravelly litter below. He wondered why he still had all these senses when everyone else was blind and deaf to him.
Regrets. The young man had implied that regrets were what kept him here. Did he regret that much?
Plop. Another waft of fresh cat poo. Roscoe stared straight into Xavier’s eyes. Roscoe certainly didn’t regret his passing.
Xavier had never remarried. Katherine had. And now she was lying in bed with her new husband, whose name was Bob.
Xavier had hated every Bob he had ever met in his life. It was as if all Bobs were required to be jolly, solid fellows with booming voices, who clapped you on the back when they greeted you. Bobs mowed the lawns and barbecued on Saturdays, and sat in a pew in the middle on the church every Sunday. They were successful in all their endeavors, and commanded the respect of their friends, families and communities. Xaviers were not Bobs.
This Bob appeared to be sleeping with a pillow balanced over his eyes and forehead. Presumably, the pillow was to block the light from the lamp on Katherine’s side of the bed. She was sitting up, reading a book with plastic over its cover. Xavier squinted at it in the dim light – a mystery novel, probably the type that involved old ladies in knitting circles who happened to moonlight as detectives. On the table beside the bed, next to the lamp was a glass containing an amber colored liquid. She was up to her night drinking again. Katherine was never flat out drunk, but she always drank just enough to loosen her tongue. To say things she would later deny saying. Was that the reason it had all fallen apart?
Of course it wasn’t. It was a symptom of a syndrome. Bad Marriage Syndrome, BMS for short. Because the night drinking hadn’t started until he started messing around with the dental hygienist from down the street, and the receptionist at work, and the mother of one of Dan’s friends. Katherine didn’t know about any of that, not at the time, but she knew there was something wrong. Just as he knew there was something wrong. He turned to sleeping around. She started night drinking.
Was this his regret? He wondered as he stared down at his ex-wife and her new husband. He began to remember their life together, as if he was watching an old home movie on video tape. High school sweethearts, different colleges, their relationship held together by near nightly phone calls and mad dashes across the state one weekend a month. Wedding. Honeymoon. Carol as a newborn. It all began to speed up now. Dan’s birth flashed before his eyes. Holidays and vacations blurred together, becoming a cacophony of gifts and meals and destinations until he couldn’t tell which memory went where.
And then it all stopped. Frozen on an image of himself staring back at himself in the mirror. His eyes were blood shot, face unshaven; there was a scratch on his forehead; Xavier couldn’t remember where it had come from.
The room went dark. He blinked, sure this was it. He was done visiting his regrets, and now he was moving on. There was a rustling, and as his eyes began to adjust to the dim light, he realized he was still standing in Katherine’s bedroom. She had turned off the light, and was getting comfortable for the night. He heard her sigh, just like Carol sighed.
“You’re back.”
Xavier could sense the young man standing nearby. Instead of looking up, he nudged the white plastic stake marking his grave. His toe slid off it without making contact. He looked up to see an old woman with a blue beehive hair-do wearing a lemon yellow leisure suit strolling past. She glanced at him, and sniffled, her eyes red-rimmed from crying.
“How long will this take?”
“Dunno, man. We all got regrets. I guess as long as it takes.”