Tag Archives: #flashfiction

Watcher

I always click the button that locks the door until my Subaru beeps. It beeps twice, and sometimes, if the mood is just right, I keep hitting the button as I sing “Tainted Love”, the timing and rhythm perfect, as if we are singing together. And that’s what I’m doing as I cross the desolate wet parking lot toward the shabby four-story hotel.

This rust belt town is grim, on its knees, leather work gloves resting on a scratched yellow hardhat, exhausted and panting, trying to get to its feet. The hotel–part of a low budget chain–has seen better days. There are desperately-needed renovations going on inside, and a dumpster the size of a big-rig trailer and several construction vehicles are parked at the darkened end of the lot. Not all the lamps work, and why bother? The interstate with its high halogens sits right there on the other side of a steel and concrete barricade. That’s enough.

My clients asked where I was staying. When I told them, they shuddered. “That’s kind of a halfway house,” they said. “The addicts and homeless often end up there.” I did not offer that once, in another life, I had helped run a little house church, and the men from the halfway house next door had been regular attendees. The men laughingly called me pastor, and I laughed along, because I might be the worst candidate to shepherd any flock anywhere. Ever. People with problems are not the problem; systems that exacerbate problems are.

The car beeps along merrily when I notice him–the shadow of a hooded figure, a man in a rain poncho of some kind–looking down at me, hands pressed against the glass of a third floor guest room window. No discernible features. only darkness where his expressions should live.

The song dies on my lips. In my hesitation, the imagination my steelworker father so often condemned as overactive revs into high gear. Scream. Psycho. The Shining.

I take three more steps and pause between two puddles, my eyes never leaving that darkness where his face must be.

He doesn’t move.

I began calculations, eyeing the structure. Distance to the lobby. Distance to my room adjacent to the second floor stairs. Time it takes to climb those stairs with my briefcase, wearing my slick-soled dress shoes. Distance from his room to the same stairs. Probability that he would correctly guess I had parked closer to the side where my room was located so that I could see it from my window.

I keep watching, my neck craning until I enter the building, until he disappears from sight. The lobby is tiny, brightly lit, and the young woman at the counter has headphones on. She nods as I pass. Once I round the corner, I scurry down the hall to the stairwell closest to my room. On the second floor landing, I hear the fire door open on three. I slip into the hall, run my card key through the slider on my door, and breathe a sigh of relief when it is closed, bolted, and chained. Just my imagination. Yeah.

A shower and a change of clothes later, I settle at the desk to complete the day’s paperwork. That’s when I hear the fire door, followed by a whistle. It’s the tune I had been singing not an hour earlier. The whistler stands just outside my door. I see the shadow of their feet through the crack. There is no peephole. I switch off the light. The whistler leaves the way he came.

I spend the next several hours watching my car through a little opening in the drapes. My room is dark. No one can see me. Just me in the chair and the car and the mostly empty, half-darkened, puddle-ravaged lot. My accursed overactive imagination and the lamps of the interstate. The scattered showers that come and go. An occasional car or truck headed up the mountain, away from the town. A figure–a man in a ball cap and hoodie–walked by my Subaru earlier, during one of the lulls in the rain. Paused in front of it but didn’t touch it. Was he the same person I saw in that window? I don’t know–probably not–but the longer I sit, the more uneasy I get, the more I wonder if I’m somehow part of the problem. No. It’s just my imagination. It must be.

The Box (Mover’s Variant)

Author’s Note: My apologies for being away the past few weeks. October has brought significant change. We moved to an apartment in the city, sold the house, and I changed jobs. And now I’m fighting a cold… 

Anyway, here’s a brief bit of therapy.

*****

Crisp did not recognize the box. He was certainly not the owner. Its nakedness marked its difference. No labels, no neat writing. No warnings about fragility, or which end should go up. It wasn’t a liquor box, nor a box that once held reams of paper. The perfectly empty box sat empty in the middle of his guest bedroom floor.

He picked it up and carried it out.

When he returned, it was back.

He removed it again, folding it and placing it into a box containing other neatly disassembled and folded boxes. Then he carried on with his day.

That night, during his ritual room check, he discovered that the box had returned.

Muttering a string of curses, he removed it again, then, steadfastly refusing to check the room again, went to sleep, which is to say, fitfully tossed and turned and dreamed of endless cardboard boxes, stacked neatly up the side of a mountain.

“Move them,” a voice in the clouds commanded.

“To where?” he inquired, tapping his fingertips together.

Silence followed, and, like an ant or a bee, he began carrying the boxes up the mountain, certain of his task.

When he awoke, bleary-eyed and grumpy, he checked the guest room.

Across the street, Frieda Blake noticed the new neighbor jumping up and down and screaming, clad only in a pair of boxers. She put down the binoculars, swearing off them for all of ten minutes. When she checked again, he was gone.

What happened next is entirely speculation.

The neighbors say he was unstable, and torched the place for the insurance money. The experts disagreed, since the only thing that was burned, really, was an upstairs bedroom. 

Two facts, however, are perfectly clear. First, Zachary Crisp was carted away in an ambulance, still wearing nothing but his underwear. Second, the firefighters swore they saw a perfectly good cardboard box untouched amid the charred remains of the bedroom.