Twelve Stories

Adam Reger

1: On Monday I buy a chicken sandwich and am peeling back the bun to apply mayonnaise when I discover the shape of the patty to be that of a heart. Not anatomical, with ventricles and aortae, but the cartoon heart signifying love. I snap a photo with my phone, keeping the image for future use. But then I eat the sandwich, because it is past noon and I have not eaten since yesterday evening.

2: The next day, a short story of mine is waiting in its envelope when I return home. It was sent back not by the magazine where I’d submitted it, but by the post office, for insufficient postage. I find myself taking it hard, taking the envelope with me to my bed and falling slowly into troubled slumber. My bedroom is an attic with a sloped roof, and my uneasy dreams include the sounds of squirrels capering across the shingles, leaping into branches, and the sibilance of the wind rushing past the eaves.

3: In the night, tree branches rake the roof, puncturing my dreams and waking me to the red eye of the space heater on the floor beside my bed. Life is a pinball game, I realize, and despair—not death—is the space at the bottom of the board, snug between my gesturing flippers.

4: There is a girl at the bakery on the corner, chubby but agreeable, who I have been talking to every few days. Slipping into the bakery when she is on the job has meant the warmth and yeasty scent of bread, and her standing captive behind the counter as I talk and talk, pausing only while she attends to customers.

But on Thursday when I come in, the boyfriend of this girl is in the shop. I know who he is by the way he stands, his elbows on the counter, his stance wide. His arms are thick and knotted with green symbols and his wide neck swivels to take me in, his blue eyes warm, not beady as would better fit the situation. It’s all I can do to ask for a banana nut muffin and take it walking, uphill through a veil of soft, small rain falling over the city.

5: On Friday, the first warm day of spring, I am walking along my street when a tractor-trailer comes curving along the road. This truck is so high that it scrapes against the branches of the trees that curve out over the middle of the street. The tree in front of my house is old and dead, and when its branches are struck a great rotten bough falls onto the back of a car parked just beside the tree. My own car is close to the tree; it may be my car that the bough has landed on. The driver of the truck stops and walks back. He is young and thin, wearing a sweat-stained t-shirt that says, “Who’s Your Paddy?” on the front. A neighborhood woman stands nearer to the car, looking. She’s pale, not old, and she wears a glossy brown wig that’s half a degree askew. I can tell it’s bad by the way the woman lifts her thin fingers to her mouth. The truck driver has only been on this job two days, he says to the woman. I get closer and see that it’s not my car. On the roof of my car there is a single thin branch with a single green leaf that’s just sprouted. A green Honda Acura has absorbed the full brunt; the bough has fallen through its rear window, dashing blue-green glass pebbles over a Hello Kitty doll and a box of tissues on the back window ledge. At the edges of the window are jagged pieces that remain intact, forming coastlines around the emptiness in the middle.

It’s someone else’s car, someone else’s misfortune. I won’t have to stand and take down the truck driver’s information, or call the number of his supervisor in a distant city, or file a police report, or take photographs with my camera phone, or tape a garbage bag over the hole in the window of my car and check to make sure the bag is still there, billowing in the breeze. I’m free from all that, free to do as I had meant to do when I started up my street—I’m free to go inside the house and put down my coat and bag and go up to my attic bedroom. I enter the house but I don’t go upstairs or take off my coat. I stand at the window, watching through a slat in the blinds as the neighborhood woman and the truck driver look at the smashed window of the car and the bough poking into the back seat and talk about what to do now.

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Adam Reger’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in New Orleans Review, Juked, Prick of the Spindle, Fourth River, White Whale Review, and Pear Noir! He lives in Pittsburgh.