ESP.LITERATURE

Stolen, the small blue Pullman placard stipulated QUIET is requested for the benefit of those who have retired.

Sitting on a chair, wooden, straight backed craftsman style, perhaps oak, old with a bit of a wobble not unlike myself, the field uncultivated for donkey’s years, surrounding for acres with a copse of planted populars, aligned, straight and tall, good little soldiers, disconcerting those trees, unnatural, with the river somewhere behind, the gurgle, the play of color, but a brook, moreso, by definition, which is just the conundrum, by god, bloody semantics, can’t get away from the beastly things.

She left me for dead, the bitch.

Apologetic, head bows, he begs—well, let us reconsider, no pleading, no down on your knees floor slapping begs and beseeches, no, none of that, more a contrite acknowledgment of impulsive … he is not licking her boots, were she wearing boots, simply asking is all, a request, like that of the small blue placard, asking for some quiet forgiveness.

She had done him wrong; he had shot her through the hardwood door.

A rather common theme, banal at best, one seeking a bit of plot for substance, a descriptive clause or two.

He wishes he had, but he had not.

Sinned, he had, if he were a Catholic; but he was not then, once was, his family holding out in the Highlands, but religion now so passé.

He had taken a bus, then a boat, then a train, then another boat, hitching north at last to home. She had returned to Vienna. So he thought. Her father, the Nazi, had hung himself. Ending it all.

Ending it all.

The quiet he found in a small place in  his head, if there could be such a space, what we are rather adept at, we humans, creating such spaces, somewhere beyond the stipulation of the blue placard, mind gently flows the pebbled, sandy streambed, abiding nowhere, unfettered. 

She, too, perhaps, a creation of his head. Then she had not left him for dead or otherwise. He had not left on a bus or a … still here, had not gone anywhere.

Cast your eyes across the field.

Hear the brook.

Babbling. Trite. More banality.

But weren’t they all, He and Her and Them.

Quiet please.

And so a palpable quiet wraps the scene.

Are you still here, says her friend, in passing, rancorously. Angrily? Nearly so. Perhaps.

Mystified, I say nothing.

She, too, holds her tongue, sits twirling her opal pendant and chain—a gift I gave—twirling this way and that about the fingers of her hand. That way and this. A play of light.

That rankles.

I left the following day. Or stayed. Semantically a chaos; pragmatically, decisive.

Quiet please.

I cast my eyes …