Four Ways North * 1: His skin recalled the lazy and incongruous comfort of alpine cream, tinged with honey and the blush of toasted roses. His hair: a mop of unruly silk in the color of beach sand—dry—curled over the crests of his ears and ticked his brow when the wind blew through it. The air was still. His hair had grown and he wore it bound in a half-tame ponytail. His eyes carried moss and sea-mist in the muddled color surrounding each pupil. Stubble itched along his jaw and a wispy thatch fringed his upper lip and the center of his chin. Sandpaper. It was a stranger’s face. The kind he only ever saw in mirrors. He glanced away from the person always at home in scratched and cracked reflections. He focused on the sounds of the night: the sustained and earnest drone of the bus engine, like digestive furnace of some vast and witless automated whale. He’d stopped trembling. His breathing was steady, now. It was after midnight: an unfathomable, black hour somewhere between broken industrial towns, farm towns, and the vast fields between them. A moonless night. By day, he might have seen fields: barley, currants, or a sea of searing, yellow blossoms, as improbable as the ink of fluorescent markers. He saw nothing—now—but the crude cubicle of restroom-space crammed behind seats and beside a row of seats as comfortable and as inviting as church pews and funerary rites. With his eyes closed, he listened for his heartbeat beneath the vibrating hum of motor noise and the purr of tires on roadway pavement. His stomach growled: a plaintive, liquid noise. He felt the need for a shower. His feet felt vaguely squishy inside of socks and shoes worn too long. He wiggled his toes to keep them from sticking together. There is an echo in his mind. A voice. “I know, Piotr,” she’d said, leaving him with no alternative. And in the absence of choice, he listened to her echo now: I know…I know…I know to the laborious drone of a bus speeding north. A northbound train waited at the border. “I’m sorry,” he’d said. “No, Piotr. Don’t be sorry. That ruins it.” Sudden claustrophobia stuck a pebble—as jagged as a sob—in the meat of his neck. He clenched his fists, feeling the sudden, unwelcome intrusion of something on his finger: the one next to his pinky. He cringed. He knew that particular bite, and splayed his fingers. There was movement—his own, or maybe the bus taking a curve—and he caught himself on the edge of the tiny, nearly-clean sink. Strands of hair, escaped from his half-tame ponytail, colored the peripheries of his vision, and for an instant, it seemed as if the edges of the small lavatory cubicle were touched with a fringe of ectoplasmic honey. Fading. He closed his eyes, prying the intrusion from the base of his second-longest finger. He thought of Marek opening bottles on the edge of a table, using the edge itself to pry the metal cap from the glass lip. He felt that motion, something like it, as the thing slid from his finger and clattered in the shallow, aluminum basin of the: where splatters of pink-liquid soap had hardened on an irregular crust of dead suds, scum, and whatever muck past passengers had washed from hands/arms/faces. He opened his eyes and glanced down, as the ring flashed desperate silver in the wan, fluorescent light, and lost itself in the darkness of the un-stoppered drain. He turned, as swiftly as he dared, and reached for the door-latch, flicked it aside in one deft motion. Perhaps it was the motion of the bus that compelled the door to open. Perhaps it was some subtle pressure. Just a nudge—a whisper of a push—to keep from banging into the ankles of some poor soul consigned to the rear bench-seat. At any rate, the door opened and he stepped into the archaic darkness of a bus (heading north) at an obscure, black hour, long after midnight. * 2: * Rain colored the irregularities of the street in its own, glassy shimmer and caught the jaded colors of neon and orange sodium vapor streetlamps on the edges of worn cobblestones and rectangular patches of asphalt. The worst of it was over, but a drizzle still leaked from the exhausted and dissipated clouds. The door buzzer spat its characteristic, asthmatic quack into the night, and he pushed against the door before the lock reengaged. It was an adventurous and reeling climb to her open door. His rain-wet shoes squeaked and squished with every step. * —Please, Jana. I’m drunk. Can’t you see that? I can’t make it all the way home; I just need a bit of sleep. On your sofa. —You can’t keep running forever, Piotr. The bed’s big enough. —I’ll leave tomorrow. * And later, in the darkness, with Jana beside him (smelling of sobriety and skin cream) Piotr listened to the muffled passage of trams along the wide, empty street. * —Does he know? —What? —Your expatriate friend who speaks English. You’re going to show up on his doorstep aren’t you? You’re going to ring his buzzer, late at night, and tell him that you can’t make it home. —I don’t know. I need a cigarette. —Not in here, Piotr. In the water closet, if it’s so important. * When he returned from smoking in the water closet, he was careful not to disturb Jana, careful not to remind her of any more of something she’d said. * —I have to work tomorrow, Piotr. The door locks automatically…be gone when I get back. —Okay. * 3: Like riding a bike: to remain motionless is to lose balance and fall… Nostalgia boiled in the depths of that thought. In the half-remembered days of his childhood, he’d lay awake at night, listening to the weighty, metallic thunder of distant trains. When he was older, he learned that they lent themselves—freely—to textbook evocations of The Doppler Effect. Speeding trains making noise. On more nights than the private séance of memory might have conjured, he’d lain awake, listening to the sustained groan of diesel engines and the thunder raw tonnage of speeding metal. He’d learned to hear the differences between freight trains and passenger carriers. He’d learned—obscurely—the nocturnal voice of the Number 8, Southbound from some far away city: Preskiyn, maybe, or some crowded passenger depot on the border. It was always the clatter of their wheels (as improbably narrow as a tightrope-walker’s stance) that captured his attention and gave brittle, rhythmic voice to the seams where one length of track met another. A train at rest is a train derailed. It wasn’t until he’d seen a motionless train (he was five) that the child’s truism he’d made up died, caved in, and lost itself beneath the indolence of reality. He’d learned nothing from that death: learning the truth didn’t explain to him (until later) how a train stayed on the tracks. He’d waited months for the birth of that humdrum epiphany… …and lost interest in trains. * 4: * His skin recalled the lazy and incongruous comfort of alpine cream, tinged with honey and the blush of toasted roses. His hair: a mop of boisterous silk in the color of beach sand—dry—explored the crests of his ears and ticked his brow when the wind blew through it. The air was still. His hair had grown and he wore it bound in a half-tame ponytail. His eyes carried moss and sea-mist in the muddled color surrounding each pupil. Stubble itched along his jaw and a wispy thatch fringed his upper lip and the center of his chin. Sandpaper: softer—now—in the fading steam of a shower. The strangers in mirrors were all in exile, and the most common of reflected faces wrote his name in the set of its features. It was after sunset: the sky above a smear or hepatic, orange city-haze, revealed its infinite depth in various whispers of indigo, violet, and something invisible that might have been black. He wrapped a towel around his waist and padded out of the bathroom. The desire for a cigarette decompressed in the intimate juncture of throat and chest, and guided him to the jacket, hanging on a peg by the door. Boots, crusted with sand and the arcane signatures of winter, rested on a rubberized mat beneath the hanging coats, scarves, and lighter things intended for smoking breaks on the balcony. He shrugged into the heaviest of the jackets, fingering a beveled pack of cigarettes in the left pocket, and a lighter in the right. There was silence in the apartment. The balcony was an island of stillness in the thunderous white-noise of the city: traffic three stories below, and over there on the main thoroughfares. A jet arrowed north, ascending to cruising altitude and finding its way—maybe—to some stretch of land, warming the feet of the Urals. He lit a cigarette. He took that all-important first drag. Snow had fallen during the day: a frigid dusting of confectioner’s sugar, now grayish-orange in the indistinct haze of city-light. Red clay pots held soil and the desiccated, corpses of last summer’s geraniums. An echo—muddled and unbidden—caressed the innermost contours of the silence in his head: a fading, faded, insubstantial voice: —Your expatriate friend who speaks English. You’re going to show up on his doorstep aren’t you? You’re going to ring his buzzer, late at night, and tell him that you can’t make it home. You can’t keep running forever, Piotr. That ruins it. He’d lost a ring, once, in the maw of a drain. Now, he smokes a Lucky Strike (it’s toasted) while a faint breeze sweeps itself through the shallow dusting of snow on the tiny, concrete balcony. The chill is gentle. It is weak. Body heat alone melts snow into puddles between his toes. “Piotr.” The sound of his name—shaped to the contours of a displaced, American accent—draws his attention to the soft pressure of hands on his shoulders, and the intoxicating warmth of warm breath sliding into his ear. A kiss landed in the stubble of his left cheek. “You’re insane, Piotr.” “Today is the first day of Spring,” he said. “Winter is finally over.” In the silence that followed, he smoked the remainder of his rolled, toasted tobacco, while his companion embraced him from behind, and after a while, pulled him inside and closed the sliding, glass door. A muddle of footprints (some with toes and some with shoe treads) inscribed some cryptic message in the dusting of snow, before the gust of a breeze obscured them. Later, there was stillness. end This is one of those stories that represents a number of impulses, 90% of which are muddled and incoherent. It's partly inspired by the prose poems of Michael Ondaatje (namely, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid) and those elliptical non-stories that are so common in "Literary" fiction. If anything, this story (these stories, as--in all honesty--it's 4 stories) probably reveal my urge to...um...be elliptical, to tell a story without giving any details. As I've been away for so long, it might be fitting to start this next cycle of posting with an elliptical thing...such as this story/these stories. I'd like to offer a special THANK YOU to NefariousDrO for allowing me to steal one of his photos. The footprints implied in the image here were graciously donated, and I hope I've done them justice, especially since they went on to inspire a story, or 4 stories, rather than simply accompanying another piece of fiction that remains...um...upcoming, rest assured, there might be footprints in that one too…if the cicadas cooperate…but…well…that’s another story. Thank you for reading and commenting, and I hope you're all having a great week.