"Arrival at Ridgewood"

A Story by Raef

This is the intended format, so don't get on me about how it looks uneven because that's what it's supposed to look like.

I rise every morning, I bathe, I drink, and then I leave. Once through my apartment door, I review the sights of

my landing; the opposite building (I believe it was itself an apartment

building, though now it’s owned by a delightful Oriental couple who are

determined on renovating it into a restaurant/apartment combination), the low

hedge that runs the street as far as I can tell (I never bothered to test its

limitations in length), an abandoned milk crate that I use as a makeshift

rubbish bin by my door. Pretty linear, I would say.

And

then there are the people; the ever-shifting mass of skin and bone, the hair

and grime. If ever I have seen the same face more than once, it would be in

those hours I spend in the entrance to my building. I do not have a job

per-say; I am more of a handy-man of sorts, and an average one at that. Odd

jobs are fine opportunities for recognition, for both my labor and myself, and I

seize every opportunity to receive it; recognition. In my free time I people-watch, and

before you begin to question my credibility, I assure you it is a peaceful,

innocent pastime. Well, as innocent as a grown man can possibly be without

coming across as touched in the head, or deeply religious, or both.

Anyhow,

these hours I spend whiling away are spent in a seated position, on a bench I

found one day on my return trip from a job across town. That day I had to break

my routine in order to arrive on time, and as I returned I found this old,

rotting bench left on the side of the road. I was particularly fond of it and I

had to decide between arriving home before dark and digesting properly, or

lugging this thing home and having something to sit on for my people-watching;

up until I found the thing I had been forced to sit on my waste bin/ milk

crate. Obviously I chose the latter, or the bench would not be where it is now.

This

morning there was a commotion on the far end of the street; a woman was arguing

with a man, and it got to the point that blows were exchanged. I relate the

argument here now for material purposes:

“You

god damn b***h, my f*****g best friend?”

“Look,

it isn't what you think, damn it.”

“A

f*****g kiss isn't what I think it is? Oh, that is so f*****g rich. You know

what, I don’t want to hear it; we’re done.”

started to walk away, across the street and, I’m sure, on his way out of her

life (which I was not wrong about, in a way), and as he did the woman started

to cry, and she made a grab for his wrist.

“Listen

to me Richard!”

Perhaps

Richard would have listened to her. Perhaps she would have convinced him that

she wasn't in fact cheating on him (she was; I saw the offending public display

of affection, as did Richard himself). Perhaps all would have been well and

Richard and the mystery woman (I found out later that her name had been "Lonnie"), would have worked past the roughness of the situation.

But

the woman, Lonnie, and the wildness of her grab, were enough to send Richard

over the edge of the low hedge, and under the tires of an incoming garbage

truck.

I’m

sure it was painless; a moment of panic and then... However,

nothing can equal the shock I felt (as did Lonnie) after realizing that

she had inadvertently killed her boyfriend (they were indeed boyfriend and

girlfriend). The garbage truck did not stop, however. I suppose I cannot place

much blame on its part; by a stroke of “luck”, Richard was in the one effective

blind spot of the massive windshield, and the roaring of the engine and the

ruggedness of the road (pot-holes were a common site on my lane) masked the

impact of the human body that now resembled a patch of ground beef and cloth on

the asphalt of the road.

Lonnie’s

reaction was not immediate, but when she did indeed react, it caught me off

guard. She started laughing, which was not at all what I expected her to do.

But then she fell face-first into the mess of flesh that was once a sentient

being (Richard), and it was then that I realized she had fainted.

remember running up to her and pulling her feet-first out of the mess, which I

realized afterwards was not the most tactful decision; it smeared Richard’s

remains all down her front and caused some to enter her nostrils and gaping

mouth. It was the obstruction of her airways that brought her back to

awareness, and when she realized what it was that filled her mouth, she

screamed, and vomited (into the remains might I add).

After

I made sure she wasn't hurt from her fall (now that I think about it, she

couldn't have been; she had a soft landing, what with her landing on… never

mind), I ran inside and phoned emergency services. They arrived, as did the now

unnecessary paramedics. They took Lonnie to the hospital, as she was in shock

and displaying hysteria. They took me aside and questioned me, and as I had

seen everything, I gave them their fill of information, to say the least. I

was thanked for my cooperation. I then retired to my home, and as soon as my front

door shut, I collapsed.

did not sleep. I stayed awake, all night, for a good

nine hours. I relived the moment Richard’s body made contact with the

forward-right wheel of the garbage truck… repeatedly. (Earlier I had given the

police the license number of the garbage truck that had crushed Richard, so

that was taken care of for the moment.)

lived my days as I normally would have, though now in my coffee I had a few

splashes of the fourteen year old scotch my father had left me in his will (my

father was not a rich man). As you can imagine I ran out fairly quickly, and I

threw the bottle into the old milk crate outside my door.

Later

that month I was summoned to court on behalf of the woman, Lonnie. On the

written date I donned my most acceptable flannel and jeans, and made my court

appearance, all the while fearfully rehearsing my lines to questions yet to

come. I had to remind myself that I was not the one in trouble, and this was

partly because of the particularly rebellious past I possessed.

need not have worried; the questions were yes-or-no for the most part, and as I

answered each I realized I was damning the defendant, which I remembered was

Lonnie, to whatever punishment the legal system saw fit.

Did you see Ms. Lonnie Davidson push the victim into

oncoming traffic?

Yes, sir. Bu-

Did you, as you put it, both

hear and see the defendant laugh after realizing what had happened?

Yes, sir. Although I'd like to add that she fainted right after, and that I don't know why the hell I said it like that.

(The gavel, here.)

(The jury will disregard everything after "Yes, sir".)

Did you do anything other than

assist Ms. Davidson after the incident?

No, sir.

Do you believe the defendant

is guilty?

An objection from the

defendant’s lawyer here, though I would have abstained regardless.

* * * * *

Another few months, another dozen or

so bottles of whiskey; I received a letter from none other than Lonnie

Davidson, asking if I would be so kind as to visit her at her apartment. I

obliged, and arrived at her apartment in (by matter of coincidence, though I do

only own a few articles of clothing) the same exact clothes I wore to her trial.

This detail was overlooked by Ms. Davidson, and she looked me over with

dull eyes as she limply ushered me into her home.

She wanted to discuss her

deceased boyfriend.

“You know, I really was

cheating on him.”

“Oh…”

“Yeah, I know; nothing going

for me at the moment, right? Looking back, I can’t understand why I would; he

loved me, and I loved him, but he just… he never had the time, you know?”

“No, I don’t.”

She gave me a look of anger,

which dissipated quickly behind a mask of utter dreariness so absolute that it

made me shudder.

“Ms. Davidson… Why did you ask

me to come here today?”

She took her time answering;

she got up and asked if I would like some tea. I asked for liquor, and she

brought out a bottle of, wouldn't you know it, fourteen year old scotch.

Rather than drink from a glass, she took a swig and then offered me the bottle.

Needless to say, I took it. After we were slightly light-headed, she told me exactly

why she asked me to come.

“After the accident, after the

physicals my doctor had me do, I got this call from the coroner. He wanted to

know when I could come in. I told him immediately. When I got there, he told me

he found something in what would have been Richard’s pocket. It was an

engagement ring; his mother’s. I remembered it from when we first started

dating; he showed me the case and told me about how his mother had left it to

him when his father went insane.”

(On a side-note, Richard’s

father went insane; not long after Richard's eleventh birthday, in an act of

insanity, his father drove the family car off of an overpass, killing both

his mother and himself, but Richard was spared due to his being asleep during

the crash and the lucidity of his body.)

“He was going to propose.”

I looked up and when I saw her

face… I can’t say my heart broke, but it was something like seeing a child’s

face just after the realization of their being lost.

“The b*****d was going to f*****g

propose when he saw me kissing his…”

If I hadn't already been

standing up, saying I had better be going, I wouldn't have been able to avoid

the flying bottle of aged whiskey that she lobbed at me. I made a dash for the

door ("Where the f**k are my cigarettes", from her), wrenching it open as a vase hit the wall by my ear. A shard of porcelain

hit me on my cheek, sticking there in the skin as I slammed the door behind me

and barreled down the stairs out of her apartment, taking leaps of three stairs

at a time. Behind me I heard the enraged shrieks of something that couldn't be

human, much less a woman of society.

I never did find out why she wanted to tell me this specifically. She should have told family, friends, anyone else. It didn't occur to me then that maybe I was the only one who wouldn't run away.

Turns out shards of glass will make me turn tail right quick.

* * * * *

She

committed suicide after I left. It was in the newspaper under the title “Deranged Murderess Sets Self on

Fire, Endangering the Residents of Nearby Apartments”. I read the article as I

sat on my bench, watching the people go by. I thought about how she had been soaked in alcohol when I left, looking for a cigarette to light. I don't think that that would have been enough to ignite the alcohol, but stranger things have happened. I remember the foot traffic was

especially heavy, and that I was slightly off-balance from the scotch I had

had before I left the house that morning (no coffee to water it down, or is it coffee it down?), so I don’t know how I spotted the

crying man.

Down the street, in the same

general area where the accident happened, a man stood, crying quietly. He had a

gaunt look to him; hollow cheeks, unshaven, sunken eyes. It looked a recently

acquired appearance ( how the hell can you tell if an appearance was recently acquired?). As I watched, however intoxicated I happened to be, I saw

him reach into his coat, and pull out two objects. One was clearly a flower (a

purple lilac as I recall), and the other was something metallic. He placed the

flower on the edge of the road, stepping into it as he did, and I feared for

his life, and started to get up, though I fell to my knees almost immediately;

I may have had more than half the bottle in order to bolster myself against the

fast-approaching frost of November.

He was looking down at the

flower, still crying as he fiddled with the metallic object, and as a flame

appeared I saw that it was a lighter. He lit a crumpled cigarette he

pulled from his pocket, and my racing heart calmed some.

Then in one fluid motion he

pocketed the lighter, reached into his inner coat pocket, pulled out a small,

snub-nosed revolver, and offed himself.

Again, reliving almost the

same accident on the same street; inquiries were made, answers were produced (by me, mostly).

From the dead man’s identification they found his name was Trevor Ernst, one of

the attendees of the trial I had testified in.

That’s when I remembered

Richard’s last name was “Ernst”. The man who shot himself… He was Richard’s

brother, and he was also the man Lonnie was cheating on Richard with. I had

forgotten that brothers could be best friends, because my own brother was

somewhere out in the Mid-West, making a bundle of money in the publishing

business. That’s when the true enormity of the situation hit me; the

complexities of such a tragic ending to three lives. I cried myself to sleep,

but I don’t know why it affected me so much.

I left the next morning, not

bothering to reclaim my deposit on my apartment (the landlord was very nice in that sense), packing what I could fit into

my pockets, hitchhiking to wherever the driver happened to be going. I

wandered like that for a month. I lived off of what I could find, doing odd

jobs like I used to, though this time I had no return trip, no bench to come

home to, no reassuring comfort of the alcohol I had come to need. It was around

this time that I became sober, and it was also around this time that I was hired as a

short-order cook at a diner. After living at the

homeless shelter for a few months, I managed to rent a small apartment; much

better than my last one, though I had to remind myself of the absence of a

certain wooden bench, and so I got some of the friends I had made to help me

move the damn thing over to my new home. Luckily it was still there; my old

apartment hadn't been leased yet (something about how it was bad luck to live near where an accident occurred, let alone two), and the landlord had not bothered to move it

or even throw it out. I was grateful for his laziness, and I took the bench

with me.

I resumed my people watching,

this time without the haze of drink to mar the effect. My bench, ever faithful,

held up for a few more years, then finally gave out after a particularly bad

rainstorm that softened the wood to the point that when I sat down on it the

next morning it broke in two. It was infuriating, but I was at peace with the fact that it had had a good, long life of sorts.

I did give it decent last

rights; I cremated its remains in the small fireplace I had in my apartment. I

almost set myself on fire because the wood wouldn't light at first, and I was

wondering why the damn thing wouldn't burn, forgetting I was holding a lit

lighter in the hand that was also holding accelerant. Eventually I lit it, and