Everywhere, Nowhere,
By: Edd Jennings
Tags: Action, Adventure, Fiction, Guns, Short Story

This is fiction, sort of. My lawyers recommend the term. Other than that, it’s ordinary life: a few shootings, a beautiful woman passing through. It has chronology, I suppose, but start, stop, backtrack, where you like. One moment makes as much sense as any does, as much as life ever does.

Chill air from the opening door touched my face. Tight leather from head to toe encased the figure, who stopped just inside the closed door to survey the room before making that final commitment to stay. A helmet with a darkened visor hid the face.

If I was in town in hopes of seeing something that might spur my imagination, this was it. My first thought of this small man was that he reminded me of a knight of old, or as easily a futuristic science fiction character. My second thought was, who rides a motorcycle in this kind of weather? I had no use for frivolities like motorcycles but recognized the hardness this represented and how it placed a man outside the common order.

Satisfied with the room, or so I imagined, as it was mid-afternoon, and I was the only other patron in the diner, the figure removed the helmet. Thick, curly dark hair tumbled out.

My breath caught; a woman, an arresting presence, who, if much past forty, wore it with lithe physical confidence. Dressed for the road, no makeup, no jewelry adorned or framed the face that scanned the room.

Few read a strange room that hard. When they do, there’s a reason. A tightly constrained energy did more for her than any of the more usual feminine frills. Coiled, ready to explode into movement, into emotion, was my read.

I rated barely a glance from her. And well she shouldn’t. I had long learned to drop into the background in the camouflage of the impoverished working man past his best years. When had that become less camouflage and more actuality?

Most of the time, I would have ordered something bland and quick like hamburgers and cheap flash frozen French fries. Because by the time I sat down I had already recognized the error in the hope I could take pleasure from a place tainted by its constant traffic in humanity. This time I ordered spaghetti, a salad, things that would take longer. I wanted to linger in this room with this woman and imagine how I might engineer what I would absolutely never allow to happen, a conversation that strayed deeper than the commonest and quickest exchange of courtesy, just enough to pick up something in the pattern of her speech, the lilt or lack of lilt in her voice, the images necessary to solidify her in my mind for a few of those cold, late winter nights to come.

God, the way she moved: assured, the dancer, the actress, the one who had known center-stage, and had never forgotten the feeling, a world away from the old man lurch I affected for town.

With her back to the wall in the corner of the booth on the other side of the narrow room, were I to give her more than the barest of glances, I would soon make my presence obtrusive. To ease my need, I used her reflection in the mirror near the entrance. I had no right to watch her like this, and the mirror itself might prove too much. How she might know I didn’t look out the window beside it, I couldn’t quite articulate. Some few were like that, sensing interest from a long history of being watched, a beautiful woman as likely to feel this as the hunted.

Nobody ever watched me, a freedom unappreciated until it was lost. When I itched, I clawed into what itched, my day one ugly unfortunate gesture piled onto the next. A woman, who had known the eyes of every passing stranger, would never dare to this kind of freedom.

Coffee in front of her, her hands cradled around the cheap ceramic, her head bowed, as if in an act of prayer, or some kind of gratitude for the bounty. Large tears surprised me. They dropped, noiseless, mingling with the steam caressing the face bent over the hot cup.

Something unleashed inside me. I didn’t know I could still respond to another person’s pain, an unwelcome realization.

When she picked up the coffee, her hands shook so violently much of it spilled. Scalding liquid on bare skin elicited almost no reaction. She only set the cup down with the most desultory of motions, and wiped her hands with a paper napkin. Pain meant little to her.

The waitress rushed over to wipe it up. “Honey, that’s okay. There’s plenty.”

“Plenty is good.” Her voice had the feel of being brought back from the long ago and the far away, gracing these stained walls with an elegant timbre they hadn’t earned. If the skinny, over-aged, used mountain girl of a waitress meant to offer comfort, the woman waved it off with an authoritative, “Thank you.”

The waitress scuttled back to the kitchen.

I kept telling myself to look away. I had no right to this. As a fellow human being, I owed her more. I owed her the dignity of privacy. Any empathy, any desire, I might muster meant nothing to her. She only wanted to be left alone. To my shame, I failed. I’m ashamed of few things. Most of what I ought to be ashamed of, I laugh at as another twisted joke. There was nothing good or noble or special in the emotions this woman drew from me. Had the gap-toothed waitress been run over by a truck in the parking lot, I might have looked to see if she had scratched the paint on the truck that hit her. The same raw presence mesmerized me that would mesmerize any other man from the lowest to the highest. When the right woman walks into the room, your life has meaning. Before, after, it’s ashes.

If I might reflect on the chance image of this woman for years, who or what she really was, or why, was none of my business. Every story didn’t come to a complete circle out in the light where I could see it. I had no right to ask that every arc I pulled from the shadows be completed before my eyes into the purity of the full circle.

She refused to touch the fresh tears running down her cheeks, the way another woman might in the presence of anyone who mattered. No sound emitted; she cried in silence like a hurt animal in hiding. Just the dead stare into the window. I’d seen that dead stare too many times, in veterans, a few seasoned policemen, some few wilderness men, rarely in a woman. It spoke of those apart, the untouchable reserve. The depth of those eyes pulled me into her like a vortex. Perhaps the mirror lessened their power? Would I dare look into them if I had an invitation? Would I ever escape once I had looked?