Caughtbetwe enarockanda heartattack

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Hey, Cameron. You realize if we played by the rules right now we’d be in gym?

That moment when you accidentally spent Ferris Bueller’s 50th Birthday doing everything good in Chicago.

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Confession:

I run every day so that I can eat candy every day.

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Seventeen Reasons Against : Part II

Margot’s last words were: “That’s alright.”  She had spoken them two hours before her death, to a man named Byron Grant, who had regretfully informed her that he was out of hot fudge, and that he could only substitute chocolate syrup on her sundae.

A short, plain woman with a sour expression opened the door.  She had on rubber gloves, and a gust of wood polish washed out into the hallway when she welcomed the two inside. 

The apartment grew unevenly out of a semicircular foyer with doors to a coat closet, a kitchen, and a hall.  It was not the unit’s original floorplan, but had been renovated, under special permission by the building’s owners, by an avant-garde architect in the fall of 1974, during construction on the adjoining unit.  Its renovation received a small amount of press, and was critically panned, for a large amount of unused space between the walls, especially those near to the foyer’s curved architecture.  The architect himself held the property’s lease, while living abroad.  In 1988, he died of a heart attack, and willed the property to the Municipal Art Society of New York, which, seeing no architectural history to preserve, promptly consigned it back to the building’s owners for leasing.

“Mister Moore is in his study,” she opened her hand toward the hall before excusing herself to the kitchen.  The two nodded and Theodore let out a lazy yawn.  There was a small nick in the molding surrounding the hall door.  In 1996, the unit’s then tenant was a young woman named Sarah Root.  She, after a research trip to southern India, suffered psychosis due to an undiagnosed anti-malarial doxycycline allergy.  During a particularly lucid attack, she moved her dinette, and its four chairs from the kitchen to her bedroom.  While carrying an antique lamp through the hall, she snapped its cord and fell, cracking the lamp’s porcelain body against the doorframe, and suddenly woke.

Aldo did not know this story, and had, in fact, never noticed the mark.

Fara entered the room first, trailing the big man and his dog.  A smile only bumped across Aldo’s face, aborting as the stranger filled the room.

“This is-“

“Edward Stoney, Esquire.”  He pushed toward the man, stomping across burgundy wood.  “I’m torn up to hear about your situation.”  Theodore was set on the ground and Edward punched a big, stubby hand toward Aldo.  The dog padded a small circled and splayed itself like a rug at the entrance to the master bedroom.  Aldo sent a small cringe toward the animal, and took its owner’s hand appropriately.

Her lips pulled thin, she not knowing what emotion to adopt.  Fara was acting under two assumptions: that Edward Stoney was somehow that of Burnham, Stoney and Davis, LLC, and that, upon hearing this explanation, Aldo would entirely understand the intrusion.  Edward Stoney had, in fact, been estranged from the named partner for a number of years, after a managerial restructuring following their father’s death.  For his part, the man had been a contributing player in a number of high profile cases over his years with the firm.  Fara had written her undergrad exit dissertation on one of these cases: 1988’s Rochester Enterprises vs. State of New York.

“That’s kind of you to say, Mister Stoney.  Is there something I can do for you?”  Aldo looked somewhere between green and white at that moment, unable to look away from the dog.

“I simply wanted to express my condolences.”  He pulled from the handshake and shifted his weight.  “I had left a call with your machine.”

Fara spoke: “I’m sorry, I had been taking care of his messages and must not have, you know, passed it along.”

“If there are any questions, legal questions, that you may have, please let me know.”  He pulled a card from a spring-loaded gold holster, it was a beautiful off-white satin with black slab lettering.

“Of course.”  It sounded genuine.  “Would you like to join us for lunch?”

“I couldn’t.”  He scooped Theodore back up. 

Aldo rose slowly, the breadth of his ailment remained hidden, but peeked through the cracks of a gaunt slow-ness, and a yellowing of the skin under his eyes.  “I’ll see you out.”  Fara paled visibly at the sight, reading and re-reading the man’s card instead.  In the foyer, the smell of strong coffee saturated the air.  A drumroll of roasting beans bounced off of and through the walls.

“Good luck, Mister Moore.”  He took the girl’s hand.  “Miss Yazin.”  They returned their own variety of goodbyes and the door shut decidedly behind him.  Silence drew up all around them.  There were three photographs on a small end table next to the coat closet.  One showed two young boys, Aldo and his brother, standing in front of the Eiffel Tower.  The second was of the boys’ parents, sharply suited, at a gala event with the late Ronald Reagan. 

The third, which Fara was, then, staring at with a piercing intensity, was too small for its frame, and depicted, in black and white, a man wearing a clean moustache and a black slouch hat.  Behind him was the crisp white façades of the Chicago World’s Fair.  This was Alfonz Aldo Moore, who went by A.A. Moore, and was Aldo’s great-grandfather.  He was a partner at a then-prominent New York bank, and spent three weeks in Chicago in 1893.  His wife, a socialite, did not join him, as she was particularly afraid of train travel, and was preoccupied with the couple’s newborn son.  The photograph arrived at their New York home on a Monday.  That night, a riot was ignited in the local tavern district.  It claimed eleven lives, including A.A. Moore.

“I don’t have much of an appetite.”

“You would have done the same, you know.”

“That man has left me six messages.  He’s a degenerate.”

“Burnham, Stoney and Davis is the reason that Margot and I-“ she moved then to a sort of melancholy.  “It was an absolute intrusion, you know?  It was a mistake.”

He frowned.  “I really don’t have an appetite.  Why don’t we take some coffee and have a walk?”  He met her eyes warmly.  “We’ll get ice cream.  This weather will be gone before were even know it.”

She nodded back, a stray curl falling into her eyes.  He found himself transfixed by it.

Tags: /rebar

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Wednesday the Eleventh

(This is not a part of Rebar, despite using its characters.)

A canker throbbed in a dull kind of way inside of her lip, and she chewed at it and poked around it with her tongue out of habit, out of boredom. Steaming milk kept up a steady hiss and espresso popped and fizzled in steel and ceramic machinery. A regimented line of flavored syrups stared vacantly at her, and she let her gaze trace the sloped shoulders of a ragged-edged post-grad with a nagging cough. Kick-drum staccato came from a steam wand, pulled from its leisurely sinkwater soak.

Somewhere far below it all, a corporate-assigned soundtrack faded one song into another.

Nine o’clock had found her still in bed, splashed as a puddle of tuck-under and folded-over fabric. Splayed as a coalition of arms and legs. Scribbled as a stick-figure fetus. Morning sun, grayed and dirtied by the snow, the fog, the city, crept in and bounced off of the mirror and glass across the street, only its facsimile ever reaching through a westward-facing window. A vinyl marquis-of-Queensbury of half-drawn and wrapped-over blinds painted shadowed bars through the room. A slow leak of traffic noise and catcalling construction workers seeped in through the glass.

At that moment, an amalgamation of the quieter things got in, as well: two cars arguing, doors opening and closing, newspapers folding and unfolding, coffee spilling into the street.

Outside of the thick blankets, a deep burgundy honeycomb pattern, the room was frigid. Sheets had been wrapped and kicked off to the side. One skinny swizzle of an arm pulled itself from under a pillow. The other was lost, bent under her, and lacking circulation – pins and needles already racing one another up and down its length. Awake hit her slowly, eyes opening thin, then wide, then blinking shut a few times and landing at a tired kind of half-open-half-closed haze. They oozed a mossy green, hidden behind a matted-down mess of red hair. Red hair like forest fires and racecars and rock and roll. Red like the end of the whole damn world.

It was a Saturday, or Sunday, or Wednesday. She glanced toward the clock, it blinking midnight or noon, and pulled the hidden arm up, moving her fingers and feeling a sleepy tingle itch to her shoulder and back. Both elbows bent and landed on the bed; she leaned onto them, letting the blanket fall to her stomach. Her hair was bent upward and curled to one side, plastered sideway and stuck together from yesterday’s product and sleep-borne sweat.

The world swelled and contracted to size, and she leaned toward a pair of Wayfarers. She let out a dry cough and pulled the blanket back up, shivering. After a silent moment, she tossed the it aside and rolled off of the bed, feet landing and toes stretching out onto the carpet. She reached nowhere in particular, then twisted her back with a considerable grace and ran a hand across her forehead, frowning at an indistinct dampness.

Six stories down, a man stumbled over a sewer grate and dropped his coffee.

She blinked floaters and fuzz from her vision, and the post-grad had disappeared. “Americano, please.” Her voice was cicadas negotiating violin string tightropes.

It was, by then, very late morning, and an air of nowhere-to-be hung thick in the coffee house. Plush chairs held hipsters and hedonists posturing themselves around their frothed mugs. Planting herself near a window, she pulled a messenger bag over her head, dragging it along the floor, opening it, pulling an accordion file with “Property: Burnham, Stoney & Davis, LLC” scribbled in blue Sharpie across its front. It matched the small ribbon Edward Stoney, black-sheep brother of the named associate had instructed she pin to her coat’s lapel.

Tags: /notRebar