Spring 2015
and to the plans of the day. Isaac Stritch throws all his attention on the rock. He has had ample
opportunity for intimate and up-close observation of the thing itself. On the thing. Its shape. Its texture.
Its color. Strangely, its weight he cares little about. No, the rock’s very being consumes him as surely
as it lays him in like another brick in a wall. For all he knows here he will remain. His known world
now and forever.
Again, he hears the faintness of the piano. And it’s Patricia’s piano, isn’t it? There’s no mistaking
it. She was a music student at that university when he was a graduate student. He first saw her walking
across the campus one bright morning and then again later that same day while sitting and eating lunch
under a statue in a grassy area surrounded by newly manicured boxwood and then the same time the
next day and was he going out of his way to catch sight of her? and had he been actively looking for
her? and was he drawn out of purely base and sexual instincts? Patricia would only chide him on
presenting theirs as anything other than a chemical relationship. Whatever you’d like to believe, dear.
However . . . He admits as much now, pinned down and trapped. There. There it is. Might as well be
honest about it. He followed the sway of her hips and the assuredness of her legs and the gold of her
hair in the light breeze that always played around her head and eventually followed her into the music
building of that university and on through the labyrinthic halls -- excited even as it was happening, as
if in a chase, a pursuit – and down the stairs and then up a half stair to a narrow hall where she
disappeared behind one of maybe a thousand doors (could it have really been a thousand doors?), all
with little windows ike pleasant amiable cells. Practice rooms. He systematically peeked in each one,
up one side and down the other, until he found her. Her back was to him but her gold hair was
unmistakable as she sat at the piano with beautiful sounds coming from her fingers. He slid down on
the floor of the hall with his back to the wall — much like now but then of his own will — and it was
like a kind of surrender with only the sound of her playing holding him there.
He supposes this is dusk now. Inside him there is a clicking which he first mistakes for a clock.
Several clickings. Then he realizes it is his breathing. It occurs to him that his lungs are filling up with
all manner of fluid and somehow this fluid is seawater and for some reason seawater makes perfect
sense and that sense is that he is dying. He tries to call out but it will just not come and his cough will
not come and, worse, he finds he cannot grasp which words to call out. What are the words? What are
the words one uses in this situation? Help is the obvious choice but that doesn’t seem right, a simple
word with one possible spelling but sounding strange and foreign to him now. What is the right word?
Then it occurs to him that he’s hallucinating, drifting in and out here on the ground squashed like a
pill bug and hidden between the layers of stone, hallucinating and grasping for the correct word. He
is aware of the Nature Conservatory beyond the tall fence and of the gravel trail winding down through
gardens to the river and of the scuffing shoes. And of Missy Misamore passing on that trail. Walking
there even now. At this moment. She would be an older woman now (although she still tries to look
young and cheery), out for an evening stroll with her husband (whichever number he is), wearing a
purple velour jogging suit (expansive), with her hair up (dyed to the appropriate shade). Missy Misamore.
Enough.
“Hello!” He tries to rasp. Not Help but something more amiable, something less scowling, not as
full of the vitriol of the years. “Hello!”
Oh, Professor Stritch! You always look so angry! The voice bubbles through a knothole.
The sun has set completely now and it is nearly dark and he can feel his body grow colder. If the
neighbors’ lights have come on he cannot move his head far enough in either direction to see. Only
the narrow shoot up the steep slope to his own house is visible. His and Patricia’s house. The back
The Linnet's Wings