It had always been 3:00 pm for Eddie ever since he moved to this planet. Eddie walked straight along the equator, exactly as fast as the little planet rotates, in the opposite direction. He walked through bazaars made of orange tents bustling with the old lady’s bargaining shrieks and the butcher’s crisp chop down a pig thigh and chicken bicker and fluster and the roaring fire of wok fry, through a pair of teenage lovers as they were about to make out, through immaculate dining halls and even on top of the century old tables in them, trudging through garbled roast lamb drowsed in Syrah and splashing over dainty bowls of clam chowder.

He walked to sing, he walked to think. Frail and always slightly hunched, one hand on his knocking cane, the other tucked behind his back. He liked to sing lines from Wagner’s opera, so out of tune that people would politely blast Spice Girls songs or get their Chihuahuas to bark.

He walked to sleep, he walked to dream – if you ever heard snoring, you’d be pretty sure that it was Eddie’s. He walked to talk. Barefooted little kids in their hand-me-down tank tops and shorts would swarm after him as he told stories. Well, they couldn’t actually hear the whole story, only caught bits here and there the way they slap onto their palms dandelions drifting in the wind. After a while they’d be tired from running to keep up with his splayed gait, and the older kids would piggyback the younger ones. But one by one the children would bend over by the road, panting over their knees, angry at their powerless little limbs to have missed the stories. They would rub the sweat off their sunburnt cheeks, and squint at Eddie’s slanted silhouette as it shrunk and shrunk and evaporated in the horizon.

And so eventually the people of the little planet named that little equator trail after Eddie. Every 3:00pm, you would sure hear the staccato of his cane. Little kids would wait along it, sucking flavoured ice cubes or napping on the shoulders of their sisters, waiting for his stories or giggling as he snored past.

But one day, Eddie’s spot was empty. The kids squinted, waiting for Eddie’s head to poke out of the horizon. A Chihuahua barked tentatively. They stared at the gigantic maroon clock glittering by the train station. 3:02pm. 3:34pm. 5:00pm. Still no echo of his cane. One by one, the children stumbled along the direction of the rotating planet. At first they were skipping. Then they started to run, faster and faster into the night.

In the darkness they saw him, pastel in the smoggy sighs of city lights. He was sitting on a big rock, leaning into his cane. The kids slowed their pace, and silently sat around him, waiting to finally hear his stories. Accustomed to seeing his back as they would try to catch up to him, they were a bit surprised to see his face, bushy brows and a bushy beard. His eyes were closed, and he wasn’t snoring, nor talking, nor singing.

After a while, a kid sneezed. Most of the little guys had fallen asleep amidst the flitter and chatter of night creatures. One of the older girls stood up to poke at Eddie’s big, callused hand, and realized that he had frozen into a stone statue.

Daddy liked his bedroom minimalistic. A lamp tucked away in a corner, really not doing much in this windowless basement. Maple charcoal floor, empty except for a closet and his bed. White walls, no picture, no poster, no mirror, like a blank stare.

I stood by the doorway, looking at the strings of smoke squiggling shadows on the wall.

The smoke made me cough.

Sweetie, go play, said Daddy. He wasn’t in my view, but from his voice I figured he was probably sitting on his twin-sized bed, the bedding as blank as the walls.

I couldn’t see where the smoke originated from. She sat in front of it, cross legged, her back facing me, her tangled burgundy hair as tortuous as the smoke, splashing all over her black leather jacket. 

                                                 —-

Perhaps an artist had spilled her cheap wine on the canvas. An accident, a flurry of foliage deep into the fall that buried a summer full of footprints, your clarinet might get lost in it.

That was the first and last time I saw my Mother.

Sweetie, go to the playground.

Every once a while, the artist would spill her wine, and snow would dissolve into spring and then it would be summer and within a blink of a second it would be fall. And soon the world would be covered in burgundy, the way the volcanic ashes covered the people in Pompeii while they were still mid sentence, shrouding the rest of their words into mystery. And then the snow would blanket the burgundy, an expressionless canvas, waiting for the next splash.

And I would find myself in a coffee shop, or a stuffy Greyhound bus, or lining up with my grandson at McDonald’s, staring at the burgundy in front of me, waiting for her to turn around.

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Her fingers rested on the edge of the poster, around the middle. She ripped it, like unveiling something. She crumbled the poster and threw it at the little bon fire, not even looking, the way you fling an apple core into the waste basket. Flames licked parts of the poster into darkness. The discarded poster revealed a blank spot in the wall, naked amongst the mosaic of photos and posters. She went for the next poster.

Sweetie, go, said Daddy.

Before we moved Daddy’s bedroom had a little window, and he would sit on the window sill, his feet dangling onto his twin-sized bed, staring at the window. I’m not sure what he was looking at, maybe the glaze of his reflection, maybe the dumpster outside. Maybe that was what he was doing, sitting on his bed with his feet dangling onto the floor, looking at the bare walls, an empty stage except for the crawling scribbles of leftover tape.

She sat cross-legged, her back facing me, a raging burgundy. Immortalized scenes of sepia evaporated in the dancing smoke.

                                                     —-

Every now and then I’d crawl through the dark tunnels of my memory vault, a headlamp on my helmet. Maybe a snapshot of her would be buried somewhere, unfiled, untitled. Maybe I had kept my memory as minimalistic as Daddy’s bedroom, so if you stumbled in, all you could see would be the blank stare of the blank walls.

Faces, one of which might be my Mother’s. Expressionless in front of a bare wall. I shook my head at each one, and started to cry.

Let’s not do this anymore, this is too much for her. One of the police women put the photos away and gave me a lollipop, maybe strawberry.

I stood by the doorway, trying not to cough. An arabesque of smoke, dotted with little black specs, like dust glittering in the morning sun. Legs crossed, back straight, as if she were warming up for ballet.

 
[short short story]