A Short Story
No AI was used in crafting this piece.
I
A dull landline phone with grimey hand-prints on it rings twice before Robert Oregon answers.
He speaks calmly, staring straight ahead, his matter-of-fact tonality and vacant gaze looking like an auditioned aloofness, but no – Robert was simply the sober type.
His wrinkled frown lines furrow and his gaze hitches like his eyelids are giving out as he places the phone back on the receiver, and again his piercing stare softens at something undetectable off in the distance. He looks right past, through the muck and the build up, as if something lies hidden underneath his breakfast table that he can somehow see underneath.
It had been his mother on the phone.
She had phoned to tell him that her brother was dying, and that she did not know how much longer he would have left, then she offered him time to go by and see him as if some great opportunity.
Despite Robert’s frontier name, he had never settled moving past the plains, his birth place.
As he shuffled into his two-door, faded jade Japanese-engineered vehicle, the key turned inside of it and it puttered to life as he swung the door shut, resigning himself to his fate.
Oregon was a man in his forties – forty-one to be exact, and rarely did he consider the fateful passage of time to be some cruel mistress. Instead, his countenance was to face it with the smallest amount of resistance like the ancient Stoics from Greece.
Robert, however, would have been much less keen to lay out his philosophies.
Instead, as the days spun and spun, the hair on the back of his head had begun to grow thin, and he developed a habit of running his thumb, nail side back across the seam of his hairline, wiping across the sweat.
If his life was dulling to a grinding halt, he would at least not be one to get overly wrapped up in the vicissitudes of its wear – he had made it his way to keep trudging on, albeit with some uncanny, disassociated resolve.
His car, aging in its own sense of miles-counted now sputtered at its stopping point, in front of a castle-like facade, the kind emblematic of the haunting ornamentation that used to permeate old architecture, imbuing it with a timeless geist. This was the house of his brother-in-law, a man who, by all appearances, knew exactly how to live in a way that portrayed it was above his means.
He was delicate with shutting the door behind him, moving in a way characteristic of his neutered gait which never left him, despite him being, at times, in better spirits.
II
His eye never focused, but yet shot towards the building facade entrance, and he lifted, one foot mechanically after the other as if some outside force were propelling him towards the entrance.
When he got to the door, he did not hesitate before he knocked, and then tried to remain silent so he could detect any movement on the other side.
The door opened to his bald, circular-eye-glassed brother-in-law Theodore, who had the facial characteristic set of a Keebler elf, including the strange, beckoning warmth from behind the eyes, and Robert was welcomed inside.
It was overcast, and so the light which forced its way through Theodore’s mostly-drawn window coverings was of a low-quality and gave the entire ambience a strained quality that it seemed Theodore might grow accustomed to living against for the entirety of his existence – that could be the only reason he would have allowed it to permeate against his drab belongings in this way.
While his dwelling possessed an impressive exterior for those who did not know the man closely, the inside was uncharacteristically dull, boring, and with an arrangement that encouraged a man to walk aimlessly about, from project to project, a sense of unease building as they attempted to muddle through their activities.
Theodore also possessed the unfortunate propensity to keep dull, mind-numbing programming pumping through his television, casting dancing, lame appearances across his unimpressive sets of furniture, and nothing seemed to match. The scent was unusually as if the man had been burning incense, although that would have seemed out of place, and so Robert simply left that particular unknown fact unaccounted for.
When the men sat, it was clear that Robert wanted something from Theodore, although the men decided the play the friendly participation game where the core issues are sidesteps and fake fronts are first presented, and then used to engage in pretend emotional postures.
Theodore was in his sixties, and was alone at least for this moment, and the extenuating circumstances were not privy to cloud Robert’s judgements.
“A nice plot of land,” croaked Robert, while Theodore could only look on in a grimace. Theodore stared indiscriminately at Robert’s protruding lower teeth, becoming a point of fixation, like a primary, core identifier one affixes early on when getting to know a new pet. Robert sat licking his lips before, as if realizing his own uncouthness, stopped, staring on, blankly as usual.
Theodore was keen to playing these sorts of games, and concealed his true emotions in a smile that was easy to dissipate, although, not so for a denseness the likes of Robert’s. Of the two, it was Theodore who would have fared more as a politician should one of the two men had ever wound up on such a ridiculous path of substance.
But yet, as per routine, Robert went soft again behind the eyes, drawing even a sort of pathetic pity out of the man sitting across from him.
“But it still needs lots of working to be done,” Theodore said like a southern-fried lawyer of old farm land disputes, then he smiled as if he were to start clucking like a hen.
A man seemingly apart from a product of his environment, Theodore, despite his drab surroundings radiated his warmth, palpable to the poor Robert, who, believing the two had made a deal returned licking his mouth like a child who had become unaware of their facial motions.
“That’s all I ask,” assured Robert, and he was on his way, nothing as of yet to show of this exchange.
When he began to part from his brother-in-law, he clasped him by his upper arm with one hand while he shook his hand with his other, a sign that some sort of business arrangement had taken place, although it was some pale visage which Robert was summoning, calling upon some distant strength which was not his own, and which he had no claim to.
Theodore, smiling his politician smile beamed back, and, loosening his grip, Robert sulked away down the short flight of concrete steps leading to Theodore’s castle.
He did not turn around again, simply moved unassumingly into his unassuming car, and then, as if making as little noise or commotion as possible, started the thing up, and then pulled out into the lane.
Robert made it to the small urgent-care facility that had the capabilities of functioning as a hospital in certain cases, such as if a patient died.
Their parking lot was small, and so Robert was able to swing into a nearby spot in a paired-off set next to a gritty-looking station wagon clearly lacking the proper amount of time or attention for maintenance.
Refocused and vibrant, Robert turned the key, pulled it out, and then let the driver side door swing open as the night was barely shifting out of the evening, the day still looking extremely overcast, which certainly didn’t help his spirits.
He sat for a few moments in the driver side seat, his legs extended out so that the bottom of his worn, cheap boot treads pushed against cold earth, supporting his weight.
III
It was that odd moment of the overcast day where the entire countenance of the atmosphere can change within a matter of ten or fifteen seconds, and now there seemed to be an angry personality settling in even though the sky was blisteringly white and lacking any sort of identifying deformation.
Before long, Robert was at his feet, prying the door back closed to a thud, then refocusing his gaze with some new intensity upon the entrance of the building. Its tall, looming windows reflected the pale expanse so that it gave him a glance towards the infinite, though he was carrying on in a trance-like state so that he hardly noticed.
Had a been only slightly more perceptive, gaze cast again now earthward, Robert lurching in a signature terrorizing, villainous splay from the left to right as he moved, might have felt inspired, his westward name transcending pure happenstance into the realm of ethereal providence.
The automatic doors crept open revealing the peculiar warmth of the midwestern hospital lobby, and despite the prevalence of new age beliefs taking root and becoming more common upon those who lived in the West, Oregon was far from superstitious.
The front desk was vacant, but he knew which floor his mother was on.
Eyeing the simple gray pair of water fountains absurdly low beneath him to his left, he was now standing in front of the elevator in a unique silence that enveloped him as if, out of the four billion people alive on the planet, Robert had been selected to experience that sublime, fleeting moment of peace out of which is born clarity.
“Mother,” said Robert, his face remaining completely still even upon greeting his mother, as if two equally malevolent imps had simply crossed paths, neither more powerful than the other, and so a simple acknowledgement of identical means of evil would have to suffice.
She wrapped her hand slowly around him as if pantomiming a recovery from a horrific injury, although she was not the one who had been admitted for the hospital care.
After their embrace, they slowly reeled back in unison, and Robert saw that this would be as good a time as ever to launch into his pitch.
Justifiably aggravated, his mother, again employing dramatic flourish every time her body moved, silently motioned Robert to stop talking, to go into the patient’s room so that he could fulfill his original obligation, but Robert had not come for that to be so.
Robert had been estranged from his poor, dying uncle, and besides, he had only just received promising word from his trustworthy brother-in-law about the great news and how it would seek to shape the finality of his future – at the very least his plans for the acute immediate.
Headstrong and babbling, Robert simply would not go. He rocked his weight back and forth from boot to boot, then reached up, and, thumbnail pressed against his slimy skin, he dragged these appendages across his face in a subconscious return to ritual, perhaps, a strange habit.
His rocking was unsettling, and his staring gaze was neither comforting, since its aim seemed to always situate behind the person in front of him causing some blankness behind those eyes of his.
As pitiful a sight as it was, Robert’s mother thought it better to relinquish her campaign to bring her son in to visit with his uncle in what she thought might have reasonably been his final hours, too dramatic instead were his rambling words and the dreadful sense of unease his greasy face and bulging eyeballs caused his onlookers.
As if waking from a persistent delusion, Robert stopped in his endless tirade on his mother, fraught with aimless begging and pleading, and with the newfound calm of a saint, drew his gaze away from his mother’s eyes and towards the back hallway behind her leading to the room where his uncle lay possibly dying.
Wordless, Robert descended upon the open doorway, leaning forward in a way lacking any subtlety, dignity, or grace, especially for the infirm, peering in at the man in the occupied bed.
Before long, Robert had finished his conversation, and annoying his mother, reminded her of the spoils that lay on that sought-after plot of good land on promise from his charitable brother-in-law, but she chose not to respond to him with anything.
Instead, the sadness penetrated her eyes, a sordid sense of maternal pity which had, over the years, transformed into a glaring resentment towards her own flesh. Her eyelids instead settled, so as to say that she should pick her own battles, and that to engage her son and his whimsical flights of fancy was to punch down, so to speak.
Turning to depart from her, she only saw the prominent spot where his hair had thinned for the last decade without ceasing.
When Robert returned to his car, he looked it over in a newfound, sober perspective on the world, and then finally he cast his gaze upwards just as flecks of drizzle were beginning to land upon his crooked jowl.
He squinted, his eyes peering into the endless whiteness, daft and dumb like some inferior creature who might peer into the sky long enough to be drowned themselves by the rain.
When he returned home, he unplugged the corded phone from the wall, and, since his bags had already been packed of his significant possessions, he merely gathered them together for travel.
A section of the newspaper indicating that he could read his fortune based on the astrological alignments for his corresponding zodiac was colored in a hippie rainbow tie-dye, and mocked him as the last thing he saw when he looked down at the random pages heaped together by his old phone book. With everything packed into his vehicle, he made an intentioned return, and glancing down at the piece of paper, he crumpled it into his heaving, wet fist.
Unsure of how to properly harness passion, Oregon instead resorted to various means of lashing out, to little or no end or effect, and proudly, he stared upon the crumpled rainbow he created upon the pile like a young sociopath bully who had trained his ire upon the innocent and defenseless in desperate measures of self-reassurance.
Now that his mom and his closest living relative should find themselves obscured in his pointless inquiries, his aimless attendance, and his feigned desire to purchase and settle into a property relegated to his own family, Robert peered again proudly at this crumpled piece of paper.
Globules of saliva erupted from Robert’s jaws as he spoke.
“I make my own destiny,” he proclaimed, still staring at the horoscope.