October 10th, 2009 | |
Posted in Stories
by Dave Proctor
The streets are bare. He can feel gravel in his shoes.
His phone bill, blam! His job, his suspended drivers license, blam! Be-bop! Those thoughts don’t matter, not anymore but they still work their way deep into his brain like gloved fingers, wiggling.
A reverberating recording of some solo jazz master pounds away, an empty concert hall shouts from darkened windows and lamp posts, crescendos pull at his chest bones, and the off-notes come as he tries to skip over cracks in the sidewalks, side-stepping, almost dancing, tight-rope walking the curb to the now loose, fluid, jazz, the jazz in his headphones.
At another intersection he looks left and looks right, no one here either, apparently, and he checks the time. 12:02 at night.
Too early for the streets to be this empty; his suspicions must be right: he must be the Last Man On Earth. He is Vincent Price, raking the streets for zombie bodies, trying clean up this town!
Or he could be The Omega Man.
A tickling piano line covers up what was moments ago a thunderous smashing of seemingly arbitrary keys and he pulls out his phone again. 12:04. But he doesn’t really read the time, just stares at the numbers and folds it back into his pocket.
If there were cars he would feel so jealous and alone, walking in the middle of the road. Jealous that he has to walk now. But there isn’t, so he kicks his feet through the air and tiptoes to the only sounds in the world, the jazz in his headphones.
The sleek flip phone appears again, and he says out loud: “Twelve oh four,” and the memory of having just looked at the time breaks over him like a wave, and he wishes he was out with friends, out with somebody, drinks in a bar. Maybe. The piano hits him, hard, crashing on the little bones of his ear.
He pulls an ear bud out and scratches at the cast on his arm. Wondering why no one’s called. He could be the Last Man on Earth. It could happen to anybody.
He can hear his jeans rub. They whisper at him and he stops to just listen for a moment.
He hears nothing. No cars. Only the sound of his flip-phone flipping. 12:05. He sends another mass text. “What’s goin’ on tonight?” Same question and he hopes for a response. But he won’t get one, so he puts his headphones back on; for now he’s the jazz master drowning out his solitude, playing air piano with one broken arm.
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fiction 