Terry

On Sunday a man came to Terry’s house.  His visit wasn’t unprovoked, or unexpected.  More so, there was nothing Terry could do about it.  Anything Terry did would just give the man’s coming more urgency.  Terry had been sitting in the sofa, arms stretched over the arms, back straight upright against the back.  He had watched as the owner of the house, a tall middle-aged brunette named Louise, pressed the phone against her frizzed hair, staring straight at Terry with her weary, worried eyes.  “It’s gotten worse.  I…I don’t feel safe any…yes…yes, that’s fine…as soon as possible, please…oh, thank you. Thank you.”

Mere days after the call, the man arrived.  He and the woman had made arrangements for the man to stay in the house for a week, during which time Louise would stay at a cousin’s house.  The man had with him a crew as well.  Terry stood by the wall and watched them bring in equipment: laptops, bundles of cable, cameras of all sorts, various other devices too.  They set up computers in the kitchen, and by the time they were finished there were cables and wires running through each room of the house.  There was a camera for almost every corner.  Terry stood, and the men walked by him without a passing glance, moving through him as he passed along through the kitchen, into the hallway, into the living room.  He stood before a camera as they set it up on a tripod.  It looked very expensive, top-of-the-line.  Terry tried to touch it, but it was too difficult.  Instead he put his arm back down and continued to stand, going unnoticed still.

Terry had lived in the house for decades.  He and his wife had lived there.  He and his wife, until his wife had a tragic, fatal accident with a truck while out on a walk.  The truck was going much too fast, and her death warranted the town borough to put up a restriction on trucks driving through the backstreets at all.  Her body was cremated, and left as an urn on the mantelpiece that later served as the living room’s main decor, around which the coffee table and sofas and chairs were now placed.  The rooms of the house had been changed since Terry lived there with his wife, furniture rearranged and finally replaced when it got too old.  The urn was gone now, in its place a gaudy, plastic vase containing fake yellow flowers.  Terry stood staring at this vase, in the place where his wife’s urn once stood.  He never got to spread his wife’s ashes.  He had still been going through the feeling of his wife’s presence, and just couldn’t part with her at the time.  Terry tried to see the urn again, but the plastic vase was in the way.  It was all he saw there.  He strode silently over to the obstruction; with a surge of energy through himself and a chill in the air, he lifted it up and threw it with all his might at the opposing wall.  The men in the room jumped and yelled at the event, one man darting out of the room.

“Yo, man!”
“What was that?”
“Fuckin’ crazy, man.  Jesus!”

Terry, calm again, looked at the spot once more.  There his wife’s urn stood, just as he remembered it.  He gazed at it lovingly, again standing still in the room.  The chill vanished.

“Man, lady was right.  Crazy shit goin’ down in here.”

(to be continued)