The street, loud with traffic and wind, was respite to Isak, the noise proceeding through his blond skull, rattling from his mind the fading echoes of the coldness of his girlfriend’s parting words. The gray sidewalk passed steadily beneath his feet, growing darker until the street lights came on, then a bit lighter and brown. Rarely did his eyes rise from that surface.
© Randy Heffner
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I should head off any assumption that it was precisely her words that echoed. Rather, Isak had analyzed and distilled her words to a phrase: "Don't call again." He always said he wanted "the bottom line, cleansed of fluff and sentiment." Yet this time he failed to consider that terse notes echo louder and clearer, and the phrase, crisp and direct, thus made all the more disturbance for him. I'm sure Isak would later realize this error and, on future occasions, employ alternate analytic methods, but as it was, to suppress the nuisance of the echoes, he seized upon the rhythm of the sidewalk's undulating tones: black in the holes between the lamp posts, then gray…brown…light and severe…brown…gray…and black again, back to the start.
At length, he grew tired. He had wandered out of central Stockholm into a street-corner park, taking his place on one of the worn wooden benches lining a broad, gravel pathway. Stillness allowed space for the echoes to return. He had chosen a seat in the shadows, but a lamp post tried to reach him even so. It threw its light against the small stones, who gladly shattered it into a thousand distinct rays. Still, only the shadows in between were allowed past Isak's retinas.
Was the coldness due him? The question, like the rejected gray light from the gravel, angled for an entry point, but was also turned away.
I knew Isak before all this. He was fun to be around, no doubt, with always a turn of phrase or a spot of satire to lighten any moment. Quite down to earth, too. I mean, straightforward and practical. "Make your plans and do them," he would say, "dreams are but ether in the sky." She was also fun to be around…no, "fun" isn't the word. Perhaps "enjoyable" or "satisfying" — I don't know the word. You were enriched in her presence, connected to deeper streams of life. I once saw a boat on the harbor. Just a boat, I thought — one sees so many of them — until I looked back and saw how her gaze was intent and intense, and locked. "Probably five generations of fishing," she said. That was all, but when I looked back, I saw in the boat a new depth of color. I noticed its age, and saw the young boy
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The question that got in was why would she be leaving? How could laughter and pragmatism be off? Logic, data, parody…these are but the tools of modern life.
The wind began to bite, and he stood again. Walking away from the bench, his head brushed the thick trees that, looking down, he hadn't seen. As he came into the wide path between the trees, he glanced up to note their height. Northern lights danced green and blue, pink and yellow, orange and violet. Isak thought about the sun and charged particles, oxygen, nitrogen, and the low probability of this occurring so far south.
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Original version published 26 Jan 2020.
by Randy Heffner
Randy lives at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and culture — reading, watching, walking, and sometimes creating in search of our better selves. Film and photography have a lot to do with it, but anyway, art. The tie is an anomaly.