In Here, Out There
A modern romance for the ages, if only one person would get out of the way.
Author’s Note:
This piece is an excerpt of an experimental novel in progress. It is not conventional and may be disorienting, but it is a look at the reader’s psychology and how it shifts from one moment to the next and whether the expected becomes the unexpected when reality is more unusual than the fiction being written.
Story:
Alan Duocott considered the many ways he would propose as he navigated the gift shop adjacent to the jewelry store he left three minutes ago. One display case contained personalized laser engraved glassware to suit any occasion. Another had hand crafted trinkets, from miniature ceramic swans, to a hand-knitted young couple sitting together on a bench, with arms around each other, gazing into each other’s eyes.
Nothing that he came across would be suitable for Penelopy “Penny” Kensington. Jewelry was too ornate, trinkets would seem garish, flowers lacked longevity, and Alan was out of ideas. The woman at the counter interrupted his thoughts, “Anything I can help you with, sir?”
Alan, never one to tip his hand to a salesperson, turned to face the woman with auburn neck-length hair curls. He took half a second to read her nametag. “Well, Tammy, I’m looking for something unique, yet understated, but it should also have an air of mystique and sentimentality about it. You wouldn’t happen to have something of that sort, would you?” He tilted his head down and met her light grey eyes above the rim of his glasses.
Tammy had a southern smile, welcoming and disarming at the same time. The type where the corners of her smile stop before they’d cause her cheeks to recede and turn upward. She placed the dust rag to the side and set a porcelain figurine of a ballerina on the aged wooden countertop. “Twenty years running this shop; I know your type, far and few, but your eyes give it away. She’s someone special ain’t she?”
Alan gave her a nod and a wink.
“Say no more. There’s been something I’ve been keeping in the cobwebs of the attic.” She made her way around the counter to the front door where she turned the latch on the lock and flipped the signage to closed. “Here, follow me ‘round back. Gonna need your tall arms to pull those attic stairs down for me.”
Alan obliged and opened the front button of his topcoat. He raised one arm and tugged the worn door string that dangled several inches above Tammy’s reach. The door opened with the rumble of wood rubbing together and a harsh clap as each step extended themselves until the platform touched the ground. Tammy began the ascent, her soft soled slippers squishing underneath her with each step. “I’ll be right back.” Her eyes surveyed back and forth scanning, the attic, whose contents she had not seen in five years.
Alan maintained his presence near the stairs and would occasionally check in with Tammy whenever there was jostling followed by a crash or thud, “You okay, Tammy?” She’d shout back a few times, but the sound was distant and muffled. He could hear her footsteps overhead as she made her way to the stairs. In the meantime, Alan took note of the various items that appeared to come from all over the world; some even ancient he assumed. The contents in the back were a far cry from the commercialized and mass-produced items at the front of the store.
***
Wilson Schaeffer’s stomach rumbled for the fourth time in as many minutes and he rolled his chair away from the desk. He took his empty coffee cup in hand and headed towards the kitchen. “What does Temmy have for him? What if it’s…? Nah. Think Will, THINK.” he tells himself. The kitchen is lit with one yellowing bulb on the verge of burning out; it flickers when Wilson flips the switch. He makes his way to two over-the-counter cupboards. The first one has a near empty bag of potato chips that carry an echo of a salt-shaker when he bumps the bag as he rummages through.
He lifts the cereal box and gives it a jiggle---all there are a few whole pieces of raison bran rustling amongst fractured pieces and crumbs. He tilts the box to its side and hovers the small edge over the precipice of his mouth. He taps the bottom of the box a few times until everything empties into it. He shifts the cereal into his cheek and retrieves a carton of milk from the fridge. The last few tablespoons of milk drip onto his tongue and with an exasperated huff, he sets the carton down, clamps down with his molars, and begins to crunch the crumbs as it blends with the milk from the other cheek.
Once the empty carton and box are binned, Wilson opens a drawer under a countertop. He fumbles his way through a jumble of bottles until the one with the red cap rolls into view. “There you are.” He pops one in his mouth, collects tap water in his palm and lets the pill get coated with remnants of cereal still in his cheeks before swallowing. He doesn’t bother with closing the cap and just sets the bottle on the counter before heading back to his desk.
***
Tammy’s squishy shoes became louder as she approached Alan, with a small box wrapped in blue silken cloth, adorned with hand painted gold designs of ancient animals. Alan’s attention was focused on a wall mounted sword and sheath when Tammy stood beside him, “That sword is over two thousand years old. This little ornament has it beat; its from around 1350 BCE.”
Alan saw the item in the crook of her arm, like a swaddled infant or football tucked against her ribs. “Fancy. What is it?”
“Come, it’s better that I show you.” She set the box down in the center of a small square table that was as old as everything else in the back. The two stood opposite each other. She clicked a desk lamp on, which bathed the box in an orange hue. She pointed to a loose string. “Pull that, but not too hard.”
Alan homed in on Tammy’s slender and youthful hands. The taut skin, the decorative wooden beads, strung together as a bracelet that tapped against each other each time her wrist moved. By her face, he would have guessed she was early fifties or late forties, but her hand told a different story. “That’s a nice bracelet. Was it a gift or…”
“My husband was a Woodsmith. This is made from butternut scraps from the first carving that he sold.” She lifted her wrist and spun the wooden rounds and decorative blocks. They had small etching that glistened under the clearcoat wood sealant. “This one has our initials; this one is the day we got married; our daughter’s birthday; her wedding day; our thirtieth anniversary. He passed five years ago”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“It’s alright, he’s right here with me.” She held her palm over her heart.
Alan pinched the end of the string and it began to unravel. He counted the seconds as a way to measure the amount of force he pulled with. Seven seconds in, the cloth was laying flat on the tabletop with the earthen box laid bare atop the silk.
Tammy put her palms on both sides of the fabric and slid it forward. “Go ahead, take a look inside.”
Alan peered into the uncovered box with a stoic expression, unsure to feign excitement or express his bewilderment. “What is it.?”
Tammy reached across the table and with her two index fingers outstretched, she went into the box and retrieved a crude necklace. She spread her fingers apart so it appeared as if it were draped around a slender neck. “This is from the Tigris valley, long before history was written. Around 1350 BCE, a famine had turned neighboring kingdoms against each other, during which time, a prince was courting a princess from a rival house. The king fell deathly ill and when the prince got word of this, he didn’t bring gold, or soldiers wielding weapons, he brought a simple and humble offering of dried fruit. It was a gesture of life preserved in the middle of death. It also saved the king’s life; in return the king bestowed his blessings. This necklace is a tribute to what the princess wore during the unification ceremony. A kingdom saved, not by steel, but a handful of dried fruit at the height of a famine.”
Alan’s throat grated as he protested, “I can’t.” He began to back away.
“Your princess doesn’t need anything when she has you, least of all the glittery things next door or the knick knacks at the front of this store, but this… I knew the moment that glitter in your eye appeared when you spoke of something unique, steeped deep in love. She will treasure this. I know.”
“I appreciate the sentiment, but this necklace is a lot to live up to and…” Alan began to have a spat of dry coughs. Unable to finish his words, he found the box wrapped in its silk cloth and placed in his palm with care.
“Come out to the front, I have some lozenges for that cough.”
***
Wilson hacked into the crux of his elbow and shut his eyes tight. He felt like they’d pop out if the coughing became worse. “Steady. breath through your nose.” His self-assurance calmed him enough that he dabbed his watery eyes in the cuffs of his sleeves and stumbled into the bathroom for the medicine cabinet. His eyes were only partially open; the aching increased if he opened them more, which caused several items to fall into the sink. He had to fish for boxes and squint at labels long enough to focus on some words similar to cough drops. He settled on one in each cheek and the saliva delivered a numbing sensation as it coated his throat.
A tickle remained in his throat and taunted him while he placed the fallen items into their designated shelf within the medicine cabinet. One item made him pause. It was the multi-colored handle of a child’s toothbrush. “She must have been four or five,” he thought aloud as his lips mouthed the words. It was a forgotten remnant of a daughter he hadn’t seen twenty years after the divorce.
He imagined what she might look like with her mother’s facial features, paired with his height, and a few shared personality quirks. He didn’t indulge in the thought for more than a few fleeting seconds before returning his attention to Alan and Tammy. He felt the rigid surface of the mechanical keys his fingers rested on. “What’s your move Alan?” he asked himself.
***
The door had closed behind Alan as he left Tammy’s gift shop, one hand waving goodbye while the other held firm the handles of the discrete brown gift bag she had provided him with.
He kept the bag in his lap when he sat in the back seat of a dark green sedan. The driver, a gig worker named Hari, brushed aside the few strands of hair left on his scalp and adjusted the rear-view mirror. He pointed to the red line on the route that was shown on the GPS device. “Sir, you should know, there is an unknown delay in the route you wish to travel, and I am not seeing an ETA or alternatives.”
Alan checks his watch. He had a two-hour cushion before Penny would arrive home after ending her shift.
“There are some sweets in the seat pocket in front of you, my wife Leela made them. There is also water in bottles in the small chest on the floor. Free for you, my friend.”
Alan obliged as the sudden pang of hunger hit him because of a board meeting that went too long, including his current shopping expedition. Alan leaned forward enough to keep the seatbelt from pinning him in place while the car was moving. He retrieved a reused valentine’s candy box, lined with aluminum foil. “How long ago did she make this?”
Hari looked in the rear-view and turned his head in confusion. “This morning Sir. Every morning… Fresh. You eat. You will like.”
The Story Behind the Story:
The seed:
I had some random podcast on in the background one day and I caught a phrase that I had to hit rewind on. It was something philosophical from the Tao/Dao and also quantum theory related and it went something like this: The body is the transition because consciousness is the inexplicable ethereal essence of your being. This then led to a variant of quantum theory about dimensions, space/time, and dark matter that we aren’t aware of. It’s somewhere where a collective consciousness resides.
It was much more eloquent and accessible that what I’m trying to explain. The crux of the meaning was that a person is here in the physical sense during active hours, but when the body sleeps to recharge, consciousness flips dimensions and returns to the collective. So, the real being is from there, but also here for the dayshift/waking hours—so to speak.
The turn:
I looked at the plurality of that being’s existence, and it reminded me of those Looney Tunes, Merry Melodies cartoons where a three-dimensional character is drawing a two-dimensional character, but the 2D character becomes aware of the 3D character. Another tangential example would be the Truman show. The difference with this instance is that the creator and the subject are two different people.
The choice:
I chose to include a page form the simulation theorist’s playbook and mix it in with the creator/creation dynamic and see how it plays out. Alan’s storyline is the one we show up for. It’s the will they/ won’t they trope that keeps us rooting for the couple.
Then there’s Wilson. He’s not an antagonist. He’s the X dimension that Alan’s world is unaware of. He’s Alan when Alan’s physical body powers off—That’s what the rule of the universe says. The problem is that Wilson isn’t sleeping as his misery increases, this causes some bleed through in Alan’s world.
The meaning:
The character study lies on both ends. We, the reader, go in with our opinions of everyone, and each plotline, but does it change? Do we root for one, both, all, or none? Maybe it’s the side characters we meet along the way. Either way, there’s a Chaucerian level of conceit I’m trying to mess with, and I’ve got a novel’s length to play with.
Thanks for reading,
—Daniel
You’ve reached the edge of this story.
If you want to keep exploring the strange, the uncanny, and the almost‑possible, follow the trail below.
Metadata:
Length: 2,000
Tone: Romance / Tragedy
Content Note: n/a
Series: The Peripheral Edge