three fifty seven

 

 

 

The car parked and ready within the vicinity of the airport, deleted name sits listening to that irregular rhythm of spring rain descending incessant upon its roof, the vehicle infused with the scent of his long wax jacket discarded damp across the back seats.
His whole face feels weirdly new, the until now daily-shaved flesh seemingly conscious of its having been subject to the last razor it will suffer for the next ten days, inducing a certain sense of rawness to the skin, peeled back to reveal a mask beneath, unwilling to endure its own reflection.
He is in rehearsal for his imminent visitor, running his lines worried there may be no words, and wondering what others he might conjure to deploy in that exact absence should this indeed prove the case.
deleted name (speaking aloud to himself): Okay well, look, I’ll posit this as a question because uh, I don’t, I’m not sure I even know the answer, but I think, well, no, let’s just,
trying to focus, and starting over
deleted name: Let’s just...
and again
deleted name: Would you say, is there a legitimate difference between an amazing photograph
as both index fingers delineate a rectangle in the air before him
deleted name: and
now marking out another alongside
deleted name: what is actually a rather boring or... or pedestrian photograph... of something which is itself amazing?
He reaches across to tip down the passenger side sunshade, dislodging the year-long secreted piece of Bazooka gum and unpeeling it from its greasy and distinctive red, white and blue wrapper: that initial effort requisite to its chewing makes him cough hard enough that his both eyes water.
deleted name (chewing, his words finding their way out and around the gum): To clarify then, if... Suppose you took what might be considered a rather... artless photograph of
speaking now just that little louder to hear himself over a sudden increased intensity of rainfall
deleted name: well let’s say, uh, clichéd as it is, some, eh,
sighing
deleted name: some particular known landmark, and showed it to your friends, it’s not, it’s not beyond imagining that at least one of them may well describe it as an amazing photograph... but is it? If you held a mirror up to that same landmark and asked someone to look at it would they say the mirror is amazing?
his eyes wrinkle, wincing at the banality
deleted name: Clearly not, right? So why then the photograph?
curiosity now prompting him to uncurl and unfold the little Bazooka Joe comic strip still held in his fingers
deleted name: And ultimately, of course, does any of this actually matter?
which surprisingly turns out to be blank, a white wax paper nothing, though in his thinking on how many of these comics were being printed at any given time he understands it as less actual surprise that one might indeed slip through a momentary absence of quality control.
Holding it up against the albeit muted daylight beyond the car window he hopes to see some residual print, a trace of what it might have been; apart from a single tiny black square top left it is completely void.
He looks back across the car’s interior, thinking for the first time
deleted name: Christ he will sit in that exact same seat in which she sat.
and then, some whole minutes subsequent, after angling the rearview mirror to confront himself for that final time for ten days,
deleted name (quietly): You are Marilyn Monroe’s bastard stillborn.
before lowering the car window to spit the lukewarm and now tasteless wad of gum from out his mouth, the rain making its concurrent and opportune ingress so that with the window once again closed it will descend in slow drips down this side of the glass.
deleted name (watching, waiting): Heeltaps.