Tag: writing

Final Real Magic

~ Richard Schulte ~ 2 Comments

The Great Sampson was a magician without peer. Five thousand shows in a hundred grimy towns and he never complained. The stiffs working the carnival regarded him with a mixture of wonder and derision.

“And now,” the Great Sampson waved, “my final act!”

A few people in the dingy tent regarded the theatrical old man. They were thinking about home. In a few minutes night would fall. Other sideshow tents were already being hastily dismantled, folded up. The Great Sampson, in his black top hat, had picked up a thin book covered with gold lettering and had shakily climbed into an open black box that resembled a coffin.

The old man ran his fingers through an ebony beard, which he had obviously curled and dyed. He opened the shining book as he faced the audience: several bored adults and one boy.

“Until this very moment,” he announced grandly, “no magician in the entire history of the world has actually performed magic. Illusion and deception have been substituted for magic, and millions of believers have been told by deceitful entertainers that they are witnessing the effects of true supernatural power. You, my good friends, will be the first to ever witness real magic. You will remember this day for the remainder of your lives. So pay very close attention. Don’t blink!”

The Great Sampson took a deep breath. He hesitated. He visibly trembled. “And now, after years of struggle, after years of false starts and dead ends, after years and years of searching: my life’s greatest and only worthwhile achievement!”

He held up the shining book with gold lettering and read: “Minui fines vitae justo in aeternum!”

The Great Sampson vanished.

The carnival sideshow audience stood with jaded expectation on the crushed dirt floor.

Nothing happened.

The people waited patiently for a minute, then two.

Nothing happened.

A man in back finally slipped out of the dark tent.

Nothing happened.

A couple near the black box shrugged, laughed and left.

Nothing happened.

Everyone left.

Everyone forsook the black box except the boy. In that shadow of doubt he didn’t dare move.

Something terrible–something extraordinary had happened. The boy could sense it. A shivering thrill fixed his feet in place.

Summoning courage, he inched forward, leaned slowly over, and peered into the box.

Skittering nervously at its bottom, a gray mouse was frantically trying to escape.

The boy’s heart pounded. His mind raced.

He jumped.

“Show’s over,” boomed a voice behind him. A carnival worker’s face was poking into the dark tent with a glare of impatience. “Time to go home kid.”

“But what about the Great Sampson?” the boy protested.

“What about who?”

The boy was indignant. “The Great Sampson is gone!”

“You need to be gone, too. Now get the hell out of here or someone might call the cops.” The worker shot him a exasperated look and left.

The boy hesitated. Nothing that had just happened–the magician’s strange speech–that split second when he had vanished–none of it seemed real.

The boy remained alone in the tent, looking down at the small helpless mouse. He had to decide. Quickly. He reached into the black box and took the mouse gently into his hand and slipped out of the tent into the twilight. The carnival was over. Indistinct lumps of canvas littered the ground.

The soft mouse in his hand had calmed down. The boy saw a man heaving plastic garbage bags onto a flatbed truck and hurried over.

“I think I know what happened to the Great Sampson!”

“What happened? What the hell are you talking about?”

“The Great Sampson disappeared about ten minutes ago! He was doing his very last magic show and I think he actually turned into a mouse. He said it was his final act! He said he would finally do real magic!”

“Get the fuck out of here. You’re crazy.”  The man turned back to the garbage.

. . .

As the boy walked rapidly home, he stared frequently through his fingers at the mouse. It seemed to be an ordinary gray mouse.

He slowed at the grassy park several blocks from his home, and he sat down on the bench in the lamp’s soft light. He opened his hand just enough to closely examine the mouse. It seemed perfectly ordinary. “Can you hear me?” the boy asked.

The nervous mouse looked about, seemingly at nothing.

“If you can hear me, let me know. Do something. Nod your head.”

The mouse’s head quivered. It looked up at the boy.

“I don’t know what to do. Are you really the Great Sampson? Can you turn back? Are you going to turn back?”

No answer. None was possible.

“If that was really your final act–” The boy looked at the mouse feeling puzzled, hopeless. “Why did you do it?

“So you wanted to do real magic? Why? To become something different?”

He leaned sideways to pull an object from his back pocket. It was the strange shining book with gold lettering. It had also remained at the bottom of the box.

The book appeared to be a journal. It was the type of cheap mass-produced journal that anybody can buy for a couple dollars at a store. The boy read elegant gold letters on the cover. They formed the words: Follow Your Dreams.

. . .

Sitting on the bed in his room, still holding the mouse in one hand, the boy opened the thin journal. Its few pages were handwritten in black ink, clearly and elegantly. Page after page after page, with an occasional word or sentence neatly crossed out. Page after page. It seemed to be the life’s work of one person.

With one hand he clumsily turned the pages until he reached the last, where his eyes froze on the final words: Minui fines vitae justo in aeternum. Those had been the final words spoken by the Great Sampson. The fatal incantation. The final words.

Were they really magic?

He mouthed a few of the dangerous words inaudibly, a shiver crawling up his back, then stopped.

He jumped.

A very loud knock on his bedroom door.

“What are you doing” demanded his mother. “I called you for dinner five minutes ago!”

“Just a second.”

“I’m running out of patience–you come out of there now!” His mother opened his door. “What on Earth have you been doing?”

“Nothing.” He turned and quickly placed the mouse in a drawer by his bed.

“Well, come on. You know how your father doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

Reluctantly, the boy stepped out of his room and headed for the stairs. Turning back, he saw his mother enter his room.

. . .

The mouse was gone.

Whether his mother had found it, or the mouse had escaped, the boy couldn’t know. It didn’t matter.

He lay on his bed, almost in tears. He didn’t know why.

Of course, it all was plain silly. Everyone knows there’s no such thing as real magic. The Great Sampson was gone, that was the only thing that mattered. The Great Sampson had performed his final act. And nobody really cares about an act. Everything in life is an act.

The boy picked up the thin book with glittery lettering.

He didn’t dare open it.

He placed it on his bookshelf, among other wise books he would probably never read.

Perhaps he’d read it one day.

How to Paint Angels

~ Richard Schulte ~ 2 Comments

Another angel, not quite perfect. Carol snatched the canvas off the easel and balled it up hard. She flung her creation into the fireplace and watched the devouring flames turn wings black.

Like a dead weight Carol sank to the carpet, then lay on her back and shut her eyes. She tried to shut out the world.

That evening, after some television news and a bite to eat, she was compelled to place a new white canvas onto the empty easel. She stared at the blank space. She dipped her delicate brush into silver.

As usual she began with the angel wings. Her strokes were precise, slow.

The most difficult part was always the eyes. They never came out right. Angel eyes were a puzzle. She would do them last.

A knock at the door.

“Come in!”

It was her new friend Monique. “I’m sorry–I didn’t know you were busy–here’s the jacket you left in Tony’s car. I’ll leave you here to your work.”

“No! Please stay for a minute! The apartment can feel so empty. It’s nice to have some company for a change.”

“What’s this? You painted all these?”

Carol laughed. “It’s my hobby, I guess.”

“Seriously? It beats making tin foil Christmas tree ornaments, or any silly thing I’ve ever attempted. I didn’t know you were an artist! They’re absolutely beautiful!”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

“Wonder what–if they’re beautiful?”

“If they’re as perfect as angels should be.”

“They’re angels. How can they not be beautiful?” laughed Monique, wandering slowly about Carol’s small apartment, turning right and then left. She gazed with increasing wonder at a dozen silvery canvases on easels. There was such a clutter of angels that it was difficult to maneuver.

Monique looked quickly at each canvas. The heavenly paintings were exquisite but something about them was odd. They felt unnatural. Something vital seemed to be missing. And there were so many. She didn’t want to say anything. That would be impolite.

“You might have noticed that none of my angels have eyes,” Carol remarked, trying not to sound embarrassed. “Not yet.”

“Oh my gosh! I was just thinking there was something kind of strange about them. Now I see why! They’re absolutely wonderful but the faces are wrong. So you’re waiting to paint the eyes on all these? Are they difficult to do?”

“I always have trouble with my eyes.”

“Me, too,” smiled Monique. “That’s why I wear glasses.”

They both laughed.

. . .

Carol rolled in a nightmare. It was another lucid dream of Hell.

Blackness swallowed her. She was spinning, drowning in an infinite void, suffocating in ungraspable nothingness. There was no light, not a trace of substance or form.

A tomb.

In the blackness she struggled to find her hand. She was desperate to lift her hand and touch something, feel anything. She could find nothing. Spinning, spinning, she was alone, less than nothing in the consuming nothingness.

It was a Hell without flames, without demons or evil, without time, only emptiness. A devouring nightmare that had erased her entire world.

No hope.

Panicking, she strained in her mind to remember some known thing. A face, a ray of sunshine. Something in a vanished life she understood. Something near. Deep in her mind she tried to grasp at anything, a momentary spark, an atom, to cling to, to push back the black, ruthless, eternal Nothing.

Nothing.

In the blackness she caught a glimmer.

She woke.

Her dark apartment was strangely aglow. She lifted her head from her pillow. All about her were living eyes. Eyes of pure light, living light. Warm light.

Carol jumped out of bed and flipped on the cold apartment light.

She began painting eyes.

Dew on the Grass

~ Richard Schulte ~ 2 Comments

Missy smelled dew on the grass.

She smelled the damp earth and yesterday’s rain. The roots of trees, mouldering leaves.

She smelled freshly broken twigs, the scent of crisp, tart, yellow and brown autumn.

And a newly blue sky.

Simply by breathing, Missy understood everything.

A ten-mile-away fireplace, a nearby muddy puddle.

The rising warm sun, startled birds taking flight.

Bees, butterfly wings, the erosions of mountains, dandelion dust and the movement of time.

From beyond the horizon, just as clear as the smell of autumn, Missy sensed infinite things. An unending motion. The residue of untold lives.

She smelled happiness and loss and the atoms of those long-vanished.

She smelled the new moon and hidden stars.

A human pulled impatiently on her leash. Missy followed.

An Old Man on a Bus

~ Richard Schulte ~ 5 Comments

The old man appeared very frail.  From the few white hairs on his scabbed head . . . to his watery eyes . . . to his trembling hands.

“Good morning,” he said politely as he boarded the city bus.

The driver ignored him.

The old man nodded and struggled down the aisle to get to an empty seat. His feet shuffled. Slowly, painfully, he turned his body, grabbed the rail, bent like a skeleton to sit. The passengers on either side did not look up from their phones.

The bus started with a sudden jolt and the old man tipped into a neighbor. “I’m so sorry,” he laughed with embarrassment.

No reply.

Each stop on Fourth Avenue brought a fresh tide of riders. The old man sat without moving–except trembling hands. All eyes avoided him.

Until the arrival of a young man.

“You’re really, really old,” said the youth, who sat across the aisle and stared directly at him from behind dark sunglasses.

“I am.”

“Doesn’t life suck when you’re old and about to die?” The young man spoke mockingly.

“It does.”

“You have to be at least a hundred years old. Don’t you worry someone like me might beat you up?”

“I can tell that you won’t,” smiled the old man.

“Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”

“Because I can see you’re just an ordinary person.”

The youth turned his head and laughed at the window. Outside the city blurred past.

The old man said: “I know you’re an ordinary person because a long time ago I was exactly like you. I thought I was something special, nothing could touch me. I could insult the entire world and nothing would happen.

“Nothing could stop me. I would beat up every person that stood in my way. The future was mine.

“Now what do you see?”

The young man saw in his window the old man’s smiling reflection.

At the next stop the young man jumped up and hurried off.

Waterfall Tears

~ Richard Schulte ~ 2 Comments

Laurie lost her love and came to the garden to grieve. She stood on the arching bridge above the small stream.

Leaning on the rough wood rail, she gazed nowhere. The cherry blossoms around her, the cheerful bubbling at her feet, the fluttering leaves: she saw nothing.

Happy children ran past her. One sweet voice cut to her heart. She cried.

Tears spilled into the nowhere. They poured out. Her grief mingled in the water, began coursing along.

Her tears ran under a willow tree. They swirled around the small turtle rock. Around gentle bends her tears coursed slowly, glistening over green pebbles. Her tears mixed with the spring rains; like lost silver they shimmered in sunshine. Her tears ran and ran and ran as the stream narrowed, in a growing hurry, it seemed, to go somewhere. Anywhere.

Suddenly, over a steep waterfall her tears thundered. They turned to mist.

Laurie straightened her back and breathed in deeply. She vaguely saw the shapes of white blossoms around her. She moved on.

A Dance in the Lightning

~ Richard Schulte ~ 4 Comments

Angie was dead tired. The steep, stony hike up to the mountain’s summit had taken longer than she and her sister had planned. The air was very thin.

Karen was anxious to begin back down. “I don’t like this. Look at the clouds.”

“Let me rest for a minute,” said Angie, gazing down.

Silent, very far below, the familiar Earth seemed empty, unpeopled. The tan and green plains, like a rumpled quilt, stretched curving into the distance. A river one hundred miles distant made a loose thread. The world’s floor was dappled with creeping shadows.

It seemed the two sisters could reach out to touch moving white clouds.

“We better head down. Staying up here is dangerous,” warned Karen.

“Just one more minute,” begged Angie.

The shadows of scattered clouds marched across the world below. The amorphous shadows seemed like creeping ink. Up on the mountain’s high summit the atmosphere was clear and icy. The wind shivered Angie’s skin. Range upon range rose to the east, raking more boiled white clouds. The farthest peaks were minuscule and dreamlike.

Up in that heaven everything was like perfect crystal: the air, a shining glacial lake nestled straight below in a cathedral of rising granite, the sharp stone walls, panels of sky painted blue. The white clouds, now so close, seemed the only things that were alive.

They were moving, growing, indefinite, changing. Becoming deeper. Deeper. Dark.

“Come on!”

But Angie couldn’t move. The strange beauty of the darkening arrested her.

The freezing wind became razor sharp.

A shadow came.

“Hurry!” shouted Karen, running over tumbled boulders to reach a small shelter that had been built on the mountain’s summit. The shelter was made of carefully assembled stones, built by someone long ago. One who feared heaven turned dark.

Angie did not follow.

A cloud very close above blackened.  A hard rain began.  Angie stood alone, watched for the first flash of lightning.

That first revelation was a blinding, searing spear of fire. It pierced a mountain ridge just below.

The lightning flashed just a moment, a jagged burning finger, cracking open the height of heaven, transforming the rain into sparks. The booming rebound from unseen blasted stone was the voice of thundering, echoing power. A momentary awful power shaking the deepest foundations.

A second flash.  Closer.

The power descended from somewhere–from some place beyond the highest peak or reach of mind.  It was a pure light, a heedless Something, manifested from gathered blackness. A burning truth.  Then an explosion.

Another.

The white light burned in front of Angie. It was the light from an open door. Her eyes saw through for just a moment.

Then came another flash. And another. Even closer. Much closer. Exploding nearer and nearer. Angie’s sky-reaching arms waved in abandon.

She felt dizziness, danger, amazement, joy.

Angie danced in the lightning.

Irresistible Gravity

~ Richard Schulte ~ 2 Comments

A leaf blower came by every Monday.

A tree in a concrete planter had been placed at the center of a concrete plaza. It fed on the dark water of janitors. It shed a few leaves.

Around and around the spindly trunk rode a grown man with a nicely groomed beard on a motorized skateboard. Mounted on his head was a tiny lens. Around and around he circled one afternoon. Around, around, around.

The tree dropped a leaf.

The Nicely Groomed Man rode briskly away, and later that night he watched his twinkling video on a screen in a small dark room.  He then sent if off to a virtual place to show everybody, anybody. The blurred scene, he thought, was like art. He was a satellite. The lone tree was a strange sun. Its gravity was irresistible. He returned to work the next day.

During lunch the bearded man spooned a cup of drippy noodles and thoughtfully regarded the tree. Cigarette butts and litter had been tossed into the concrete planter. The tree grew in a false light reflected from a wall of sheer, faceless offices. A wonderful forlorn miracle. How did it grow? Why did it grow?

Where did it come from? Who placed it there? It didn’t occur to the man that they were alike. Both in that plaza. Waiting. Waiting.

Another day came. A janitor dumped a bucket of dark water.

A leaf blower arrived on Monday.

A Small Fountain in Green Park

~ Richard Schulte ~ 4 Comments

“Don’t fall in!”

Maggie was too busy to hear her mother. She leaned over the edge of a small fountain in Green Park, peering into the basin. Her two-year-old eyes took delight in the swirling reflections.

The water bubbled, whispered, leaped. It splashed cool kisses. Maggie extended her arms and laughed. She touched the rippling surface with a tentative, curious finger.

Strangely, she saw her own small face in the fountain, crowned by sunlight, wrinkling brightly and dancing.

The water in the park’s fountain was alive like an inexplicable wonder. Its light contained a secret. Maggie gazed at her own small reflection, trying very hard to see herself clearly. Her face was there, then–poof–gone. A flying drop landed on her nose and she laughed again.

“Don’t fall in!”

Mrs. Spivey, the third grade teacher, frantically counted heads. Eight-year-old children become spinning whirlwinds on a school field trip.

The Natural History Museum and its dinosaur bones were located in Green Park, across the plaza from a small fountain. The fountain around which her students were running wildly.

Maggie dashed past the fountain, then suddenly stopped, turned around. The place seemed familiar. She approached the small fountain, stood very still and looked down into it. The water swirled and bubbled, rippled and whispered. Catching her breath, she looked curiously at her own reflection, becoming thoughtful. Her small face twinkled, the sun over her shoulder. Her face appeared to be a sudden vision in a wonderful dream.

But a classmate almost caught her. She darted away, laughing.

“Don’t fall in!”

Feeling slightly guilty, trying to keep her balance, Maggie leaned over the water. She crumpled the empty box of detergent and shoved it into a shopping bag. She glanced over her shoulder. Her high school friends stood nearby, laughing in the sunshine.

She stared down into the fountain’s shallow basin and was surprised to see an uncertain reflection. It had long curly hair and blinking eyes, and a thirteen-year-old smile that seemed rather crooked. Had she seen that face before?

The bewildering vision disappeared in a sudden brew of rainbow bubbles. Bubbles that multiplied out of control. Foam spilled all around her.

A shout echoed across the park’s plaza and Maggie and her friends ran.

“Don’t fall in!”

The two sat on the fountain’s low edge. Maggie’s new boyfriend gently pushed her shoulder.

She swept her hand through the cool water and splashed him. They laughed.

“Don’t fall in!”

Maggie walked slowly past the fountain, hand-in-hand with Robert. The park was very quiet on a Tuesday afternoon. It was their honeymoon. The never-changing sun shone brightly high above them. A cool mist from the small fountain touched her warm face.

Suddenly, Robert bent over to kiss her. He lifted her up, cradled her in his arms, whirled about and–laughing–dangled her over the fountain. Maggie shivered.

She imagined falling through space, splashing into the water, dangerously, merging with a soft something that was completely permeating and mysterious. For an instant she saw the reflection of two lovers in the water.

She saw two faces crowned by sunlight, like angels, dreamlike.

She was set again on her feet, and the two walked slowly on.

“Don’t fall in!”

Sitting on a park bench, Maggie closely watched her first child. Her working mind was distracted. It was such a busy day, with so much to do. The tiny girl peered into the small fountain and suddenly reached out to touch the rippling water with a finger.

Maggie jumped up and hurried over. She never took her eyes from her precious child.

Maggie sat down on the low edge of the fountain and wondered at the actual depth of the basin. How dangerous was it, really? Just a few inches. But it seemed so dangerously deep. Her child stared down into the dancing water, so Maggie looked down, too.

Two small faces stared up at her, two faces that were different and alike.

How could she explain that shining, wonderful, perfect–uncertain vision of life in the water? A very young child would not understand. It all had something to do with wistfulness, love and memory. And time. She felt a moment of loss. She couldn’t explain what she saw, not even to herself.

“Don’t fall in!”

Maggie’s happy children were racing around the small fountain like three frantic whirlwinds on a picnic Sunday. She rested on the blanket on the park’s grass. She watched those whom she loved whirl round and round and round. She couldn’t stop them. She did not want to stop them. She simply watched.

“Don’t fall in!”

The children were gone. Grown up.

Maggie and her friends in the Watercolor Society had dispersed themselves strategically around Green Park. Their mission was to create beauty. She had set up her easel right beside that familiar old fountain. It seemed the very best place, with so much potential. One of her old friends had shouted the silly taunt. But Maggie knew she wouldn’t fall in. Not now.

She had known that water all of her life.

Maggie studied the uncertain light on the moving water. Gentle ripples fractured unsteady reflections. It was like every piece of a world jumbled together all at once, but in constant motion. And the unreachable sun was the source. It was the point from which searing light descended to bless her eyes with a thousand living, rising fragments.

How was it possible to capture one brief, so-very-brief moment in a life? All of those passing visions in the small fountain were in her memory still.

At best, her effort–might–master one moment in endless–eternity.  At best.  But, still, she painted. She painted and painted.

“Don’t fall in!”

Her granddaughter was worried. Maggie leaned quietly in the wheelchair over the small fountain.

Maggie’s granddaughter regarded the old woman until she felt reassured, then comfortably turned to examine the small fountain herself.

It wasn’t her first visit to Green Park.

Compelled, she gazed into the water and saw her own rippling face.

It was a beautiful day.

One Strange, Shimmering Dream

~ Richard Schulte ~ 9 Comments

Jimmy was born on a farm. As a young child he roamed the fields collecting shiny pebbles, colored leaves and other ordinary things.

When Jimmy was eight years old he had an idea. He carefully wrapped a loose bundle of dandelion fluff with old spiderwebs. He kept his small creation in a shoe box, which he hid under his bed.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Jimmy would quietly slip out from under the sheets, reach under the bed and pull out the box. Very slowly, he’d lift the lid and shine a small flashlight inside.

The delicate, ghostly threads wrapped about fluffy whiteness gently gleamed. It seemed that he had assembled a magic thing. A strange, shimmering dream.

Over many years, working on that farm, his dreams grew.

One night, at the age of 86, Jimmy suddenly sat up in bed and whispered to his wife, “I’m going outside to look at the stars.”

“Okay, dear.” She rolled over.

Jimmy walked slowly in his pajamas out the back door. He shut the door silently.

Barefoot, Jimmy walked out onto the dark, newly tilled field. There was no moon. He reached down and crumbled some Earth in one hand. His barn was black under twinkling stars.

He disappeared into the barn.

A few minutes later, the large barn doors swung open.

And slowly up, up, up rose something weightless and strange–an enormous milky cloud, indistinct, streaked with ghostly threads, like a nebula in the dark sky, faintly shimmering amid the many bright stars–rising up, up.

Dandelion fluff and old spiderwebs float easily. Seeds are meant to fly. Carefully made webs bind living things to the air.

Jimmy watched from the center of his finished creation. Higher and higher he rose, above the barn and dark fields, above his tiny farmhouse, now vanishing far below. The farmhouse vanished.

Riding among the stars, Jimmy ascended.

Night deepened. The stars multiplied. He revolved slowly among them, his shimmering dream-thing reflecting twinkling light, propelled like a raft in a sparkling stream. Quietly, Jimmy watched.

When he looked over his shoulder, he noticed that the Earth could now easily fit into the palm of one hand. The Earth had become a round blue eye. Then it winked shut.

And the dazzling stars grew thick and close, as if they could be easily touched. Jimmy reached out one hand. Motes of light gathered together, withdrew, and the galaxy once so impossibly large became suddenly tiny, and a billion other galaxies rushed in around him like stars, whirling like stars–stars containing billions of stars.

That infinite light could not be described.

In his dream-thing, he floated on. Through galaxies of galaxies, until they, too, could fit in the palm of one hand.

The night was unusually quiet.

When his wife woke up, Jimmy was gone. He had passed far away.

Light on the Restless and Small

~ Richard Schulte ~ Leave a comment

Late morning was pleasantly sunny. Jeremy directed his feet toward the delicatessen overlooking the boat ramp. He was hungry.

A water taxi on a trailer was being slowly backed into the bay. The boat’s hull was black with decay. A man waving his arms near the water suddenly shouted: “Stop!”

Jeremy lingered on the deli’s sunlit patio, looking down at the scene with vague curiosity. He then stepped inside, carefully analyzed the choices and ordered a turkey and avocado sandwich with extra peppers.

He returned to the patio to wait.

The sunlight felt good. Shining pleasure craft bobbed in the quicksilver marina to one side of the ramp. The boats were empty. They shrugged on the water in rows, bright white, waiting, waiting.

A small pug waddled up from nowhere to the chair where Jeremy sat and pressed its nose against his ankle. Jeremy scratched behind the dog’s ear. The small dog pressed itself against his leg.

Runners from the nearby fitness center ran along the boardwalk. They ran with pumping legs and arms glistening in the sun. They followed a line, from the fitness center, past the marina, past the deli, to the boat ramp, back to the same place where they started, back and forth, up and down the boardwalk, sweating, arms swinging, back and forth, back and forth, wishful perpetual motion machines. Younger females. Older males.

Two motivations, realized Jeremy.

Fear of rejection. Fear of death.

It was a perfect day for a walk or a run. Sunlight in the open air always feels good. The runners passed through the warm sunshine on a day like any other.

Jeremy heard his name.

He returned to the patio with his fresh sandwich and found an open table. The pug came up to him again and pressed its nose against his ankle. Standing on the casually littered concrete, it stared up between Jeremy’s legs.

It was a fat little pug with demanding eyes. The animal stared directly at Jeremy’s carefully selected sandwich. It stood perfectly still. The eyes did not move.

Is there meaning in sunlight? In its warmth?

Jeremy, the philosopher, stared at the sandwich and felt sudden pain: his desperation for an answer.

But philosophy vanished the moment he took one bite. The sandwich tasted very good in warm sunshine.

Sparkling water lapped gently up the boat ramp.

Trailing black smoke, the water taxi was laboring across the bay into the distance. Its purpose: to pick up those many people who had places to go–places where sunshine might be.