Caesura

Caesura


Even out in the open air, the old phonograph that Morris hugged tightly in his arms smelled musty and ancient. He couldn’t resist it when he saw it. It was just sitting there in that consignment shop among a myriad of objects, ready for the taking. All of it was ready for the taking. But this record player was special. It was just begging to sing again and he couldn’t allow it to just sit there in silence for unknown years to come. No sir, this thing was precious. After all, he hadn’t heard music in so long and it made his heart ache in anticipation. And of course, Anna would probably enjoy it too.
He set the old black leather and brass capped cornered music box on the trunk of the beat up orange car outside the store. Plants were growing from the dirt built up around the seam between the trunk and the back window. Morris looked down at the very sun faded plush unicorn that was staring at him from the inside of the car window and smiled a very pleasant smile at it. A gentle breeze fluttered the pink and blue and flowery silk scarf that was dangling around his neck. He turned around, walked back inside the store and returned with a plastic milk crate filled with dog eared records. He placed it on the roof of the car and started flipping through the contents.
“Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.” he said as he peeked at each cover. It was all so terrible. Not even worth listening to in an ironic way.
“Oh, this just won’t do, Anna! We need something brilliant! Something beautiful! Something that will move our souls! Something timeless… like you!”
He reached the back of the stack and frowned.
“Oh this is just gross. Trash! Trash! More trash!” he yelled and chucked the entire crate of vinyl out into the middle of the road. Most of the records scattered out along the pavement. A couple of them came loose from their sleeves and slid even further into the curb on the other side of the street.
He returned to the inside of the record store, stomping his paint and sticker-covered combat boots as he went, like a child rejected from getting something he wanted from a parent. A moment later he was back with another crate of records on the roof of the car.
“No. No. Definitely not. Why would anyone even make this? No… Aha!” He cried triumphantly lifting a very plain looking record sleeve into the air.
He popped open the top of the phonograph, slipped the record out of its sleeve and placed it on the turntable. He gave the crank a few turns, turned the brake off and then gently set the needle on the record. For a moment there was only the sound of popping and crackling but then, suddenly, big band music followed by a slightly warped voice crooned out from the speaker and drifted through the air. Morris closed his eyes and tilted his head back. He began to sway and move his hands like a conductor as the silky smooth voice of Cab Calloway flowed over him.
“Oh, Anna! Did you ever think you would hear Minnie the Moocher again?” He continued to sway, now moving his hips and his feet. He began to dance. Turning, hands in the air. His patch and button covered jean jacket jangling as he twisted around and tried to do his best version of a tap dance or maybe more of a somba or whatever the hell he felt like doing. He passed his hands over his head. He played with the scarf around his neck, flossing it around the back of his head, around his waist. He danced up to Anna and flipped the scarf over her neck and flossed it back and forth. Anna continued to stare into oblivion. She was a stone of long legs and a tattered summer style dress.
“Oh come on now, honey! If Cab Calloway can’t make you move ain’t nothing can!” he continued to dance, turning his back to her and wiggling his ass up against her.
She didn’t move. Not even from the occasionally too close bump of his butt against her hip. She just stood staring as she had been for years in that spot. Day in. Day out. Rain or shine. Morris stopped dancing and frowned at her, staring into her bloodshot unblinking eyes.
“You’re no fun, Anna.” he whipped the scarf from around her neck and dramatically wrapped it back around his own. He turned and cast a broad look around himself.
“None of you are any fucking fun!” he yelled.
All around him, scattered along the streets, were people. A man on the corner. A couple in the crosswalk. All of them still and silent, frozen in place in various states. The man on the corner had a slight look of surprise. He seemed to have his head turned up and was looking towards the sky. For the couple: the man held the woman by her elbows, staring into her face as she seemed to be clutching at her chest with her mouth agape. All of their skin had taken on the subtlest hints of gray. Their eyes were all bloodshot (those with their eyes still open anyways) and their gazes seemed slightly off, almost slightly cross-eyed. He had found it most unsettling. Even after all this time he still hadn’t quite gotten used to it. Morris had tried his best to ignore it, but he couldn’t look at any one of them directly for long before feeling a little ill.
He didn’t know if they were dead. They never decayed. They never aged. It had been years, so many years, since this had all transpired and he had never come across one decaying corpse. They only looked weathered. Like statues that stood in parks collecting grime and bird shit for long decades. Their clothing was battered and stripped by wind and storms and faded by the sun. Their hair hadn’t grown or been tussled or matted by the wind and elements of nature. Men who had freshly shaven the day it happened didn’t have the slightest hint of facial shadow. They were all somehow just trapped. Preserved in some invisible embalming force that for some reason Morris had escaped.
Oh, it had trapped him, or so as far as he could figure out. He remembered that clearly. He remembered very well how he couldn’t breath.How stiff his body had felt. He was restricted like a giant incorporeal vice grip had locked its jaws around him and was trying to squeeze all his juices out. He remembered finally blacking out. But for whatever strange reason the force had let go of him and when he came to, he was right where he had blacked out. A great deal of time must have passed. He had woken up to dust, water stained ceilings, the smell of mold and, worst of all, the frozen face of his sister. Her body was locked in a position of bending down to help him. Her hand was still wrapped around the back of his arm trying to steady him. This too felt like a vice grip. Stone like fingers dug into his flesh. It had hurt terribly. He had screamed at her to wake up! Move! Do something! Anything! But nothing. Just those bloodshot eyes looking almost concerned but also slightly unfocused and stuck open. A fine layer of dust had settled into the corner of her eyes and eyelids. A partial piece of fuzzy old cobweb dangled from her eye lashes. He was horrified but he was trapped there, her face locked looking into his.
It took tremendous effort to pull himself from her grasp.
At first he was scared that he would end up breaking her small slender hand. But after trying and trying, he couldn’t slip out of her grip. He had no choice but to attempt to break her hand to escape. But he couldn’t. He tried with all his strength, but it was like a statue made of steel had been carved around his arm. He had punched at it, pulled as hard as he could on her fingers, even tried to strike it with a heavy glass decoration from the nearby coffee table, but to no avail. All he did was shatter the decoration and hurt his hands. Eventually all he could do was pull as hard as he could. Her fingers tore deep ragged gouges into his flesh. His blood spilled deep scarlet all over her and the carpet.The bleeding was so profuse he had thought he had torn open an artery. He had wrapped it as best as he could and went looking for help, but there was no one. No one was moving anyways. Everywhere, people were all in the same state as his family. Frozen. Seemingly lifeless. Eventually he was left with no choice but to stitch himself up. He had never done such a thing before. He had to read a first aid book his mother had in her library. He didn’t know which hurt more, the initial wound or having to continuously push a needle and thread through flesh with no painkillers.
It was the worst day he had ever known. It tested him in ways he didn’t think possible. It exceeded the limits of his mind and body and will. And it felt like that day just never ended. To lose not only all of your family, but absolutely everyone. To be so abruptly thrust into a life of just surviving, alone with more questions than answers. To question time itself. To question the point of continuing to live. It was a nightmare. Or a special hell just for him. Whatever it was, it mostly felt like suffering.
For months, maybe even a year he stayed in the house. He couldn’t abandon his family, all stuck in their last moments of existing, their final expressions a testament to who they were in life. His sister frozen, doing what she had always done for him: looking out for him, making sure he was okay before she even thought about herself. His younger brother, frozen indian style on the living room floor with his phone in his hands, barely starting to glance up from whatever video or meme he had been looking at. His parents had been in the kitchen making dinner. Mother had dropped a kitchen knife and father was holding her tightly. They were all there. But there came a day where it became too much for him to wake up and stare into those faces. It was like taxidermy made from nightmares. He tried to keep them clean. Keep them safe. But the house was becoming unlivable. Ceilings were starting to cave in and everything smelled of dank old mold. He had no choice but to leave. So he said his goodbyes. He had told them to their silent faces that he wished that he could have at least buried them if they were dead and then covered them in sheets of plastic that his father had kept in the garage for painting. He gave them one final look and then stepped out into the new cruel world.
Morris had walked. And then he had walked some more. Surely there had to be others somewhere, he had once thought. He couldn’t have been the only one. But he looked. And he looked. He drove sometimes when a vehicle worked. When gas hadn’t turned to jelly in the tanks (which most of it had). Sometimes he would ride a bicycle. When it fancied him and felt necessary to keep his mind busy, he tried to get better at skateboarding while in major cities. There was even a period of time where he would just rollerblade down long stretches of highways for hours. But everywhere he went, things were the same. People frozen in a moment of time. Horrified, or barely acknowledging the sudden strange situation that had befallen them. There were so many different people left like they were in mid sentence on a page of their lives. It was like time had stopped in the middle of their book, bent the page down and then walked away, never to return.
He found car wrecks with people’s faces smashed into dashboards. They had never even noticed, becoming steel mannequin wrecking balls before the car ever left the road. One woman he found even looked like she had been in the middle of laughing when it happened. The car was obliterated. Wrapped around a tree like a dry hot dog bun holding a brat. She had been hanging half out of what was left of the car through a broken door still locked into a seated position. There wasn’t a scratch on her. Just a big open mouth with chiseled laugh lines that never got to finish the last big snorting chuckle she was having before time put her on pause.
Town to town he went. Small towns. Big towns. Cities. Trailer parks. Farm houses. All of them were the same. He wasn’t sure why he kept moving. He had long since been convinced that there was no one. But at some point it just became a habit, almost instinctual. He was just there to observe like some tourist lost in the biggest and creepiest wax museum of all time. There was nothing left to do but to just go and see.
He wasn’t sure when it was that he had started naming them. It was so casual at first. Just talking to himself really. But then he started to bring them into the conversations. Acknowledging them like they were still aware and paying attention. He had, however, never felt comfortable talking to strangers. So they needed names. He would look for wallets and try to find their real names to connect to faces, but there were so many people and he just didn’t want to make the effort anymore. He would usually forget their real names along with their faces anyways. So he named them himself. He gave them histories of his choosing. He crafted relationships with them with more and more eccentric backstories. And then he would move on and forget. And that felt even lonelier. So he kept to only a few names and a few backstories and a few relationships and each person he encountered would get to take over the same role and continue the story. Like a series of movies where in every sequel the actors are replaced because they became too famous and wanted more money or didn’t want to be typecasted.
His favorite characters were his family and friends, his sister, Anna, of course being the star. She had always been his favorite. His best friend. His protector. So out there in that big quiet world, priority one was to find an Anna. Sometimes he got to be picky. Sometimes an individual would instantly strike him with that certain je ne sais quo. Something in their (bloodshot) eyes would speak to him. Or maybe it was a smile that read in just the right way. Or maybe it was someone who looked like they would be concerned for his well being. Someone who would take care of him if he asked. Really, he would find just about anything that made him feel like they somehow connected to her. Other times he had to make due. Like that bald old fat man he found while wandering in the desert. That was a hard sell. But he needed his sister and that’s all that was there. He needed his Anna and the show must go on.
Now this tall thin blonde with no discernable expression listening (or more accurately not listening) to the old haunting tones of Cab Calloway with him was his Anna. She didn’t have any je ne sais quo. She was totally unfamiliar. But she did have beauty. His sister was the most beautiful person he had ever known, so this blonde mannequin was the winner.
Lights. Camera. Action.
“Are you really going to tell me this doesn’t do anything for you?”
Blonde tall Anna stared blankly.
“Okay. Okay. I see how it is. I give us magical, spirit-moving music that we needed, that I needed… and all you can say is ‘Where to next?’” Morris shook his head and then raised a fist to the sky “Disappointed!”
He marched over to the side of the store. A large army pack covered in colorful flair was propped up against it. From it he unstrapped a twelve gauge pump shotgun and pulled out a couple of shells from a loosely zipped pocket and started feeding a couple into the chamber.
“Alright! Alright! Shut up already! I didn’t know you hated the legendary Cab Calloway! It’s never come up before!” he pumped the forend, “I’ll get rid of it then!”
Morris pushed the buttstock into his shoulder and pointed it at the phonograph, barely even trying to aim. He pulled the trigger and the part of the back windshield of the car exploded.
Morris shrugged with open arms and the shotgun in one hand.
“There you go, sis! Cab refuses to quit! He’s not going anywhere!”
He nodded at the statuesque woman.
“Is that right? I’m just a bad shot? Oh. No. You think I missed on purpose? Really? You’re telling me that you actually think that I can defeat the hold that Minnie the Moocher has over me? Right. Right. No! You’re right. This isn’t the same track anymore anyways. You don’t even know this song. That’s fine. Fine. I’ll try again!”
Morris brought the gun up to his shoulder again. This time making more of an attempt to aim down the barrel. He pulled the trigger and the music abruptly ended, replaced by a rain of debris.
“Happy now? I know you are. You always love getting your way.”
Morris paused for a moment. At first he thought it was his imagination, but he quickly realized that somehow there was a small fire erupting on the ground under the car.
“Oh, shit.” he muttered as the flames began to grow and claw their way up under the car.
He watched in complete awe as the fire engulfed the entire back end of the vehicle. Pieces of what was left of the vinyl record began to bubble and drip as the flame consumed the gelatinous gas that had pooled on the ground.
“Tank must have rusted out and sprung a leak. Oopsie.”
The fire turned into a blaze. The gentle breeze was blowing it towards the frozen woman. The flames twisted and danced over her. Her dress began to burn and soon she was half obscured in fire.
“Oh man. Sorry sis!”
He stood there watching the car burn. The flames went higher and the car crackled and popped and hissed. It took less than five minutes for the entire car to be a bonfire. Fifteen minutes after that, the inferno was dying, leaving a blackened smoldering husk in its wake. A tire had popped with a loud bang. Glass shattered and cracked. He had even heard the glove box blow open with an impressive bang.
When the fire had completely died, he went to inspect his stand-in sister. He had never seen someone in this state get caught in a fire before. It had never even crossed his mind. Do they burn? He stepped close to her. Black soot covered her from head to toe. He wiped some of it away from her face.
Nothing.
No damage. No boiling. No scorching. Even her hair was still intact. Just dark with soot.
“Well,” he moved his mouth around contemplating, “At least it gave you a hair color closer to hers.”
With the edge of his thumb, he wiped some of the black from her open eye. It still stared. Still bloodshot and unchanged. He tapped on her pupil like someone would tap the top of a pop can before opening it.
“Still in there? Hm? Hope this wasn’t too dramatic of an experience for you!”
He glanced around, slightly embarrassed.
“Well, I think that’s my cue to hit the ol’ trail.”
He gave her a small sad frown.
“Ssshhh.” he pressed a finger to her dirty lips. “Don’t cry. You did your best. I know you don’t want to be left here all alone and especially in such a condition, but I do have to go. Thank you for playing though.”
He turned, hesitated, and then turned back. He took off the silk scarf and wrapped it carefully around her neck and tied it.
“Something to remember me by.” he patted her shoulder.
He looked her up and down. Her dress had completely burned away, her body now only covered in layers of leftover burnt car.
“Hopefully it will serve as a small way to maintain your dignity.”
He brushed the soot from her other eye and gave her another once over and a weak smile.
“Sorry.”
He briskly turned and walked away and gathered his items back into his pack and reattached his shotgun. He pulled it over his shoulders and headed down the road, whistling Minnie the Moocher as he went.