Archive for the ‘Daniel Braum’ Category
Unanchored ( Part Two)
Monday, January 25th, 2010
For part one of this story please visit my author archives or click here:
http://www.dailycabal.com/2009/12/unanchored/
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We materialized inside a cave bustling with activity. Men and women in trench coats worked at desks and pointed at dots on giant glass screens at various points within the spacious cavern. A few ghosts, like me were at the sides of some of the operatives.
“Belinda Shepard,” the woman in the trench coat said. “This is our center of operations.”
“Operations?” I asked.
“Anchoring. Anchoring the lost. Like you were.”
I wanted to ask how but looking at the crystal rod in her hand, I remembered. I remembered the car crash in front of the old house, the medics taking my body away, the mourners placing flowers at the telephone pole. I hadn’t believed I had died. Or maybe it was the mourner’s grief that bound me, but I stayed and I wandered. Shopping. The bank. The salon. The supermarket. Up and down the street in a pantomime of my old life. Until Belinda woke me.
“I hope you’ll consider working with us. As my partner,” Belinda said. “You have one foot in our world and one in the hereafter. This can be very useful in our line of work.”
The glass screens were full of images. Cemeteries. Suburban streets. Ordinary people in the motions of their lives. Ambulances and car accidents. Were these all unanchored?
“Why me,” I asked. “I just want to…”
I realized didn’t know what I wanted. And I didn’t know what to say.
“You weren’t the only one who died in that car crash,” Belinda said. “Help me. Help me save them.”
For a moment I feared it might have been my children who had perished, but I remembered I had never married and never had any. How much more of me had I forgotten? How much more of me had already washed away? Then I heard the rich Cajun chuckle of the man in the old building. I had been on my way to his shop to pick up a pair of shoes when… when I crashed. Right into his shop.
“He’s still out there,” Belinda said. “Join me. Together we can anchor him and bring him where he needs to be.”
I wanted to help. I really did. It felt like the right thing to do. But this place. This cave. All these operatives. There was a lot more going on than Belinda was telling me. Helping her seemed the quickest way to find out.
-End of Part Two-
UNANCHORED
Monday, December 28th, 2009
The first time I remember noticing her was one day when leaving the nail salon and there was all that hubbub about the old Victorian for sale across from the post office. She looked non-descript enough, kind of like an investigator in an old trench coat and old hat.
People in the neighborhood had hoped a buyer would be found who would preserve the old house but instead plans were made to tear it down and put up another small strip-mall type office complex. Merrick Road was full of such, so it wasn’t the presence of more that was such a tragedy. I liked going there. I found my way there everyday. After, I went to the nail salon, the post office, and walked up and down the main drag. Always I rushed past the telephone pole full of flowers and photos.
“I see you staring,” the woman in the coat said.
“It’s such a nice building. It’d be a shame to tear it down. Just there, that office, used to be a shoe repair shop with the quirkiest old guy from down south running the place.”
“I know,” she said. “You could barely understand him, but thought he told the darndest stories…”
“How do you know? Are you from around here?”
“No, I’m on business,” she said.
She fished an odd device from her pocket, it looked like a crystal rod, and waved it about. I felt very uncomfortable and wanted to go.
“Places have memories tied to them,” she said. “And when they’re gone, well the memories, and more, are just un-anchored, shall we say.”
Suddenly I could see what would become of the house. The wrecking crew and bulldozers. I saw myself in that house; saw the faces of all the people bringing flowers to that telephone pole.
“It’s alright,” the lady said. She kept waving the rod. “Its how I save the memories. The house will be torn down soon and then you’ll be unanchored.”
“Unanchored?”
“You’ll wander aimlessly, then eventually forget who you are until you dissipate.”
“How long does that take?”
“Hard to say.”
“What if that’s what I want?”
She didn’t answer and I didn’t have choice. The rod was pulling me, taking me somewhere and I could not resist.
“Don’t worry. You’re going to like it with us,” she said.
But I didn’t believe her.
– End of Part One –