Another one

Talus woke to the sound of sirens. Looking out his window he realized that the commotion was caused by another jumper. Someone, yet again, thinks he/she can fly. Sometimes Talus wondered if Castle apartments mysteriously drew people to it. Come, my sick, my weary, my suffering and climb my stairs, step onto the platform of transformation and life! Twice, Talus actually witnessed the attempted flight. The first was when he was eight. He had just rounded the corner with his grandmother. They came from the subway after Talus's violin lesson. His mother didn't see them as she stood looking-up into the sky. She stepped forward as if she was stepping onto a train that Talus had seen her do a thousand times. And then she was gone. His grandmother, torn between running to see about her daughter and keeping Talus from seeing her, stood for a moment frozen. Talus took her hand and pulled her forward. She looked at him, told him to stand next to the fruit stalls at the corner grocery and not move. He watched her hurry toward the crowd. Talus sat on a crate and took out his violin. It was his mother's when she played. He started playing, not paying attention to the song or the people who looked curiously toward him. They were drawn by the music and the crowd. Talus notes hung heavy above him. The grocer came out, saw the scene, asked a bystander about the crowd, and then looked at Talus. He stood listening for a moment. Then sat on a crate next to Talus.

The graveyard of hope

The graveyard shift and the grave yard occupied most of Talus's time. The ordinary world of toilet cleaning provided a certain numbness that music once did for him. Playing the violin wasn't about engaging, it was about playing himself into the void to not feel his fingers, or hear his thoughts. Janitorial work didn't provide Talus with much to think about. He didn't worry about the next customer, the next phone call. He only listened to the splat of the mop,and its movement from one side to another. The soft glide of the record sleeves against each other when he replaced one record after another. The tedious sounds gave him meaning. Talus had time to kill before work and he wandered into the graveyard once again. He stood in the middle of the small place with maybe fifty gravestones. All old and lost in the middle of the city. They stood, leaned or even reclined as if waiting for someone or something to arrive. Each quiet and distant. Some of the names Talus knew from his youth. He leaned on the edge of Andrew Matthus's gravestone. Looked at his mother and grandmother's gravestones. He saw a piece of his coat still attached to the small cross. His mind wandered back. After the fall and the subsequent fall into the graveyard on Christmas eve, and the two men beating him-up only to discover that he was trying to give the salvation army money to give himself salvation from the bell, the men left him laying in the snow and pain. The snow helped to numb his cuts and bruises. Blood spotted the snow as he lay looking at the slightly tilted headstone of his mother. Turning his head, Talus looked at his grandmother's grave. He painful stumbled and pulled himself up by using another gravestone brushed off an opposing tombstone, and sat down. Various pains surfaced and Talus could do nothing more than sit staring at their graves. A piece of Talus's coat that was caught by the tiny cross, stirred in a slight breeze that made Talus blink. He looked around at the snow, the clouds moving across the sky in a mass of grays, and he felt something leave him. Something drifted so slightly away from him like a brush from a stranger as they pasted to get off the subway that he looked to see if anyone was in the graveyard with him. Because of his thin Italian leather shoes, Talus noticed he was cold. A cold so deep and numbing that he quickly rose and hurried back to his apartment. He stood in the hot shower unable to find warmth or comfort. As he crawled under the covers, the sun was finally walking away, leaving the remains of the day, an ambient light circled the bed. Talus felt another brush as the darkness came.