Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 91 - Produce

Photo by Patrick Pankalla on Unsplash

“How will we get this cart down there?” Jeremy called over to Charlie, but it didn’t matter.

At the instant the words finished coming out of his mouth, the cart was snapped from their perch at the top of the landing, along with the metal railing and the grated floor on which they stood.

Still lying on the makeshift gurney, Gordon’s elbow was hooked around one of the metal bars attached at two corners that made up the base of the utility cart’s handle. Even as he was now being flung through the air atop the cart like a magic carpet constructed not of intricately interwoven threads but of industrial-grade steel plating, he somehow thought holding onto the bar would help him, that even if the cart suddenly stopped floating, holding on would somehow keep him from crashing to the ground below.

The same could not be said for Charlie, who lost his last tenuous grip on the cart’s handle and started to fly away.

“Gordon!” the old man gasped as his fingers unraveled and slipped from the cart’s handle.

Gordon painfully reached out as Charlie looked back with his broad, crazy-looking eyes and wide-open mouth of crooked teeth. He seemed to hover in the air, levitating via some invisible source for what felt like eons but was just the slow-moving span of a second. He was pulled across the room like a rag doll, limbs flailing, somehow moving faster than Gordon on the cart. Then he was gone, disappeared into the black.

“Charlie!” Gordon cried after him in a weak, sputtering cough.

Looking across to where the cart had just been pulled from the landing, Gordon saw the other man - Jeremy - also somehow floating in the air just feet away from where he was now halted, midstream, between where the landing had just been and the black hole on the opposite side of the room.

Jeremy, too, floated weightlessly for a moment, and then, like he was inserted into a pneumatic tube, he was suddenly sucked up and snuffed from existence as he limply slipped into the black hole, as well.

Gordon tried to crane his neck over the cart’s edge to see Becca and the others, but it was too late. The cart shot forward like a jet plane launched off the end of an aircraft carrier, impossibly fast and sudden. Everything blurred and was overly bright before falling away in less than a second, replaced now with a murky blackness and crackling static followed by an intense nothingness — no sound or sight or taste or feeling — and in Gordon’s mind, he was sure he heard Marie again.

“Hold my hand in the dark,” she’d said to him so many times before. “Take me to the movies and hold my hand in the dark.”

All was obsidian and pitch-dark, pervasive blindness with no bearing for direction. Gordon felt weightless now, his injuries nonexistent.

And then again, in this sudden dark, somehow he recalled the alley and his last memory there before waking up confused and disoriented at Marie’s funeral, hearing her voice there, too, pulling him to herself.

“Hold my hand in the dark.”

Then, just earlier that same day, arriving in Chicago and at this place, and falling into a murky confusion after being drugged by whatever Becca had put in the water.

Her voice had been there, too.

“Hold my hand in the dark.”

Did that even happen? Had he gone to Florida? Had he left his mother-in-law Delores in Pennsylvania to face this insane new world on her own? Had he been so selfish?

But it all this had occurred. He’d been drugged in the staircase. That much was certain. And maybe that’s where he was now, still intoxicated. But even as he tossed about in this dark void, he knew that wasn’t true. He’d moved on from there. The others had found him - Charlie and the rest.

And somehow he was - where?

In a black hole?

Surely not, else he’d be dead. And as all these thoughts rallied for occupancy in his brain, he couldn’t process it all in the ramshackle of words and memories.

Marie.

He’d heard her voice. He was sure of it. Each and every time. He’d heard her voice and was unavoidably drawn to it.

How badly he wanted to believe it was her. How he’d lived so long and was ready to be with her again — assuming that was possible, that there was somewhere beyond this place and time and world where loneliness and hurt and confusion and sadness had prevailed for far too many years, holding him down like chains wrapped around his throat, and losing Marie and Hewing Grocery and any hope of any future that together they may have lived.

Why hadn’t he done more after she was gone? Why had he waited?

And why was it that, when the second chance presented itself after the blackness hurtled everything backward in time, he still took wrong paths - ending up in Chicago via Key West — and now this blackness?

This.

“Gordon?”

Suddenly, within the atramentous blackness, there was a flash of light. It wasn’t like lightning, but gentle, like the one time he had surgery to have his tonsils removed as a child, and the way the room warmed and came into focus within a gradually dimensioning haze of cloud as the anesthesia wore off, drifting away as the edges of his vision, from blurry to clear.

The cart was gone now, and he was standing in the aisle of Hewing grocery. Everything was lit up and bright. Everything seemed to be made of light, and it was as it had been in the early days. There was the bright linoleum, freshly mopped. Droplets of drying rain, having just washed away the exterior windows, left them reflecting tiny rainbow patterns on the floor around where Marie stood in a bright white sundress, her brown hair shining and clean, pulled back into a ponytail, held together with a white ribbon. She stood facing Gordon as she smelled a peach and inhaled deeply.

“I could eat this right here and now,” she said to him and smiled, revealing her perfect line of teeth. Her blue eyes sparkled like starlight. “You have to smell this, Gordon.”

Gordon was confident that this moment had never happened before. It was not a memory or even a dream.

“Marie?” Gordon said.

“Hello, sweetie,” she answered.

“I don’t understand.”

“Smell this,” she instructed and came so close to him that he could feel warmth radiate from her body.

She delicately placed a hand upon his shoulder and held the peach to his nose with the other. He inhaled deeply as he stared into his wife’s eyes.

“It’s wonderful,” Gordon said.

“No more dark,” Marie told him, her beautiful smile wrinkling her eyes ever so slightly as she wrapped her slender arms around his neck in a warm embrace, pressing her body against his for the first time in over forty years. The smell of peaches was everywhere now, and Gordon allowed himself to fall into it and away from everything else.

“No more dark,” she whispered into Gordon’s ear as he wrapped his arms around Marie’s slender waist.

Photo by Carolina Pimenta on Unsplash