Construct Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
It was seven in the morning, it was
inappropriately cold and overcast for a spring morning and the girl with the
dark red hair was just standing in the shallow end of the pool. She wasn’t
wading, she wasn’t walking, she wasn’t treading water, and she clearly wasn’t
getting ready to swim. She just stood there. Andres didn’t know how long she
had been there, but he had seen her ten minutes ago and she hadn’t moved since
then. Perhaps she was acclimating to the water temperature. Perhaps she was
about to make a move at any moment. Perhaps there was a key moment she was
waiting for, some signal to start or call to activity. Perhaps.
Andres
stood in his hotel room peeking through the thin curtain. He was going to go
out to the patio and drink his morning coffee and think and plan and dream about
the day. Instead he got to the sliding patio door, saw her, and lost his nerve.
He wasn’t sure what she was up to, and he was fairly certain it wasn’t
intentionally directed at him, but it was quite disruptive. He wasn’t totally
sure why he was assigning so much power to her presence, but he was. She had
become an enigma, a challenge, and a symbol of his inertia.
Andres leaned in and pressed his head against the
curtain and the curtain against the window. He let out a slow breath, the heat
from his mouth and from his coffee cup fogged a spot on the window through the
thin fabric. She was a mystery to him – he could only see her back. She wasn’t
sexually attractive, but the mysterious nature of her inactivity and half naked
appearance was intensive and exhilarating.
He wanted to open the curtain and reveal himself and
let it be known he was watching her. He wanted to go out to the patio and call
to her and ask her what she was doing. He wanted to go down the pool and check
to make sure she was real and make sure she was alive. He wanted to get in the
water and push her and force her into some sort of action. He did none of these
things. He tried to think about her and her stillness. He tried not to think
about his life and his own inertia. He didn’t want to confront the reason he
was living in a hotel and living an existence that really had no life of its
own. There was no value in facing a life which he had no answers for. So
instead he watched the red headed woman in the pool that refused to move. If she
would just move he might have a bit of hope himself.
He wanted to yell to her, to beg and plead with her
to move. He would not beg. He could not bring himself to bend or beg. He wanted
to ask her for help, as if she held some secret that he solve the riddle to
everything. He could not bring himself to ask others for help. He wanted some
sign that things really would be okay and that the problems and the pains of
life would fade away and things could begin to fix themselves. But she would
not move.
He pressed his head hard against the glass and felt
like crying. He closed his eyes and thought about the past and the hurt of a
future that was unfulfilled and would likely remain unrealized. He hurt and he
hurt those around him and he had no solutions to try and make them stop.
When he opened his eyes and looked again she was
gone, but the water was calm and still, unaffected as water would be if someone
had just climbed out or had leapt forward and begun swimming. Andres remained,
still searching for answers, wondering if any of it had been real; it was
as if she had never been there at all.
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