Day 217 - Junk Story

Junk Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Edward tried to complete forty laps every morning, but couldn’t always make it. He knew it was good for his health, but there were days where he just couldn’t find the motivation to push himself. He had good days and bad days and lazy days and lack of time days. Some days the water was too cold. Some days his muscles were too sore. And some days he just didn’t care. That was how things worked. He just didn’t care. But he would then make himself a deal. He told himself that the next day he’d make up for it by pushing himself into doing more. That didn’t happen very often, but every once in a while he actually tried. Mostly, he was happy if he completed some of the laps, most every day. Routine was its own achievement.

Edward mixed up the number of laps and the style of swimming. He knew that was important. Variation. Sometimes slow, sometimes fast. He wanted a full body workout. During his younger days he had torn his rotator cuff and shredded his left knee pretty badly trying to perform needless motor cycle stunts. He wasn’t a brave man, but he had been a foolish young man. His middle aged body was quite bitter. The water was supposed to help. The low impact exercise was supposed to work the muscles and have a gentle soothing effect on his joints. He knew it helped. He didn’t know how much, but he knew it helped.

The moon was still out. The water was cold and he could still see the moon. He wasn’t swimming any earlier, but the season was starting to shift and so the moon was still out. Soon it would be too cold to swim in the morning and Edward would have to switch to the afternoon.

There were streaks in the sky. There had been streaks in the sky for several days. Edward didn’t know what it was, but he assumed it was something burning up in the atmosphere. He had seen images of the space junk that circled the planet and had read that sometimes satellites hit other satellites creating a wide spread of new space junk. There were supposedly hundreds of thousands of bits of debris floating around in orbit, making it hard for new launches not to hit something. Edward wondered how dangerous it was for the astronauts that had to navigate the space junk. It was funny that even with infinite space mankind had somehow managed to fill it all up already.

After a few days Edward stopped noticing the space streaks. He focused on his forty laps. He pushed himself, trying to add an extra ten. His shoulders were feeling good and he was sure he could handle it. He wanted to build his cardiovascular system. He wanted to be healthier.

Most space junk ended up being relatively small. Most of it was less that a centimeter in size. Most of it would burn up in the atmosphere. Not all, but most of it anyway.

Edward pushed himself to fifty laps. He never knew what hit him.

Day 216 - Values Story

Values Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

It started with a mugging. It wasn’t well planned. It was more of an experiment just to see if he could do it. Kip found out that he could and that he sort of liked it. It wasn’t the money; there really wasn’t that much money. He wasn’t a thrill seeker. It was more about the sickness in his stomach, the fear of getting caught and the painful disgust he felt with himself once it was all through. Somehow that was the part that he ended up liking and wanting to recreate.

Kip wasn’t really a criminal sort. He was antisocial, but had always played by the rules growing up. He respected authority and didn’t have any need to rebel and exhibited no violent tendencies and never seemed to embrace immoral proclivities. Kip was brainy and thought too much. He had too few friends and always felt the need to keep proving himself to the friends he did have. He never felt comfortable with other people and had a hard time accepting them and being accepting of himself. Still, he was hardly a criminal.

The muggings continued, but soon Kip decided to try greater and larger crimes. He tried vandalism, defacing and destruction of property. There was no money in it, but he wasn’t after money.

At one point Kip decided he wanted to test himself and see what he was capable of. He had little respect for his fellow man and late one night decided that whatever boundary he wanted to test and push, it should involve some sort of confrontation and exploitation against them. He didn’t set out to be a criminal, but it was something he thought he could get away with and live with. He didn’t think he could actually handle murder or rape or anything requiring a great amount of physical violence.

Muggings and destruction of property seemed fitting together because they both required a lack of respect for other people or other people’s things. That he could handle.

He didn’t expect to change, but that was out of his control. Mugging someone wasn’t enough. He grew numb to the experience. Breaking something wasn’t enough. The act lost the sense of revenge against an uncaring universe. Soon muggings turned to larger scale theft – either from stores or from homes. And the destruction of property grew and grew until he was leaving the locations he stole from in total shambles.

Later he began burning properties to the ground. He didn’t care about what he stole anymore. He became much more fascinated in the destruction of things. He had no value system anymore. He saw no worth in the places he went or the things he saw. All he had was a blind rage towards them and the desire to destroy them.

Kip murdered a man in an alleyway behind the man’s jewelry store. Kip wasn’t after the jewelry or the money. He wasn’t after the destruction of the store either. It had all lost its effect. Kip destroyed a life to try and feel something again. He thought that should have been the ultimate sickening feeling of power and pain. He knew other people valued life above all other values, so he expected to feel the most from this act.

He felt nothing. He was empty inside. Dead. Either he never had anything inside himself or he had destroyed it long ago. He didn’t know which. He had no value anymore. He was no value. He no longer knew how to recognize a value. And for that he felt a twinge of sadness and pain. He knew it was over. There was nothing left.

Kip turned the gun on himself and felt a moment of sickness in his stomach. There was a brief second of doubt, a slight stirring that made him think that there could possibly be something human still inside him. But whatever it was, it was small and weak and shallow. He was tired. He had hurt for so long and so often that he just didn’t have any pain left to feel. He knew he could pull the trigger and he knew he wouldn’t feel anything. And maybe that was the only thing stopping him. He had only ever destroyed things that someone somewhere placed a value on. If he had no value to himself, then there was no real loss or destruction happening. There could be no value in the act.

He put the gun down, not sure what to do. He was lost for the first time in a long time and had no plan or purpose or next step. He knew his crime spree was over, but he had no idea what his next step could be.

After a while, Kip wandered off. He was gone and aside from the few lives he had hurt, he would be forgotten. He wandered off and it was like he had never been there to begin with. He was just a broken shell, hardly worthy of being called a man, just some shadow wandering off in the night somewhere.

Day 215 - Recorded Story

Recorded Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

“Tell me your story…”

He listened. He recorded.

He was not a doctor. He was not a psychiatrist. He was not a biographer.

He listened. He recorded.

Was he helping them or hurting them? He wasn’t sure. All he did was listen and record it. People assured him there was something there. Maybe it was like absolution. Maybe it was a cleansing ritual. Maybe he was an eraser. Maybe that was what he gave them. A fresh start. Free from the past. Free from before. Then there was only the present or the future. But the sins, the pains, the ‘whatever’ from the past was gone.

That’s what he thought he was doing anyway.

Men always talked about women. The loves. The losses. The ones they would go back to. Even if it was just for one more night. But the ones that always seemed to mean the most were the ones that got away. The ones they wished they could have had. There was always some trade, some deal, some mistake, or some compromise. There was always the thing they would do now, just for that once upon a time chance. It didn’t matter how rich or successful the man. They could be happily married with children. They always talked with regret. There was always at least one story, one woman, one love that could have been. Maybe that was human nature. Maybe that was men. Maybe people just wanted to be heard, to have someone relate and understand. But let them talk long enough and they always got around to some woman.

He cried. He listened to the recordings and cried. The sorrow they felt was his sorrow. The loss was his loss. He was an empath and it tore him up inside. Their pain was placated and pardoned. But he still felt it. He still lived it.

He cried.

And then he cleaned himself up and put the recording away. He cleared his mind and tried to move on. It was a futile hope, he knew, but he always had to try.

The tapes sat on a shelf, waiting, wanting to be played again, to be heard.

Day 214 - Barcelona Story

Barcelona Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

The girl at the counter was laughing as she talked about her summer in Spain. She said she had studied Spanish but didn’t really speak any when she and her friends had decided to visit Spain the previous summer during a break from school. She expected to learn. She thought being surrounded and inundated would force her to learn. Instead, they spoke too fast. The accent got to her. She couldn’t follow the conversations. She had been to Mexico and thought she had heard Spanish before, but the Spanish that was spoken in Spain was very different from the Spanish that was spoken in Mexico.

“’S’s are pronounced like ‘th’s. It was always ‘Barthelona’ not ‘Barselona.’”

One of her friends had come back and spoke near perfect Spanish afterwards, but that was a different story.

The girl at the counter sounded like such an American. And she laughed about it. Oh, how she laughed about it. She didn’t care. She didn’t realize how ignorant she sounded or how innocent and young she really was. Being innocent and young was so beautiful sometimes. It was hard not to be charmed by innocence and youth. And the fact that she was beautiful in that childishly young way didn’t hurt either.

Randy knew she was young. He knew she was way too young for him. And usually he preferred a woman to a girl. She was definitely still a girl, even if she was old enough to be a woman. She just sounded so young with everything she said.

Randy never approached her. Never made advances. Never tried anything openly inappropriate. But he was listening in on her conversations. That was probably pretty inappropriate just by itself.

Randy didn’t know her name. She served him coffee and occasionally a bit of food, but for the most part he tried to order from the other employees. He didn’t want to speak to her. He didn’t want to come across as creepy or weird or as a dirty old man. He was sure every time he looked at her that she knew what he was thinking and looking at. He was embarrassed the proper amount. But more important than his inappropriate attraction to a girl at least fifteen years his junior was the fact that he didn’t want to destroy his inappropriate attraction to her. He knew the more he spoke directly to her, the more likely he was to have it destroyed. He didn’t want to ruin what was magic about her. If he knew who she actually was, then the youth and beauty would probably be too far outweighed by the youth and ignorance. Randy was far too old to be legitimately interested in youth and ignorance. There was no way she’d have anything of real note to say. There was no way she could actually relate to him. That he was sure of. Or pretty sure of anyway.

She stood by the counter with a coworker and some customers that must have been friends of hers. One had a child with her. The girl at the counter made silly faces and played with the little boy. Randy decided that someday the girl at the counter would make a great mother. That was all it took, seeing her take part in one simple conversation, and he could write a whole life story for her. Randy was like that.

She laughed and laughed as they all talked about their travels and troubles with foreign languages and foreign lands. Her laugh was so bright and uninhibited and full of life. It was hard not to fall in love with her with a laugh like that. Someone said “Kendra” and she replied. Randy didn’t need to know that. He would have preferred not to have heard that. He decided to pretend that he hadn’t heard it. But after that, hearing the rest of the conversation was a little bit harder, and hearing her laugh had lost a little bit of magic as well. It was all a little too real. She was just a little too loud. A little too young. A little too obnoxious. Still, he liked to hear her. It was a lovely voice. If he closed his eyes and just focused on the voice, he could almost fool himself into believing she was still just the girl at the counter that had trouble pronouncing words in Spanish.

Day 213 - Debris Story

Debris Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

There was much debate about how to properly paint a surfboard. Jay preferred Posca pens, but he had a number of friends that didn’t mind spray paints or more traditional paint and brushes. Jay wasn’t a purist, and he wasn’t one who believed the paint affected the ride. But he didn’t compete, so it wasn’t so important to him. The Posca pens didn’t peel and they were easy to use. He was happy about that. He was after the perfect balance of simplicity and usability. Appearances came second. Jay wasn’t much of an artist, so it only made sense that he didn’t get caught up with the look of the finished product. He wanted something unique, even if it wasn’t the best, but more importantly he just wanted it to work.

Jay wasn’t the best surfer. He had begun surfing in his early teenage years and was competent, but he was safe and had very little skill. He wasn’t a daredevil and he didn’t know any tricks. He wasn’t possessed with a great amount of courage or talent. But he wasn’t trying for a sponsorship, and he didn’t compete, so he didn’t really care about his lack of talent. He was just out for fun.

Most of his friends were better surfers than he was. Most of his friends had big dreams and tried to compete. Most of them weren’t really as good as they hoped.

Jay liked to take pictures of his friends while they were surfing. He wanted to make a coffee table book someday. He liked the fluid motion of the waves. He liked the image of man riding on chaos, controlling nature, besting it, even when it seemed as if nature could crush him at any moment. Water was always being described as calm and peaceful, but Jay had seen the violence and destruction it could bring. That was what he tried to capture in his photography. He wanted to express the danger and the surfer’s resolve to overcome. If he could name his art book anything, that might be it – “Overcome.” He didn’t know if he was a good enough photographer to really create art, but he didn’t let that stop him.

There had been a flood of junk washing up on the beaches. Jay had read about tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan washing up all kinds of human trash overseas. He didn’t know if the trash that was arriving had anything to do with that. He sort of hoped it was from one of the trash islands he had read about. Not that he wanted more trash on the beaches or in the water, but if he had to have it, he wanted there to be a good story behind it all.

Jay took a really good picture of the beach – in one direction was nature, in the other was the city skyline running into the trash strewn water. He liked the juxtaposition of the composition. On one side was paradise, while on the other, all the problems of modern day man.

Jay tried to take photographs of his friends while they surfed in the trash filled water. He was hoping to get the perfect shot of a surfer getting barreled with the trash swirling all around. There was something sick and twisted to it, something to show both man’s domination over nature and his destruction of nature at the same time. It would be a perfect picture of man leaving his mark behind. If he could get a really good shot, he thought he might use it for the cover of his book.

Jay sat on the beach with his camera and his board, looking out at the waves crashing. It was still early in the morning. There were still plenty of waves. It was just that no one felt like surfing.

The dead body had washed up on shore a little over an hour ago. After that, the day was pretty much ruined for Jay and his friends.

The police had been called. Most of his friends had already taken off. Jay waited and hung around. He wasn’t sure what he was going to see or why he wanted to watch it. There was something so terribly macabre about it that intrigued him. He had been so concerned with the trash and the waves and the perfect picture, meanwhile there had been a perfectly good dead body surfing nearby. He felt bad for thinking it, but he really wished he had seen it and been able to get a photograph.