Images

              I take a shortcut home through an alley two hundred feet from the main highway.  Normally, I would avoid such a route when the night is dark, the moon is new and the long shadows hide the images of my nightmares, but security lights guard the back entrances of the businesses between which I hurry along.  And I’m late. So I dare the rutted and graveled track with a peppermint mocha clutched firmly in my right hand and Parachute keeping me company in my CD player.  I skirt the pickup parked parallel to a house on my right and keep an eye out for movement behind the dumpster up ahead.  I can never be too careful in this town.

            I catch movement out of the corner of my left eye and shoot my attention to the second floor window of a local dentist’s office just as the curtain twitches aside.  I wish I hadn’t.

            A woman’s dead face meets my gaze.  My stomach clenches, my skin grows ghost-cold, and I can’t look away.  I don’t know how, but I know she’s waiting.  She’s not waiting for me, but at this moment the knowledge affords very little consolation.

            Disbelief comes to my rescue.  Doubt reminds me of my overactive imagination.  She smells it and without any dramatic flash or puff of smoke, she’s gone.  It’s a few moments before I can collect my thoughts and tame my roiling bowels.  My peppermint mocha no longer tastes quite so delicious and Parachute is an obnoxious noise in the background so I turn them off and toss my cup in the dumpster on my way by.  Before I leave the alley, I risk one more glance over my shoulder to the window.  I’m trembling slightly and my neck nearly refuses to allow my head to turn, but the hairs on my neck are still standing, I feel eyes knifing through the back of my head, and for the sake of my sanity I have to check

            The window is still blessedly empty.

 I don’t take that shortcut anymore.

            I never found out what she was waiting for.

            It’s been a long day and I’m quite happy to close the front door behind me and start the trip home.  My co-worker and friend Tony has caught a ride out to town with another co-worker, but I crave some alone time and elect to catch the shuttle bus as usual.  I carry slung over my shoulder a light hoodie and a heavier field jacket from my walk through the freezing 5 a.m. air.  Now, the 5 p.m. air is dipping from chilled toward icy and I pause in my trek to drop my over-filled backpack to the dirt and shrug into both of my warming layers.  The goose bumps die, but now I’m running slightly behind in my trip to the bus stop.  No big deal.  I’m used to walking fast.  I kick it up a notch and make it in plenty of time (though the wind certainly doesn’t help and my wind is a little harder coming when I arrive).

            The bus stop is a little off to the side of the base hospital.  The whole “campus” is slightly elevated and offers a spectacular view of the surrounding town outside the guarded gates.  A storm is building behind the mountains to the northwest.

            But “building” isn’t the right word.  The distant clouds form an army of atmospheric fury dead set on a catastrophic onslaught.  The dark, heavy bearers of the sky’s angry standards march quickly on the wind around the peak of the foremost mountain, amassing themselves into the storm’s shadowed vanguard.

            The army is moving quickly.  The same wind thrusting itself through my hair is frantically throwing the storm’s front lines toward the town houses only just alighting against the deepening twilight. 

            I stand watching it come—a soldier unprepared, unarmed, and frightened.  Should the storm’s vanguard break over me here, I will be swept away as a breath before a gale.  The hem of my heavy field jacket rises and falls almost rhythmically as the last defenses of sunlight fall before the storm’s onslaught and the outer edges of the town come beneath its shadow.

            Headlights wash over me, startling me out of the battle.  The bus is here.  I pull out my phone, check the display, and glance back at the sky.  Bus is running late.

            Twenty minutes later, as we pass through the main gate and leave the base behind, rain begins to die on the windshield, roof, and windows.  But I am warm and dry.

            A light crowd on the bus tonight.  It’s cold and misty outside and either the bus driver doesn’t know how to operate the heater or the unit is broken.  Naturally.

            The scant crowd is still generating enough breath mist to fog up the windows.  I’m watching out the window for my favorite tree as the fog creeps into my field of vision.  The tree stands on a aside street in Joshua Tree—a town I pass through twice a day Monday-Friday.  The tree looms outside what I assume is an apartment complex and its my favorite because when I pass it in the evening the streetlight directly above it showers it in orange drops of incandescent glow.  The drops roll from leaf to leaf and drip down its trunk in a broad flow broken by the bark’s natural cracks and brooks.

            I’ve seen this tree countless times and each time inspires me with images and a sense of numerous stories and possibilities.  I look for it greedily every night and I’m terribly disappointed if I miss it.

            So I’m looking out the window, waiting for my tree when my vision is obscured by the passengers’ collective breath.  I slip my hand deeper into the sleeve of my hoodie, grasp the edge of it, and use the fabric to wipe a spot clear.

            The outside world disappears with the vapor and through a small opening in the condensation I’m looking out at a world I’ve never seen before.  Though it is night in the world of the bus, it’s sunny and clear through the hole.  Though the bus is running through a moderately small hi-desert town, through the hole I see a vast forest of twisted, bent, and gnarled trees running for miles.  A clearing comes into view and there, in its center, is my tree.  It’s taller in that world; majestic and intimidating.  The scant leaves in my world are full and lush and just turning the breathtaking reds, yellows, and golds of fall in that world.  It is mid January in my world and my tree’s death last fall was quiet and quick, so the display of natural destruction out my window is captivating.  I want to glance around to see if the other passengers can see what I see, but I instinctively know that this world is fragile.  If I look away, I might lose it.

            I lose it anyway.

            The driver finally gets the heater running and the sudden noise and blast of lukewarm air on my legs startles my attention away from the window and down to the heater below the seat in front of me.  I shoot my eyes back to the window, afraid of what I might see—or not see—and my fear is vindicated.  The cold, mist-ridden world is filling the hole as it slowly expands from the heater’s gusts.  The other world is gone.

            We’ve passed my tree in this world, but that’s okay.  After seeing its counterpart in the other world, this one will never be the same for me.

            I have since tried to find that other world again.  When no one is looking, I will lean close to my window, breathe hard on it, and rub a spot clear. 

            But it’s not the same.