Chapter 2: Just Add Soda
Daniel walked through the parking lot to his home. As he passed the gas station the lone attendant did not even raise his head from his phone. As he passed the laundromat he saw an old woman as she stared off into space, her eyes full of distant memories. Past the town’s diner a group of old truckers smoked and laughed, clustered together in their grey shroud. Their guffaws echoed off the walls of the nail salon, that became a pizza place, and had now closed entirely.
Daniel’s mother had said that the city had once been a major center of manufacturing, but it had been so long ago no machinery was left standing testament to that gilded age. The names of that age’s heroes on placard and sign post had faded, erased by the hands of sun and wind.
He passed an abandoned lot of car parts rusted into a skyscraper for groundhogs and foxes. A truck left abandoned was so covered in moss that it seemed to return each day more to the Earth.
As Daniel walked the sun lowered and the shadows stretched longer. Without a car, Daniel was forced to walk along the whisper thin shoulder along the road to get home. Several cars whizzed by him, but none stopped.
It was near dark when Daniel got home. Home was an old town house on the corner with a long front porch. The roof’s shingles had been half torn off in a storm and the landlord was always quite silent when his mother asked when he would get the roof fixed. The townhome had once been painted a bright yellow, but the paint had flaked off in half a dozen places to reveal the brick beneath. The landlord was silent on when he planned to repaint that too.
Even though the house itself had seen better days, the grass was neatly mown and there were pillows on the chairs outside on the porch, painstakingly embroidered with dozens of bright flowers.
To the side of the townhouse sat an abandoned lot, filled with grass and meadow flowers. Alongside the flowers were hundreds of plastic bottles, tin cans in various stages of rust, a few shopping carts, kids skates and alarm clocks, long rotted nightstands and chairs that had long fallen to rot. Broken glass, spread across it all, twinkled in the first rays of moonlight.
Daniel went inside to the kitchen. The kitchen was the specific bland tan from the seventies; tan floor tile, tan cabinets, tan backsplash. The oven door was taped to the oven. The ceiling fan rotated loudly. One propeller had fallen off weeks ago, and was now taped back crooked. As their rent was late, Daniel and his mother had not even asked about getting that fixed.
“You’re home early,” Daniel’s mother Becca said. “Good! The chili is just about ready.”
Becca’s brows furrowed as she looked at his face, her eyes trained detectives to the corners of his down turned mouth, his shoulders that weighed heavy, his eyes that would not connect with hers because they would give his guilt away that he had lost his job. He had no idea how they would make rent without it.
“Everything alright?”
“I’m fine,” Daniel said and sat down at the kitchen table.
“Here,” his mother took a bowl and spooned chili into it.
“Thanks,” he said and started to eat.
“How was your day?” Becca asked as she sat down.
“Good,” Daniel said.
The two of them ate in silence.
“No chance Dad called and said when he would be by tomorrow?”
Becca’s spoon stilled, “He said he just texted you about tomorrow a few minutes ago.”
Daniel looked at his phone.
Hi, Carrie and Maddie have both gotten the flu and Judith needs my help here. Rain check?
Becca watched him as he read the message.
“How about we do something fun tomorrow? There’s a farmers market out in Lucas that you might like, I thought about selling some of my embroidery there…”
Daniel looked at the refrigerator. On it was a Christmas card of his father’s new family. His father, Don, stood next to his new wife Judith with their two blonde twins, Carrie and Maddie, clad in matching outfits and complete with toothy smiles and pig tails. Behind them was their new house, a house that had all of the shingles on its roof and not a flake off the paint of its walls.
Daniel got up and took his soda and his half-eaten bowl upstairs. He could not eat with that picture in the same room. He stepped out onto his room’s balcony. The balcony was sloped on one side, most of the paint was striped off, and the railing was not so much wood as a compilation of splinters that had yet to fully split off.
Daniel sat against the wall. He opened the soda and chugged half of it.
He looked at the moon that shone over the abandoned lot, casting the trash in sharp relief. He took out the silver seed from his pocket and looked at it in the moonlight. It shimmered in his hands. As he rolled the seed he thought back to the many different versions of himself that he thought he would be in his childhood.
There was never time for camp,
no money for skates,
no time to see if I could be great,
no chance to see what kind of great I could be,
Yet under the moonlight my heart — -
it yearns for something,
My hands can’t draw it’s shape,
and my eyes can’t see it’s lines,
but yet it reaches
to the corners of my mind,
I want something more,
but more of what I can’t be sure.
There was never money for the movies,
to dream myself the hero on the big screen,
no time to study,
to make my mind a ticket from this place,
No connections to contact,
to bring me up to bat.
Maybe not get a home run,
but I would be happy to run
under a sky where I could get my pitch.
No money to fail at a lemonade stand,
to see where I would land,
I hear a whole world is out there,
and all of it is out of reach.
No time to define this feeling,
when rent is due,
and so it’s left in me unspoken
Even if a star were to fall,
no wish I could call,
For I have no words to describe
Just scream “more” to the sky
more to this life that I’m left with,
more to this road that I walk,
more to the minutes I can grab,
more acts to my story
than the blank pages I see
but more is four letters and I can’t afford them,
so even this simple wish I cannot cast to the sky,
stars you’re off from work tonight,
as there won’t be any wishes
from me.
Daniel flicked the seed off the balcony. It soared through the air and landed somewhere in the abandoned lot. As Daniel got up he knocked the soda bottle off the balcony. It too soared into the air and disappeared along with the seed into the abandoned field.
Daniel felt a second of remorse, but it was not like there were not hundreds of other bottles in the field. He shrugged and went inside.
However, as fate would have it, some of the soda he spilled had splashed onto the seed. And while his wish was not fully formed, the theory of magic is more art than science, so not fully formed wishes seemed to count too.
As Daniel slept the seed unfurled. It sent long, thin silver strands out through the fields, out to the road, and on to the surrounding area. The near abandoned town was filled with the most exceptional filaments, unfurling like flowers to the morning air. They were only visible to those who could see things not as they are, but as they might be.
The silver strands spilled into Daniel’s room, ran across the floor boards and curled around his sleeping form. They twined through his hair and curled around his toes to form a cocoon-like structure around him as he slept softly.
Daniel awoke that morning to a tapping on the glass. He threw off his covers from over his head. His covers had images of spaceships on them, an elementary school remnant of when he had hoped to be an astronaut. His walls were covered in old and peeling music posters from when he wanted to be a musician. A guitar stood in the corner, half covered by an old sweatshirt which was covered by a slightly less old sweatshirt. In stacks on the table were SAT books from when he had hoped to go to school. This was before he learned how much money it would take.
Golden light poured into his room. In the light of day it was possible to see that his covers were stained and old dishes covered most of the flat surfaces of the room.
The tapping continued. Daniel looked outside to see a small squirrel. It tapped on the window and then held its hands together as if asking for something. Daniel went to the window and gingerly opened it.
“Please sir, might you spare a walnut?”
Daniel yelped and fell back against his bed so hard that he flipped over it, taking his covers with him.
“Everything alright up there?” Becca called.
“Yeah yeah!” Daniel shouted back as he slowly lifted his head up from the side of his bed to stare at the squirrel. It had overturned his old bowl of chili and sniffed at it.
“Not a walnut. Decidedly not a walnut.”
“Yes, I know that is not a walnut.”
The squirrel skipped to his desk, where he sniffed an old bowl of cereal, then to the ground where he clamored into a bag of half filled Doritos.
Daniel looked dumbfounded at the squirrel as it hopped over his feet to a Pringles can on his speakers.
“I don’t think I have any walnuts.”
“But how will you not get hungry in the winter?”
Daniel did not know how to respond to that. He could not get over the fact that the squirrel responded to him at all.
“How…how are you talking?”
The squirrel paused in his foray through Daniel’s room. “The way I always have. Maybe now you’re finally listening,” the squirrel said with a shrug then disappeared under his bed.
“Amadeus promised there was food in here…” the squirrel said from under his bed.
“Amadeus…,” Daniel thought, “Is this Amadeus an old man, with a suit..?”
The squirrel did not get a chance to reply because Daniel’s mother called, “Daniel, can you come down? There’s someone here to see you.”
Daniel’s heart thumped in excitement. Perhaps Daniel’s father had actually managed to get out of taking care of the twins.
The squirrel emerged from the bed and looked at him quizzically.
“Coming!” Daniel shouted down, and pushed off his covers. He struggled to find where he had set his jeans the night before.
“Go away!” he hissed at the squirrel as he put one leg through a pair of jeans he found on the ground.
The squirrel shrugged and darted out the window.
“What?” Becca called up.
“I wasn’t talking….” Daniel started to say, but trailed off before he could finish, to you. That would bring up the question of who exactly he was talking to, and he did not want his mother to think he was going crazy.
He ran down the stairs, taking them in twos, but stopped dead in his tracks as he saw the person in the kitchen was not his father.
It was the old man from the other day.
He was sitting next to Daniel’s mother in the kitchen sipping a cup of tea.
Daniel’s mouth dropped.
“Daniel, good, you’re up. I was just telling your mother about your new job.”
“My…my new job?”
“Yes,” the old man sipped from his cup. “I told her how you quit Frank’s Provisions.”
“Daniel, you never said you quit,” Becca said to him. He could sense the disappointment in her eyes. And perhaps the fear too, that now that he had quit they would not be able to pay rent.
“…to come work for me.” the old man added as he set down his cup.
“I have bought the land next door and plan to build a garden. I have hired Daniel as a gardener.”
“Oh!” Becca exclaimed, “That is fantastic. Daniel, you didn’t tell me about this!”
“Um, yeah, sorry….the opportunity kind of took me by surprise.” Daniel stepped forward into the kitchen.
“Now, I had best be getting the supplies ready.” The old man stood up.
Becca stood up too and shook his hand, “Thank you, thank you so much for giving Daniel this opportunity, Mr….?”
“Amadeus,” Amadeus squeezed his mother’s hand warmly.
“Daniel,” Aamdeus turned to him, “When you finish breakfast, head on over.”
“I don’t usually eat breakfast.”
“You’ll want to today.”
