Whitney Collins - Big Bad - Stories

On the first morning in the new apartment, Spencer looked out at the reservoir and stretched. He didn’t feel anything. Neither remorseful nor refreshed. He just felt nothing. Which was how he wanted it. Before it had always been something.

At work, he ran some numbers, then he had a piece of cake in the break room, then he ran some more numbers. When he went back for a second piece of cake, he ran into Babson, the IT guy, doing the same.

“Good cake,” Babson said. “I think it’s spice. No one ever makes spice cake anymore.”

Spencer just chewed and gave a nod.

“Hey, sorry,” Babson said. “About everything going on.” He brushed some crumbs from one hand onto the knees of his pants. “I heard around.”

Spencer wasn’t sure what to say, so he said, “Well. Life’s no picnic.”

Babson crossed his arms and nodded. “You got that right,” he said. “Even a picnic is no picnic. The last time I went on a picnic, I …” Babson trailed off.

“What?” Spencer said.

Babson looked as though he’d been caught reaching for a third piece of cake. “Oh, nothing,” he said. “I don’t know what I was going to say.”

Spencer felt suddenly persistent, almost pushy. “No. You were going to tell me something. Come on. Tell me. Tell a man a story.”

Babson raised his shoulders and shook his head. “It’s really not that great of a story,” he said. “I just came across an animal is all.”

Babson paused and Spencer stared in a way intended to make Babson feel obligated. Spencer knew it was out of character for him to act as such. It was the first time he was using his predicament to garner pity, to force a reaction, but he felt an urgent and inexplicable need to know the details of the story. “What kind of animal, Babson?” Spencer asked. He surprised himself by calling Babson by name. He surprised Babson, too.

“It was a cat,” Babson said quietly. “Tangled in some wire.”

Spencer felt something close to empathy wash over him; he could feel the very wire on his own leg. “Like barbed wire?”

Babson shrugged. “Yeah,” he said. “I tried to get him out, but it just made things worse.” Babson uncrossed his arms and rubbed his neck. Then he clasped his hands behind him.

“So,” Spencer said. “Then what?”

Babson cleared his throat. “I had no choice,” he said. “I put it out of its misery.”

Spencer held his cake a little higher, intrigued. “Really?” he said. “And how did you do that?” Spencer asked. “How does one go about putting a cat out of its misery?”

Babson gave a weak smile. He looked at the floor, then out the glass door of the break room. He moved in front of the door to block it. “I had no choice,” he said again, almost whispering. “It was the right thing to do.”

Spencer stood in a way that he normally didn’t stand. Unyielding, feet slightly apart, one hand speared in a pocket, the other, paused indefinitely, with the cake out in front of him. Babson looked out the glass door then back at Spencer. “I didn’t have anything on me,” he said. There was a long pause before Babson spoke again. “It was a picnic, for chrissakes. All I had was a corkscrew.”

Spencer stared at Babson for a second to let it sink in. Then he resumed eating his square of spice cake. “Hmph,” he said with his mouth full. “Wowf.”

Babson ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know why I brought all this up,” he said. “I think I was just trying to make a point, you know. That nothing ever goes perfect in life. Not even a picnic.”

Spencer finished his cake. He saw the cat as calico in his mind. He didn’t know why, but he felt certain it was a calico. He thought he might ask Babson what the cat looked like, but then he moved past him in a friendly way and said: “Well. Back to work.”

By the time he reached his desk, Spencer had made up his mind to go on a picnic. He’d go Saturday, first thing. March wasn’t quite picnicking season, but he had his mind set on it. His hope was that he would come across something like Babson had come across. Something that required either saving or slaying. Something that needed mercy. Spencer considered the various ways this could happen: a dog in a well, a duck wrapped in some discarded fishing line, a deer with its legs caught in an old cattle gate. Any of those would suffice.

Saturday was cold and royal blue. Spencer woke and dressed in a new pair of jeans and a new gray sweatshirt and a new jacket that featured a little icon of a basketball player dunking. Spencer had never been a basketball fan, but the jacket was something he could buy now that he didn’t live with people who would ask him why he’d bought it. He made a cup of instant coffee and while he drank it, he watched the grocery bags in the fence flap in the breeze. Then he went to the nice grocery, the gourmet one that sold baskets and macaroons and French cheese and he bought a basket and macaroons and French cheese. He also bought wine. And a corkscrew. When all that was done, he drove thirty miles out of town until he came to a large swath of land that was maybe part of someone’s farm, maybe government land.

Spencer left his car on the gravel shoulder. He climbed over the guardrail and over a fence and he walked until he came to a meadow of dry winter grass tucked between two long stands of walnut and cedar. He spread out his basketball jacket and sat on it. He broke off some of the cheese. He ate a few macaroons. He opened the wine and drank straight from the bottle. He tried to figure out a way to balance the bottle without it tipping over, but it was too precarious, so he had no choice but to drink it all. After a while, he lay back and closed his eyes. It was cold, but he tried to imagine what kind of animal he might come across in a plain place like this. Maybe a coyote or a dairy cow. Maybe a hawk dragging a broken wing. Spencer went in and out of sleep. He felt he was attached to a balloon. He felt he was lodged in a deep crack in the earth. He felt he could not remember his name. Then something came into view. It was the toile camelback couch from the two-story. There in the cold field in his half sleep, he saw what the people printed on it were doing. It was a story. Of a family. Of a woman with apples in her lifted apron. Of two children, a girl tying ribbons in a pony’s mane, a boy sailing a boat with some sort of stick. There was also a man, leaning against a towering elm and playing a flute. It was the sort of world where a father might go out into the world, smiling and properly dressed, and buy his children something. A ball, a kite, or better yet, a cat. It was the sort of sunlit universe where there was little to do. Where the wind never rose above a breeze. Where a husband might show up on his old doorstep and press the doorbell and present his family with a kitten. It was a world where nothing had to be explained. Gifts could just be presented and the presenter could stay or leave. There were no obligations.

At this, Spencer woke fully. He sat up and looked around. The sky was no longer blue but white. He gathered the empty bottle and the cork and corkscrew, the tin of macaroons, what was left of the cheese. He put the things back in the basket. He stood and put on his jacket. Then he walked out of the field and up to a small hill. In one direction, he could see his car, in the other he could see where he had just been. He closed his eyes and saw himself buying the cat. He saw himself ringing the doorbell. He saw himself handing the cat to Melody and Levi. He saw their joy and Cassandra’s sorrow. Then he saw himself leaving. He saw himself leave again and again, over and over. Going from his old house to his new couch until it, too, was completely worn out.