Matt Cowper - The Clerk

He described how Orianna had given her notice on Christmas Eve, and how Vernon and she had agreed to a five-day notice instead of a two-week one. Her last night had been the 29th. Thomas wasn’t there. He hadn’t talked to her since the night of the Christmas Party, and he had no intention of being part of any farewell ceremony Vernon or anyone else might plan. Vernon tried to talk to him about all of this, since he seemed to know there had been some sort of disagreement between them, but Thomas had evaded him each time.

Next Thomas talked about his sister. He described their Christmas Eve dinner, and how Emily had suddenly raged up to her room. He placed a weirdly hysterical Dan on a front lawn in a quiet subdivision, and dragged a Jetta across said lawn and out into the vastness of Raleigh. He told Reggie how he’d fallen asleep instead of dealing with the drama.

He woke up from his soon-to-be-forgotten dreams with a parched mouth and a strong sense of guilt. Color was coming back into the world outside, but the sun had not yet risen. He pulled himself out of the sensual bed, sloshed some water in his mouth, took an epic shit, and went in search of a family member. He found everyone easily: they were all downstairs on the living room sofa, save Dennis, who was still sleeping contentedly. No one said Merry Christmas. They had, Thomas learned, been up all night waiting for Emily to return, and their vigil had taken its toll. His pajama-wearing parents looked haggard, but Dan’s appearance was downright shocking: he was startlingly ashen and hollow-eyed, and his hair, usually so well-combed and well-oiled, now looked like a bird’s nest, if the bird who’d built the nest had gone insane and forgotten its centuries-old nest-building instincts.

Thomas was strangely enlightened to learn there were actually honeycomb-licking bears on his pajamas, not sailboats or dinosaurs.

The accusing looks of the family suggested that, while Dennis may have been tacitly excused from the vigil due to his young age, Thomas was a grown man and should’ve counted down the dark minutes with them, especially since it was really his fault Emily had run away. Thomas apologized weakly, although no one had actually denounced him.

They made room for him on the couch, and he joined the vigil, proud to finally suffer with them. But after two minutes, he felt embarrassed because he’d crumbled beneath his family’s accusing stares, and he reasoned that suffering was pretty much pointless. He asked if Emily had contacted any of them in any way. She hadn’t. He asked if anyone had called Emily’s friends, her co-volunteers at the rape crisis center, or anyone else who may have acted as a port for Emily’s storm-tossed ship. No one had; Dan said he wanted this kept “within the family.” Thomas asked what they had been fighting about last night. Dan stated with almost childish obviousness that they’d had “a major marital quarrel.” Had they had any other quarrels recently? No — well, sort of, but nothing major like this. Thomas sighed and got up from the couch to go get some breakfast, to the disapproval of all. As he walked away, his mother started telling a story about the fisherman Emily made out of clay in the third grade, and his father told her to quit going off on tangents.

About half an hour later, Dan’s phone buzzed. He snatched it from the coffee table as if it were a bomb about to go off — which it was close to being, metaphorically. His fingers were shaking so badly that it took a few tries before he could successfully open the text message.

“What’s it say?” Jean asked timidly.

Dan pored over the message for another small eternity. The suspense was so thick that Thomas, who was munching on his fourth Eggo waffle, would have felt justified in grabbing the phone from his brother-in-law and reading the message himself. Glancing at his parents, it looked like they felt the same way.

Finally, Dan replied: “It says, quote, I need to spread my wings. I’ll be in touch. Don’t worry about me, end quote.” Before anyone could comment on this, the phone was sailing through the air towards the wall. Thomas expected an electronic explosion, with chips, wires, and cracked plastic flying everywhere, but nothing of the sort occurred. The phone was as tough as a brick, and it thumped loudly against the wall and fell to the hardwood floor, apparently unharmed. The wall itself actually sustained more damage; a small indentation now marred the off-white paint.

“That bitch! That selfish, idiotic, self-centered bitch !” Dan raved, pacing back and forth. “All I put up with, the long hours I work at the firm, and she runs away like some, some, hippie named Sunshine, and all she feels obligated to do is send one lousy text message to me! I thought she was mature! I thought she was an adult! Now I don’t… there’s a man involved with this, there has to be! That sneaking adulterer!”

“Now, now Dan,” his mother-in-law cooed, “we don’t know anything for certain…”

“Shut up! Stop defending her! You’ve been trying to convince me she’s ‘just had a spell’ all night. She’s not your perfect little daughter! She’s a heinous, lying whore , and by God, I’m going to do something about it!”

“Control yourself, Dan,” Frank Copeland commanded, rising from the couch to challenge his son-in-law. “You’re not going to talk to us this way.”

But Dan ignored his father-in-law. However, the “something” he was going to do had not yet been determined, so Dan stood there, momentarily lost, his figure trembling in the charged air, his hair even wilder than before, the formerly innocent bears on his pajamas transformed into mauling beasts.

Finally, Dan, perhaps emulating his wife, ran outside, hopped into his Touareg, and backed out of the garage. However, he immediately encountered the same problem his wife had had: Thomas’s Malibu and his parents-in-law’s Traverse blocked him in. He madly spun the Touareg around, and now the emulation became complete: he zoomed across the yard, bumped up onto the road, and was on the hunt, or whatever it was he thought he was doing.

The rest of Christmas day was mostly spent trying to track down the fugitive Dowlings. Dennis appeared eventually, looking disheveled and half-blind, like all just-woken teenagers. He listened as his grandparents informed him of the terrible, terrible events that had blighted an otherwise happy Christmas, but he refused to be traumatized, despite his grandmother nearly making him traumatized by asking him at least ten times if he was.

There was some present-opening after lunch, and Thomas saw in his parents the same anti-consumerist feeling he always had after everything had been opened. They frowned at the scattered wrapping paper and the needless gifts, and they only reluctantly reached into the personalized stockings hanging from the mantle. All of it seemed so pointless in light of what had happened to the family.

Dennis, however, persisted in acting normal. He’d energetically opened his presents and thanked everyone profusely, then returned to his room and fired up the Xbox.

Dan returned a few minutes after sunset. Where had he been? “Around.” Had he found Emily? “No.” Well, what had he accomplished, if anything? “I calmed myself down, which, believe me, is very important right now. Now excuse me — I’m going to take a bottle of some sort of liquor to my room, along with a bucket of ice and a glass, and I’m going to stay there for the rest of the evening. Don’t bother me.” No one did.

The next day, Thomas packed up as soon as he woke up. He had to work that night, and while he could’ve called Vernon and gotten the day off, he needed to escape this insane asylum. Dan had emerged from his cave and was prowling around the house, staring at old photos and mementos, as if trying to figure out a way to return to those golden days. Jean’s optimistic warbling had gone into overdrive, since she felt she had to battle the gloom that had settled on the house, like an elvish princess battling a dark lord. (She’d just read a good fantasy novel with that plot.) Frank Copeland frowned and muttered, since this wasn’t a problem he could immediately solve in the bull-headed Frank Copeland way. Only Dennis remained unconcerned; he seemed to regard the whole situation as an overblown comedy, the kind where you laughed at the actors for their ridiculous performances, not because the gags were actually funny.