Man In the Water by Jon Hill

Author:Jon Hill [Hill, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Banzai Press
Published: 2021-10-04T22:00:00+00:00

20

He woke up from the dream to discover that he’d fallen off the couch. The dream—unreachable moonlight shimmering through depths of liquid darkness—lingered for a while after, and relief didn’t erase the feeling of abandonment until he was back on the couch and listening to the tick-tick-tick of the wall clock hanging on a nearby wall. Each second helped escort him to the present and back into Donny’s house. Five minutes later, the nightmare was replaced by facts just as terrible. And the tears began to fall again.

···

Donny came down the stairs and passed through the morning light that was streaming through the dining room window. He was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt that was fading badly around an NFL shield.

“Hungry?” he asked Jack. He disappeared into the kitchen.

Jack was still on the couch, staring into the mysteries of life as seen woven into the throw rug beneath his feet. “No,” he muttered.

“You have to eat,” Donny called back.

“Don’t you have to work?” Jack dropped his head and grabbed handfuls of his hair.

“It’s Saturday.”

Saturday. It’s been a whole week? Jack forced himself to his feet and padded into the kitchen. In some ways, it felt like seven years had gone by and, in others, just seven hours. “Cops don’t work on the weekends?”

“Not this one.” Donny got some coffee brewing. “When are you supposed to go back?”

Jack didn’t think he could ever go back. “The cruise was supposed to last another week.” He didn’t want to think about work. Or whatever would have to be done about his house. He didn’t care. Not right now. Not in light of Ivan’s revelation. That Anna was Stacey.

He sat at the table and stared out into the morning, watching little birds dart around the bushes surrounding the small patio out back. What was it that the Bible said? Something about not worrying for your life, what you’ll eat, drink, or wear? That the birds don’t gather more than they need day to day, and yet God takes care of them? But he’d seen birds fly into plate-glass windows before.

He sighed. God... Stacey didn’t believe in God. He always wondered how she could be so sure that everything existed by dumb luck, that nothing had any meaning beyond whatever some evolved feelings had decided to trick us into believing... But if life was an accident with no purpose or value and the human race wasn’t any better than the rest of the animal kingdom, then no one had the right to hold anyone else accountable for anything.

He knew some said that the concept of God was a product of human evolution, the morality-maker that enabled a greater chance of survival for the greatest species. But there were two things wrong with that. First, if they believed that devotion to a God was seen fit by the evolution they espoused, why then reject it? In rejecting it (at least this was how he saw it, anyway), they were rejecting the wisdom of their own god.

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