Strange Skies by Matt Marinovich

Author:Matt Marinovich
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061877650
Publisher: HarperCollins

I guess some of you, moral snobs that you are, might be licking the fat off your fur right about now. The meal you’ve made of me! And how many of you have been waiting for me to get my just deserts for lying to Lee, for leaving Barb and Jack in the hotel room, waiting for your revenge as I walked like Jesus in my long flowing white robe on that BreathWalk.

I can see your eyes everywhere today. In the plate glass of that Starbucks window. Staring at me from that van. Swerving over Manhattan in your superior little helicopter. Just once you’d think you might have the guts to tell me what you think of me. But no, you still lurk.

I get off at the Seventh Avenue stop in Park Slope. Peer in the window of the cheese shop, all decked out for Thanksgiving. A hundred unnecessary delicacies crammed into the window. Gumdrops and sculpted fig bars and nuggets of crystallized ginger. The rush-hour line already forming at the counter.

And for some reason, it hits me then. It hits me as I’m staring in that cheese shop window. I’m not going to be around in five years. Maybe three. And who knows, I might be dead in one.

Yet I’m staring at a tin of crystallized ginger, and I can hear the happy sounds of people making ridiculously unimportant decisions at the cheese counter.

Are there any firm guarantees I’ll be around next Thanksgiving?

Will anyone miss me?

“Sir,” the aproned counterman says, poking his goatee outside the shop door. “Can you please remove your forehead from our window?”

I lift my head and he takes the edge of his striped blue apron and buffs the skin smudge I’ve left on the glass. This seems to amuse the customers crammed in the store, who seem to be relishing the stricken, idiotic expression on my face. That is, until I keep on looking at them, rooted to the spot. One by one, they turn away, fidgeting with the clasps of wallets or handbags or checking their cell phones. And I turn away, too, walking a few blocks until I enter a used bookstore.

“Can I help you?” an older, frumpy woman says, her green sweater dotted with stray balls of cotton.

“No,” I say, “I’m fine.”

I browse the nonfiction pile by the window, but can’t find anything sufficiently depressing. At a time like this, I need someone truly evil to distract me.

I need Hitler.

But this is a difficult person to ask for in a tiny bookstore in Park Slope, where a large Hasidic woman is reading to her four expressionless sons in the children’s section.

There he is, on the next-to-top shelf. I reach up and Last Mystery of the Third Reich nearly topples on me. I right it just in time, and look over to make sure the Hasidic woman isn’t watching. I look in the other direction, too, and I’m surprised to see Brenda’s husband, Felipe, standing there. Just standing there, back to the window, hands in the pockets of his Ralph Lauren jacket, shifting from one leg to another.

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