The Deepest Black by Randall Silvis

Author:Randall Silvis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2022-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23.

Spinning my wheels

The day after receiving the miracle medal from Aunt Sara, I was still so unnerved by my memory of the spirit attack, or my near heart attack, panic attack, whatever kind of attack it was, that I began to grieve for the quiet life I used to have, and feared that I might never reclaim it. That kind of thinking can lead to despair and its downward spiral. For many years I had kept myself out of that black hole, safely just beyond the event horizon, by making certain that I always had a goal to work toward. What goal could I turn to now?

A vehicle inspection! Okay, sure, why not? My Jeep’s inspection had expired the previous month, but I had been putting it off for weeks because it would require my sitting in an overheated waiting room for two or more hours while some mechanic got around to attending to my car. Try working on a laptop in such a place crowded with ill-mannered customers and their mannerless children complaining or chattering on cell phones or noisily masticating their Whoppers, incessantly going in and out of the door, all while clamorous mechanics shout to one another and bang their tools around in the echo chamber just a few feet away, and you will understand why I looked forward to the experience only slightly more than I looked forward to having my appendix removed with a rusty spoon.

But it was my only viable option, so off I went to my local garage, laptop in hand. Another damp, gray day, though no rain or mist was falling now. Fifteen minutes after assuming my position in the already crowded purgatory, and with two young mothers talking to one another across the width of the dirty floor while ignoring a total of five rug rats staring and/or standing in front of me and trying to put their sticky hands on my laptop, I called Cara and invited her to lunch at Mobogo’s, a little Vietnamese restaurant a quarter mile from my place of torture. She said she could spend twenty minutes with me but no more because one of her two employees had not shown up for work that day. That was good enough for me, so I pushed my way through the moil of rug rats, laptop tucked under my arm, and gladly started the hike through the parking lot and traffic.

I should tell you a little something more about Cara, I suppose, just to better fill in the picture of her and of our relationship.

The first time we met, we both felt an unspoken kinship with the other. We then spent the next nine hours examining all the things we had in common: both of us grew up feeling like aliens stranded on a strange, hostile planet; both of us avoid noisy people and the venues where they gather; both of us love to travel and prefer to explore places off the beaten path; both of us

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