Two Over Easy All Day Long by Shari Lane

Author:Shari Lane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blazing Sapphire Press
Published: 2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Curate's Egg

Out the back door, past the dumpster that had housed Sam's body, and down the street again. More dawdling, more pondering. He takes a few random turns, wandering streets he's never explored before. Mostly they lead to dilapidated houses staring forlornly from their window-eyes.

An inhabited house is a testament to hope. The house announces to all who pass: I am lived in, life happens here. Fat tender toddler feet will dance on my lawn, there will be lovemaking in my bedrooms, perhaps even in the kitchen; Aunt Cecelia will drink too much beer and pontificate on politics and pass out in my pantry, Marco will wrestle with adolescence on my balcony and lose the battle, parents will hang their heads in despair at the impossibility of parenting, and grandparents will sit on my porch and smile in sympathy and a little vindictive pleasure that it is no longer their burden to carry, this impossibility, they can merely watch and meddle and criticize and then go home to their own house where whining and urinating on the floor are the provenance of the senile overweight dogs, and dinner can be a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream if you damn well feel like it.

When no one inhabits the house, it is bereft, but still there is hope. A fresh coat of paint and a liberal application of fescue-blend grass seed is all that is needed, the house believes.

Tony passes the houses, pushing aside their silent hopes and griefs. He comes upon a massive building he hasn't seen before, a community center that was built through the generosity of John and Martha Lanyard, according to the bronze plaque on the grass. A memory stirs in his mind: Welcome, Tony. I'm Roj. That's short for Roger, in case you're wondering. Roger Lanyard. Presumably John and Martha are related to Roj. It seems there is no escape from the toxic influences of that man.

It is a Thursday in the middle of October. All the children who might otherwise be cavorting or lurking or whatever else a child does in a community center are presumably in school. The huge building is mostly silent. Like everywhere else in this town, the community center feels abandoned, a place for people where people aren't. He remembers reading on Wikipedia that there are fewer than four thousand people in Motte and Bailey, but most of them seem to be missing in action at any given time. In one of the vacant shops he passes every morning on his way to work, there is a newspaper article taped to a dusty window, proudly proclaiming a Revitalization Plan. He thinks back to the Latin classes obligatory in an East Coast private college preparatory high school. "Vita" means "life." Revitalization: the act of breathing life again into something dead. Can a town be revitalized if the people refuse to show up for the effort?

He walks on, shoving his hands into his pockets for lack of anything else to do with them, but that turns out to be a mistake.

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