Matthew Flaming studied philosophy and creative writing for several years, before becoming an itinerant IT worker on the west coast of the United States. |
The sure thing by M. Flaming It was night when I first sat down to write this story. My mother had left for a week on vacation, and I sat in the darkened dining room of her house, pen hovering over the ruled lines of a composition book while outside crickets chanted their summer song and a bright waxing moon hung in the distance. Earlier that afternoon, my girlfriend and I had sex on her cheap futon, in the blue light that slanted into her small bedroom. Walking home afterwards, just after sunset, I saw a shooting star slice a brief, shining arc through the hazy Los Angeles sky. That night, alone at home, I felt burdened and overwhelmed by an immense sense of the possibilities that the world contained, pregnant with unspoken intensities. I was seventeen years old. I wrote: Tonight I saw a shooting star, by chance, dropping out of the sky like God's lost penny, like nothing at all. Last year I took a trip by train. To look for connections between these things would be a mistake. Continuity has the consistency of a daydream, dissolving and shifting with each passing moment. Listen to me. This is a pure story. Connections change places, take on different meanings. Parallel lines choose to meet or not to meet based on various astrological factors. There may be numbers behind these words, and things more elusive still behind the numbers. Particles collide and move apart along precisely calculated paths, precisely insofar as they believe in the laws of physics. In theory, the odds against a given event occurring at a given time are almost infinity-to-one against. The odds on nothing happening are even worse. On trains, time moves differently. Stories are told, each with multiple, equally plausible endings. Certain things bring connections into existence where none were before. Railroad tracks, the moon, love. There are prophets in the streets, prophets on trains, in the wilderness, in office buildings. Prophets roam everywhere, each with a future clenched between their teeth. Prophets everywhere, although the Department of Probability denies that this is the case. Railroad tracks, the moon on certain nights. Love. The odds against meeting the same person twice are so impossibly huge, my lover says, that it never happens. A man in Los Angeles says to his wife of twenty years: "I'm leaving you. I'm going to live with my true love, a cocktail waitress in Des Moines." "At least tell me her name," the wife pleads. "I don't know yet," he says. "But she'll be there." On the same night in New York, a woman leaves her husband. "What are you going to do without me?" he asks. "I don't know," she says. "Maybe I'll end up as a cocktail waitress in Des Moines." Certain things bring connections into existence where none were before. Nine years and many thousand miles have passed since I first wrote this story: tonight I sit inside a half-built house in another country, while a new lover sleeps a few feet away. Palm trees rustle in the tropical breeze and in the distance I can see the lights of town across the black waters of the bay. I don't know why I come back to these words, again and again, adding new syllables, changing the ending. I don't know why, but I have a hunch. Particles collide and move apart along precisely random paths. And on the sidelines, God grins and places his bet: He knows a sure thing when He sees one. (c) Matthew Flaming 2002 |
