Skyscrapers
“Do you ever wonder how you’re gonna live?” Sadie asks me, apropos of nothing, at least nothing as far as I can tell though Sadie’s mind works differently from mine, as we sit out back on the patio after dinner, the pork roast Sadie cooks in the crock pot every Sunday, enough to feed us for a week.
“What’s that?” I ask once it resonates with me what Sadie has said as I was too preoccupied with just sitting, and relaxing, and appreciating the unseasonably mild temperatures for Louisville in mid-February, sunny and sixtyish, fake spring I think of it since surely winter isn’t done with us, and the groundhog agrees. “What do you mean?”
“Well …” Sadie shifts position in her chaise lounge, which suggests that this is something she’s been dwelling on and now it’s going to come out, the way she is, the way she does. “People always wonder how they’re gonna die —”
“They do?” I ask, and I wasn’t intending on cutting her off, but it just happens that way. “What people? Who?”
“Just … people,” Sadie says, as if I caught her off guard. “I don’t know who exactly. I don’t have names. But people, in general, seem to be so concerned with how they’re going to die.”
“Uh …” I start to talk then decide to let Sadie finish.
“Peaceful, in their sleep, just sort of drift off and be gone.” She pauses to take a sip of wine from one of those cheap plastic tumblers we got in Pigeon Forge on our anniversary because we don’t bring our fancy glasses out here and risk them falling off the wrought iron table that’s on its last legs and can no longer stand straight and breaking on the bricks. “Or suddenly, like a car wreck, or a heart attack.” She breathes out, a sort of gasp. “Or, God forbid, a lingering illness, like that girl from work — poor soul.”
“I, um …” I offer, unable to contain it, to urge Sadie along, “but anyway, you were saying …”
“I was saying, does anyone ever wonder how they’re gonna live?” Sadie asks, back on track. “Because that seems to be the more important part, don’t you think? Once you die, you’re gone, so why bother with that. But to live,” Sadie says, and she turns to me, those inquisitive blue eyes, “to live, well, that takes, you know … a lifetime. That’s what we should be concerned about.”
I tell Sadie I know, though I don’t know if I do, but I get what she’s saying all the same. And I’m hesitant to admit but I have, on occasion, pondered my own eventual demise — usually during those sleepless nights when I wake in a cold sweat and for a brief few seconds that feel endless I struggle to figure out where I am and how I got here, and not just here in our bed, but here in my existence. But to wonder how I am going to live, that’s a question I’ve never really contemplated — yet now, no doubt, I will.
“When we were kids, we used to call those skyscrapers,” Sadie says, switching subjects on a dime, as she is apt to do, focusing her attention upward, and above us, an expanse of crisp cerulean, devoid of clouds but marred by crisscrossed markings from the puffy white plumes of smoke and steam trailing the jets on their way to and from the airport on the other side of the park as somehow plans and patterns have evolved to place our quaint Cape Cod and this otherwise quiet neighborhood in the middle of the flight paths. “What with how they scrape the sky like that.” Sadie nods at the planes and the billowing lines they leave as if the angels are arranging elaborate games of tic-tac-toe in heaven.
I tell Sadie I’m not sure what those are called but skyscraper seems to be as fitting a name as any so why don’t we just go with that, and we do.
“Aren’t you curious,” Sadie continues, “when you sit out here and see the skyscrapers, where those planes are heading, or where they’ve been, and who’s on them, what kind of lives those people lead — who they love, who they’ve lost, what gets them going in the morning?”
“Sometimes,” I say more out of sense that that’s what Sadie wants to hear because, unlike her, I tend to be more connected to what’s on the ground than in the air.
“Business trips, or vacations,” Sadie says after another sip of wine and a satisfied swallow, before her demeanor drastically drops, “or to a funeral.” She casts me an anxious glance, her cheeks flushed, probably from both the wine and whatever is racing through her mind. “Even if you do get to fly for free to a funeral, that seems like an awful waste of a plane ride.” Sadie takes a beat to stare into her empty tumbler, though it appears she is further away. “I’d rather take a skyscraper someplace else,” she resumes, “someplace I might by happy not to return from — the beach maybe, just somewhere near the water.”
I’m with Sadie on that, because the beach does sound good to me, especially during this teasing spell of agreeable weather that I’m certain is going to be yanked out from under us when we least expect it in exchange for another few frigid, bleak weeks and I would much prefer to be where the climate is always temperate, and Sadie tells me she does too. So we spend the rest of the evening sitting out back on the patio talking about the beach, and imagining how nice it might be to live like that, just somewhere near the water.
***
This short story is based on characters from the collection All The Things She Says, available on Amazon, for Kindle Unlimited, or order from your favorite independent bookstore [ISBN: 978–1–7375801–5–7]
