You (Or Everything Happens Every Day) by Geraint Jonathan

You’re the man always last seen departing the station gone midnight. Yours is the face always half hid. You’re the one seems to know everyone’s name, whether they’ve told it you or not. You’ve got that demeanor, at once furtive and hapless, cunning and ingenuous. Always last seen somewhere, the hour either vaguely ominous, midnightish, or not in the least bit ominous, three o’clock any Wednesday being as likely as ten past nine of a Monday. You get my . . . And often miss-able too, gone in a blink, and a shit-eyed one at that. It happens. Any moment now perhaps a cat will yowl and moonlight reveal a figure standing at the corner of Smith Street. I say standing, not lurking or looming or loitering. And the shadow it casts will soon lengthen, as shadows will when the figure in question walks away. I say walks, I don’t say prowls or slithers or slinks. I’m keeping it neutral here. Where and how you show up is none of my business. Or rather it wasn’t my business until you started to make it so. That time on the tractor, swerve taken, and the thing tilting up onto its side and about to roll over. Come evening, there you were, at the end of the drive, leaning against a pillar-box. Thought at first you might be some bod from Immigration, some checker-outer of the farm workforce. Kept my eye on that driveway, I can tell you. Then there was that business with Mosey Pete. I remember how it felt to be on tiptoe all that time while Mosey Pete pressed the blade against my neck. I don’t recall the joke I’d made. That I didn’t wet myself is testimony to an already emptied bladder. It was only later that I realized there’d been someone else in one of the cubicles. My recollection of the shoes glimpsed tells me it might have been you, don’t laugh, funny though it is. You’re free to tell me it wasn’t you, of course. I could be mistaken, mistakes being human. And I don’t doubt there were times I noticed nothing at all. Your being around without my clocking the fact says jack zilch. You might’ve got up close and personal, and I’d’ve been none the wiser. Many a stroll taken over iffy terrain. Many a Keep Out sign ignored. Who knows what happened along? If it was you held the door open for Tilly, I’d have no quarrel with that. That it was you whistling away as the Old Man sat dying I’ve no doubt. I say whistling, but only as I’d say it of the milkman – as in of old, the kind preserved in folk-memory, ever-cheerful of a morn. No malice to his whistling. The world knows that. Same goes for the tuneless kind in the vicinity of the Old Man. It happens every day. No harm intended. Death’s death. And I’ve heard worse whistling. Just as, over the years, I’ve seen figures lean against pillar-boxes, none of them showing the least sign of being anything other than a person leaning against a pillar-box. As I say, I’m keeping the tone neutral. You’re free to deny, as the mood takes you. But it must get tiresome, denial, if overdone. Then again, the opposite of denial would be worse, would be, as they say, ‘inappropriate’. With bells on. About as elevating as having to run around telling all and sundry that oxygen is good for them, and that the sun, lo, rises, and what’s more it then sets. I mean, who the fuck doubts it. It’ll set tonight as it did last night, rise tomorrow as it did this morning. Big deal. Though of course it is a pretty big deal. But you get my gist. So if a sly smile or a workaday whistle is the way of it, then that’s how it is. Smile on, I say.

Next up, shouldn’t wonder, you’ll be charming the janitor while he fixes the lift in this building. He has his work cut out for sure. Or one night you’ll be walking out of the station just as clouds black-out the moon, and just as I, in my forgetfulness, the last bus having left, agree to go halves with you on the taxi fare home.

Geraint Jonathan

Image – A Male shadow against a stormy, cloudy sky. From pixabay.com