Author Archive: CalebTheTimeTraveler

#4 Jack

Jack drives to work every day. He commutes alone, from a subburb an hour away from the city. He lives with a wife he knows is cheating on him, and two kids which make the only two reasons he stays with her. And they’re pretty piss poor reasons.

His job is boring, “but it’s a job” he tells himself. He doesn’t go to bars. He doesn’t go to movies. He spends his days at work, and his nights inside, surrounded by his family, and alone. He sighs in the morning when he gets up, and when he climbs into his own, seperate bed, he fails to remember the good times.

He just drives to work every morning, and drives back every evening. And it’s in what would under any other circumstances, be a boring drive, a lament of everyone else’s existence, that Jack looks forward to. That Jack lives for. In his car, in that drive, is when he’s careless, wreakless almost.

It’s not that he drives like he’s crazy, or has an expensive sports car. He’s cautious, and his car is an old ‘97 sedan, the kind that even when it was new, was just a car.

It’s what he becomes in this car, when he’s alone. He puts in his CD, and sings along with the band, who seem to sing about all his wants. He wants to live his life without the care and caution he always shows. He wants to end his relationship with his wife, and leave her with the kids that spit in his face. He wants to quit his job for something exciting, and he wants to finally ask out that girl in the cubicle a few down from his. He wants to buck up, and tell the people in his life, just once, to shut the fuck up.

In his car, he’s who he wishes he was, and who he knows he can’t be. When he opens that door, he knows he has to be the Jack everyone knows and depends on, and not the Jack no one suspects even exists.

One can only guess who he’ll be after the impact…. If he’ll even be anyone.

#1 Tess

She opened her eyes, and like awaking from a dream only then to realize how strange everything was. Her mind wandered the room. She realized every importance, and unimportance. She held the items for their heft, and touched the funiture for their spring. She pushed against a wall, just to see how sturdy it was, and starred into the light in the center of the room, waiting for it to flicker, just to see if it’d burn out by here mere gaze.

She had always known the origin of each item, and the itent of each. The couch she bought off her mother when she had her’s replaced, the Love Seat she bought when she realized why her mother thre out the couch, the fireplace that might as well had been there for decoration as she had never lit a fire in there in her time living here. The DVDs and CDs in their cases, on the shelf, each a story on them and each a story to them. The Books she never read, but always meant to. The painting was there for decoration, a simple sunset drawn by a starving artist she never met, sold at a discount funiture store, bought by an old boyfriend, and left there when he moved out. She used to think it “tied the room together”, or at least that’s what she would say. She never did quite understand what exactly “tieing the room together” meant, but now, she asked who painted it. She scurried to flip it around, hoping for a name. She wondered what paints they used, what inspired them to paint it, where the cloth came from, and what kind of tree the wood frame was. Was it a sunset, or was it a sun rise? Was the sun even moving, was it even Earth? Was it bound by time? was it even something that could even exist? The questions scattering in her brain. She stepped back from the painting, just staring at it. She extended her hand, and slowly placed it onto the sun in the painting. She stood in almost shock when she could feel the painted fabric beneath her hand. It was cold, so much unlike what the painting depicted.

She stand in disbelief, as a tear ran her cheek. She felt lost, and didn’t understand why she was doing this.

She fell to her knees, hiding her face in her hands. She wanted to dream again. She wanted to know why she only now realized how strange everything around her is. How solidly everything existed around here. It made her stomach churn, and made her head hurt. In a very literal sense, the room, and the world the room represented were all too real for her.