Short Story

When I walked into my grandmother’s room at the retirement community, she asked, “Did it survive?”
It was the first time I’d heard her speak in person since I’d been in Indonesia for six months. She had recently been transferred to the memory care unit.

The wait staff must think we are quite the pair when we come into their restaurant. Seska is resplendent as always, in a green jacket, black T-shirt, purple leggings, shades, long, unruly, dirty blonde hair, excessive jewelry, and her generally disheveled sense of fashion. And I, of course, am me. I have hair shooting out from everywhere.

The late summer breeze felt brisk with hints of autumn. Blowing across the water, it gently tossed her ponytail back and forth behind her. The sun was a deep orange glow, illuminating her chestnut hair with copper highlights as it reflected on the river like fire on water.

Sometimes the big decisions aren’t made: they just happen. My days at Alaska Ocean Products, the salmon cold storage plant that employed me, were numbered. Fish and Game had a date marked on their calendar to indicate the end of the season, and even before that date arrived, I would be up and on my way. Exactly in which direction, I had not completely decided.

From above, the college was a series of rectangles. Cinderblock buildings painted industrial grey, a color somehow even more drab and unwelcoming than the standard cinderblock shade. The poorly maintained quad at the heart of campus was almost always empty aside from the occasional student trying to read on a blanket stretched out on the patchy grass.

Bruno tried to shake off the dust from his black velvet slippers and beige silk pajama legs as he walked along the dirt road. But it was no use. The dirty grains stubbornly clung to his clothes no matter how hard he tried to shake them loose. He stopped and looked around at the unknown landscape, feeling like a prisoner who managed to escape, but from where and from whom he hadn’t a clue.

Michael was trying to remember just when they’d started calling it “Atlantis.” He knew it had been much later than the first Central District Project, the one that included the combination office-condominium tower complex. Back then, they still radiated enthusiasm for a big project, and after that one had failed, they were too hurt and angry for that kind of ironic wordplay. Yes, it had been well after CDP, but when?