Petrichor

WINNING ENTRY

Two guys chat on the way to a hospital

It’s not so brown from down here.

The water settles back into a crystal haze nestled in green. A smattering of spirogyra or some slippery species of moss. Below that of course is cobblestone. Worms swim in the puddle or behind my eyes.

The footsteps slow down. Black sneakers on white and the dark grey crus of loose joggers.

He asks in Czech Are you alright?

I sit up slowly. I draw my right hand from temple to cheek. Wet of course, but the only blood is from my scraped palms.

Are you alright? This time in English.

There’s pain in my knee and ribs and temple and my general being. He is older than I thought.

“I’ve had worse”

My bicycle lies in the grass off the road. I see no obvious signs of damage from here.

“Do you have your phone? Mine’s at home. You may have a concussion. We should call an ambulance.”

He has on a light raincoat and doesn’t pause to breath as he talks.

I unzip my pocket and take out my phone. The crack on the screen is a cartoon spider web. Parts of the screen threaten to fall loose from the frame of the phone. Parts of the screen are white. Lab-mouse white. All the color pooled to the middle. Lab-mouse blind.

“No good”

He agrees and we agree to get to St Anne’s.

We head to the park exit. Off the cobbled stone is the tree-sheltered dirt path I was looking for. The rain smell is heady. Sand and wet loam and the appeased specter of winter. The path is all mud, so we head for another exit.

I walk gingerly. He walks my bike. I stop to take a sip from my water bottle. There’s a plum undertaste.

“Why are you cycling in this weather anyway?”

“I didn’t check the weather in the morning”

“How do you not- you have to check the forecast”

“The weather was so nice. For the whole fucking week. Just my luck I guess”

“Yeah. How long have you been here?”

What I should say is Long enough. What I say is “Fair enough. And you? I mean it’s not exactly running weather either.”

I stumble trying to avoid a loose cobble and he asks if I’m fine which I say I am.

The rain pours in sheets and the cars in trickles. We wait under the roof of the convenience store by the bus stop for the rain to stop again. The wood of the store creaks periodically. I accept the sound as a passive feature of the world.

“So you didn’t answer me”

“Answer you what?”

“How come you are running in this weather?”

“I am dressed for the weather”

“You’re training for some race?”

“Not really”

“So why do you have to run today? Now?”

“I guess I needed to be outside. I’ve been- I guess I just needed to be outside.”

I don’t press further.

It may well rain forever. The bus stops. Thankfully, with little splash. It’s the 25. We watch it move on. My good leg feels sore and I shift a bit of weight off it.

“I was clearing out my dad’s place last week”

“He passed?”

“What?”

“Your father. Did he die?”

“Yes, last summer”

“I’m sorry”

“Me too. Anyway we were clearing out the place with my younger son. Everything is heavier than the last. Two of those cathode ray TVs. A table that may actually protect you from radioactive fallout. He has this old couch. The thing must have weighed sixty kilos when it was made. And I’m sure it gets heavier each year”

“Your son must have been thrilled about that”

“Oh oho. Half the time he was cursing. The other half I was. We said we’d get beers after, but we just went home. I don’t think either one of us stepped out of the house yesterday. Food bed food bed food. We were so exhausted. And meanwhile, my wife’s been practicing all week so the music which I adore at other times. The music is in my head like an onion hangover. Anyway, I thought there are worse things than running in the rain”

“I suppose there are. And how’s your son?”

“He’s fine. He got a surprise inheritance. We found my father’s old turntable”

“Where’s he gonna find records?”

“He was more than happy to get my father’s record collection. I guess he’s the kind of young where ‘old’ music is cool. Mostly rock and roll from the nineteen sixties and seventies. I was surprised. I mean you’d expect it to be mostly Caribbean – rumba, calypso. You know? Something Latin with drums and a hint of Africa. He had some-”

“Why would you?”

“What?”

“Why would you expect him to have something Caribbean?”

“Oh he was from Cuba originally. Moved here in nineteen sixty-eight. We actually found a picture from before–I guess from around nineteen fifty-three. He’s being carried on the shoulders of a young man. The guy has a chain and no shirt and he’s smiling, and my father, all of eight years old, looks very annoyed. They have a basket. One of those woven baskets, I don’t remember what they’re called. Some kind of plant weave. Brown”

“Wicker”

“Yes. So this older kid is holding a wicker fishing basket. And my father is sitting on his neck. And they are so skinny and young”

“The fish?”

He laughs. “Not the fish. Well, maybe the fish too. And it’s hard for me to imagine. I mean I have the picture you know? I’m looking at the picture and I still think it’s a trick”

We leave the shelter as the rain lazes into a drizzle. There’s a fluryette of other people hurrying from whatever temporary shelters they were hiding in. Other unfortunates caught in the rain. The weather gamblers and the choiceless and the ill-prepared.

“You ever go there? Cuba I mean. I guess you have some family there”

“Not since the nineties. I guess it ends with him”

“That’s kind of sad. So you’re Brno through and through?”

“I was actually born in Zlin but we moved here when I was quite young, so mostly Brno through and through”

We should take the 6 but there’s construction uproute at Hrncirska. Neither of us is sure if the trams have been replaced with buses or if they’ve been rerouted. We decide it’s maybe best to walk to Ceska and take a tram there.

I wonder if it ends with me. I think of my father and my mother. My sister living at an angle to me and to herself. I think about picnicking by the dam, hydroelectric generators on the horizon, larger than the whole future. And my mother saying Don’t put your foot in the water. And my daughter who will inherit me – in shards and in whole. Quiet at times and loud at times, play-sleeping and then playing and then sleeping. Always a miracle. I think of my wife who I should call as soon as I can. I don’t want her to panic. Eel sparks of lightning behind the fleeing clouds and thunder burps. And I think again, inevitably, of my father.

He asks how my head is and I tell him it hurts a bit but my knee hurts more.

“I’ll need a stream of painkillers. On the bright side, looks like I may be miss work tomorrow”

There’s a schoolboy pleasure in the thought of missing work.

He asks me what I do and I tell him. I have well-rehearsed lines that I use for the part of the occasional party after the nice to meet yous before the ooh that’s fascinatings. I try a bit harder than that. I explain what I do as well as I can.

“You hate it?”

“Not really.” I feel like I owe him more. “I don’t know. It’s not the work itself. I enjoy it. It’s useful work and I’m passing decent at it”

“So you don’t hate it”

“Put it this way. When I have a project, I’m afraid of failing. Who isn’t, right? Still though, there’s something. Kind of long run. There’s something that scares me more”

“You might keep succeeding”

“Exactly”

“Drift into hyper-specialization”

“Yes. Ever into hyper-specialization. Time spans measured in proposals and promotions”

“Salaries and work lunches”

“Team-building exercises”

“And in the end, retirement”

“When all the entropy is spent”

“Not all. I hope”

I think again of my father, not dead but far. All the things you never tell your father. Lightning streaks across the north like the skeleton of some burning tree. Off the main stem, branches of light, all jumping in staggered step. Bright omens like a jingle in light. The wind feels too strong for more rain, blowing the clouds east. There’s a couple across the road. He’s pushing a pram and they have hooded coats and she’s fixing something in his hood. And it’s all part of the same trick. How time compresses as it passes, every year trying and failing to be as long as all the years that came before, and life condenses into habit. How all the things you never tell your father become the things you will never tell him. The thunder, when it arrives, is as advertised. Loud and visceral. When they say something thundered, this is what they’re talking about. The rumbling origins of all superstition and philosophy. I miss him habitually.

We get on the 5 at Moravske Namesti.

Don’t put your foot in the water. And me asking her Why not mum? And her saying Because of the turbines. Which I didn’t know what turbines were and I thought they were some kind of water spirit. And I still think so a bit. In the ineffable recesses where one fears and wonders. I think again of my father and a little of thought itself, palindromic and cannibalistic. The way thought sometimes turns on itself. I think of my daughter and my father and of this almost stranger’s father. Or because of his father and his excised ancestry. I didn’t tell him calypso’s not Cuban.

“I’m sorry about your dad”

One hand on the tram’s side railing, he turns to me and keeps silent for a while. Maybe he worries that the tram’s uphill climb has shaken my brain loose of its nooks and we still have a stop and a half to go.

“Yeah. So am I”

In the waiting room, I hold out my hand and tell him my name. It takes him a second and then he shakes my hand laughing. He tells me his name and laughs some more. I laugh too and my right temple starts to ache some.

The doctor flashes a light at my pupils. First one then the other. Then she asks me some questions and I answer. Unsatisfied, or fastidious, she asks them again in English. I give mostly the same answers.

She says I have a mild concussion and I should take it easy. She prescribes me some painkillers for my troubles and makes an appointment for a femoral x-ray. I ask if I can use her telephone and I call my wife.

At home, I call my mother and she asks how I am. I tell her and she says be more careful and rest and she prays for my recovery. I ask her how she is and we talk about familiar things and the politics of the day. I ask about my dad and she finds him in the house and I hear her tell him I’ve been in an accident. He asks how I am and I tell him I’m taking it easy. We talk for a bit and he gives my mum the phone back. She asks for my wife and I leave them talking while I hunt for my rest before my little demon of joy and joint ache wakes to learn a few more cat’s cradle moves.

On the bed, I yawn and flex my fingers. To test their motion and to see if my hands will hurt. Which they do and didn’t I expect that.

I will call my sister later. I remember the number.