Sole Mates

April went for a walk along the path around her neighborhood.  She saw dogs, she saw people, and she saw an everlasting essence of the impression that something was following her path.  Not someone, something.  Last year she had gone to a party with her friend Angel.  Angel wasn’t angelic, she wasn’t demonic, she was in a type of limbo that only occurred on the streets of upper-middle class drop-top hoods and Gatorade bottles that were left to the homeless in some parallel dimension where this type of beauty went unappreciated. 

In April’s last dream, Angel had three eyes.  The center eye saw what was going on in the back of April’s head.  April learned this when in her dream Angel gave a speech about having to live as a type of strange cyclops, and when April thought to herself something unkind, Angel looked up.  Her center eye started to glow, but then she looked down and continued to read.  After Angel’s speech, everyone in the class started to clap and yell loudly, everyone except for April, because she was terrified of the fact that Angel knew what she was thinking.  Angel walked from the front of the class to the back, through the center.  Suddenly a fire alarm went off.  The teacher told everyone to form an orderly line and to walk to the back of the building.  April stood next to Angel.   As soon as they were about to turn a corner, Angel grabbed April’s hand and told her to follow her.  They ran through the halls into a stairwell.  They could see the flames of a fire through a window that was a flight of stairs above them.

They sat down on the steps of the stairway.  Angel looked deep into April’s eyes, and April became terrified of what happened next.  Angel’s center eye dissolved into nothing, and her two eyes formed into one big eye.  Angel looked up to the flames and then back to April, and said, “This happens every time that the justice disappears.”

What are you talking about? April thought to herself.  Then she froze.  Did Angel know what she was thinking?  Whether she did or not didn’t seem to matter.  Angel’s only eye had a tinge of redness into it.  She took April’s hand and opened her palm and traced the lines with her fingers.  “Maybe someday you’ll understand,” April became scared yet incredibly interested, “that these lifelines are what can help you to be free and find what you are looking for.”  April looked at her palm.  She felt a burning sensation where Angel had traced over it.  Then a ball of light jumped from her hand and flew into her face and landed in between her eyes.  She felt her eyes cross for a moment.

Then April looked up at the flames through the window above them.  They had the same form, except that instead of them being red, orange, and yellow, they were blue, green, and purple.  April felt an incredible surge of energy go through her.  A gust of wind behind her assisted her up onto feet and forced her up the stairs.  Angel looked up to her in admiration.  “We don’t call them wings,” she said, “We call them helpers.”  Angel followed April.  They ran up the stairs, back through the halls, to where the rest of the students were outside.  The firetrucks were there, and there were firemen fighting the blaze, blasting it with hoses.  There were a few students sitting in ambulances who had been burned in the fire.  When April looked to her fellow students, she saw balls of light behind them.  Those who had been injured had blue, green and purple spheres of light behind them, those that were unharmed had uncolored lights.  “We all have our own talents,” Angel said to April, “It was my time to pass it on.”   

April remembered this dream as she walked up to April’s house, who lived more or less half a mile away.  Angel’s blonde hair was up in a French braid, and she wore a headband with a heart pattern on it. 

“Where to?” April asked Angel.

“How about the mall,” she said.  “I’m jonesing for some Starbucks.”

Angel and Alex walked to the mall and got in line at Starbucks.  They scanned the menu.  The barista asked them what they wanted.  April wanted a cappuccino, Angel a Frappuccino.   The barista was an odd character.  He wore a Cubs baseball hat and had a very thick unibrow. 

As the barista handed April’s change back to her, April saw that on his palm there was as tattoo of a pair of wings.  April looked up to him and there was a projection of a bolt of lightning behind him, on a television screen.  April drew this all to coincidence until she looked at his nametag.  It read, “Angelo.” 

These things happen, April thought to herself, coincidences happen.  The barista smiled.  “Yes, these types of things happen,” said the barista, looking at April, then Angel.

April stood there, stunned.  “….WHAT?” she yelled.

“There was a tornado in Indianapolis, April,” Angel said, pointing to the television screen behind them.  “Chill out.”

April walked with vengeance because her book pack held her in comfort and warmth.  The patterns drawn by the vast night skies of Chinese child factory technology hid the fact that she cared about anything at all, except the shoes on her feet.  These shoes didn’t match.  She stole both of them, one from Lady Foot Locker, the other from her brother’s closet.  When she went into her brother’s closet last Saturday, she was confronted by the vengeance of Catholic school boy multiplicity and happiness that can only be canceled out by the next graduating class.  She looked through his yearbook and found numerous autographs, some from his teachers, some from other students, and one from himself.  He wrote the one to himself in the back cover corner.  He thought no one would see it.  He wrote it last.  But she saw it.  She felt like the goddess of the underworld of black and white repetition.  Someone who saw and read all, that wasn’t intended to be read by anyone but him.  Algunos recuerdos.  “Stay cool, Frank,” his autobiography of a signature read. 

            April’s other shoe was a Puma, a red and white one, with white stripes and a red background.  Shoes were a big deal to April.  She felt like she could judge people before she even met them just by the type of shoes they had.  People with no good sense of judgement wore Pumas.  This is why she only wore one, so she could cancel out her bad judgement call.  Her brother’s shoe was a low top converse shoe, black and white.  It looked demonic, like something you could cut out of time and space with a pair of metaphysical scissors.  It made her look different.  It made her stand out.  When people gave her concerned looks on the street because of the two different types of shoes she wore, she just kicked her feet ahead of her a little more, with a little more pizzazz, avoiding trepidation.  She thought she was the only person in all of Chicago that wore two different shoes. 

            Her brother wore Nikes.  Nikes have the “swoosh” symbol, something that once belonged to the Greek gods.  April had a dream last night about her brother and his Nike shoes.  She dreamt that she saw him walking down a flight of stairs.  Every step he took, he would move very fast, and then pause, and then his body would be thrown back, like the motion of the swoosh symbol.  In her dream the people around her brother were very angry.  Everything was red and agitated; the streets, the bushes, the cars.  It was like a combination of the simplicity of 50’s household combined with the concerns and fears of what could be perceived of as the future.  She could feel a different energy of the dream go through her bones, through her skin, the energy of fear and the demand for a solution.  A solution to the fact that this energy could only be seen through the Nike shoes of her brother.  In her dream something told her that this energy was very important, but there was no way of obtaining this energy.  It was like a whacked job of Dorothy’s slippers, except home for her in the dream was not understood.

            She stole the Puma shoe from a Lady Foot Locker that was across the way from the Starbuck’s.  She had had a dream the other night about a Starbuck’s, too.  In this dream the baristas all wore Cub’s hats, and whenever a customer walked in with a Sox hat and asked for a coffee, the customer was told that he or she couldn’t order anything, except for a decaf, because decaf isn’t true coffee, just as the implied authority of the Starbucks believed that the Sox aren’t a true exemplification of Chicago.  April dreamt that she stood in line behind a woman with a Sox hat, and when the woman refused the offering of decaf coffee, everyone and everything in the store ceased to move, speak or act in every possible way, even the people that were all the way in back of the store.  The barista pointed to a poster to his left of some coffee beans as if it were some religious relic, something worshipped and esteemed by Starbucks goers and Cubs fans alike, and said, “The decaf is available to you, now and forever.” 

            The lady with the Sox had become enraged.  She swore out loud and threw fists in the air.  One by one, people sitting down at the coffee tables stood up, unsure of themselves in the sense that they didn’t know if they were sympathetic towards the barista or the lady wearing the Sox hat.  This happened until everyone was on their feet and the only sound was a dripping noise coming from a coffee maker.  The lady threw her hands over her eyes and ran into the street, out into nothingness, into the negative zero of a vast plain that went on as much as forever as ying against yang, as much as there will be a tomorrow for today as much as there will.  April watched until the lady became nothing but shadows, until she disappeared into a black hole of April’s subconscious.

            The day after April dreamt this, she went to the mall and ordered a Grande Mocha Frappuccino.  No dream was going to scare her.  It was as if she wanted to prove to her subconscious that there was nothing to be afraid of, that even the sandman of all sandmen couldn’t deny her the right of her Frappuccinos.  Standing in line to order her Frappuccino, she overheard a lady talking on a cellphone. 

            “Tell Neal I’ll be there in a minute,” the lady in front of her said into her cellphone.  Something in her voice made April feel an intense sense of anticipation and of wonder, as to why this lady was here, right here, right now, at this Starbucks, smack in the center of the universe of Freudian theory.  This lady wore Nikes, and when she turned around, April saw that there was a Sox baseball hat on her head.

            Two seconds later someone came running through the halls of the mall.  This man had glasses, was tall, and wore blue and green Nikes.  The man drew people’s glances, and stopped people in their tracks, until he stopped suddenly in his tracks, in front of the lady with the Sox hat at the Starbucks counter.  She was about to order.

            “Do not,” he was out of breath.  He put one hand on the counter, one on the lady with the Sox’s hat’s shoulders, “DO NOT, order the decaf.”

            Everyone around them was appalled, except for April.  She expected the lady with the Sox hat to be concerned.  She wondered what would happen, if her dream would replay itself, or if destiny would redraw its cards. 

            The lady with the Sox hat laughed. 

            “Silly Neal,” she said, exasperated and defeated.  “I told you I’d be there in a minute.”

I chose to emulate some aspects of the story “Criminal” from the book Olive Kitteridge.  While reading this part of the book I found some things interesting and I thought it would be challenging to take on some characteristics of the plot.  For example, Rebecca Brown is a kleptomaniac, and she steals a magazine in the beginning of the chapter.  This is why I chose to have my main character steal something also.  Also Rebecca reads about a psychic woman who helps police solve murders, and I thought it would be really interesting to try to emulate the concept of a psychic woman in some way.  Also Rebecca’s mother is a Scientologist, and this religion is briefly described in a way that makes it seem kind of absurd, so I described in my story my own original religious entities.  Also, I took a line of dialogue directly from this chapter, from page 245, “These things happen,” and developed my own plot around it.  Finally, Strout writes that Rebecca thinks the word “sole” is spelled as “soul” when she is thinking of her father wanting sole custody of her, and this is how I came up with the play on words for my title.  I found it easy to imitate the plot of this story, but not so much the style of Strout’s writing, so I chose to go out on a limb and try to write in a way that I usually don’t, in a stream-of-consciousness type manner, and I have yet to see if this will be well-received by readers.