Notes

In the sleepy town of Brenton, the sun was just dribbling across the early and still starry summer sky when a boy of fourteen was awoken from his slumber.

An automatic movement from his hand silenced his alarm.

The boy eagerly pushed off his covers and jumped out of bed. This was no ordinary, Suburban Hell day. It was Day of Fates. A day where anything and everything can happen.

The boy began quickly getting ready in a symphony of movement. To brush your hair, your teeth, change your clothes, and grab the paper. Despite planning what had to be done the night before, these duties were not executed calmly, but with a kind of impatient ravenousness: the comb was dropped carelessly on the bed, ditched so he could commit another act of brushing, of his teeth; a shirt and pants were wrenched from their hangers that sent the hangers spinning, clicking and tangling against each other; pajamas left haphazard on the floor - disheveled, abandoned.

This was the kind of frenzied attitude characteristic of Emerson Poleoma, though. Finally, the symphony crescendoed with the grabbing of a folded, smooth sheet of paper from his dresser, which was slipped into a denim pocket, and he likewise slipped out of the bedroom, and with the quiet noise of the door smartly connecting with the door frame, the symphony ended.

~~~

“Emerson… Emerson!” sang an overly saccharine voice.

Emerson slowly opened his eyes, and through them he saw his friend’s face and upper body silhouetted, made into an indiscernible black blob from the bright sun shining from behind.

He stretched and raised himself on his palms. As much as he was impatient this morning, it was largely due to wanting to connect with his best friend.

“What are you doing? Someone could have stolen your bike,” Caleb motioned to the subject, a thin blue Glider, laying unshackled on the grass.

Emerson waved him off. They didn’t have to worry about anything now that they were together. He stood up to dust himself off as Caleb retreated to lean against the tree, a ginormous walnut. It stood by itself on the hill that rose outside of the suburbs where Emerson and Caleb both lived. It was the perfect meeting place.

With a slip of his hand, Emerson deposited a smooth, white piece of paper from his front pocket of his t-shirt and began unfolding it carefully. It was smooth in the way that comes from repeated handling, although the paper’s texture was originally rough. Its surface felt familiar and comforting. Caleb approached Emerson again from his position a ways off, where he was leaning against the tree, and they turned away from the suburbs behind them, as the sun was rising above it, and, standing sheltered together, faced the barren field of patchy, yellow grass which was behind the tree.

“Thank you,” Caleb said, enunciating the last word as he pinched the unfolded paper out of Emerson’s hand.

Caleb’s short fingernails handled the surface of the paper. Emerson noticed the dirt that had settled in them, like the dust that settles in a windowpane. Caleb wasn’t able to get out much due to his father. Although his hands looked coarse and rough from helping out his father in his profession, wood working, his long and bony fingers looked almost delicate and breakable in the early morning sunlight. Caleb’s contradictory nature of being rough yet smooth, like the paper, became apparent to Emerson as his lifelong friend made exaggerated “A-huh” and “Mhm” noises as he read the paper on which Emerson had scribed some final touches on the night before.

“Looks good,” grinned Caleb cheekily. He handed the paper back to Emerson. Emerson thought about how their dynamic shifted as they got older. Caleb had been spending more and more time with his father, and, although the two remained best friends, they had become a bit distant. Caleb even seemed older, somehow, although they were the same age, even as he remained his joker-like self. Now that he thought about it, Caleb was full of dualities like that. Rough, yet smooth. Older, yet the same age as him. Goofy, yet somehow mature. His best friend, but also someone he saw sparingly now.

“Well, first thing is to climb this big ol’ tree,” declared Caleb.

Emerson smiled. “For sure.” This had been a tradition of theirs, begun on the first Day of Fates.

Closest to it, Caleb heaved himself over a low branch first. He pulled himself up and stood on a protruding branch as thick as a dinner plate. He continued climbing into the concealment of the tree, its leaves masking him, and yet the color of his skin, clothes, and hair poked through. Emerson let him get higher first and then followed his path. As he stood on the dinner plate branch, he saw Caleb rising higher and higher into the animal; he was in its gut now.

Emerson climbed, too. He took a diverging path from him a few feet up. He eventually caught up to Caleb, and together they stood on opposite branches, facing the same yellow field of grass that they had when they looked at the paper.

Emerson turned around, wanting to look at the suburbs now. As he did, his pivot caused him to see Caleb and notice a solemn, introspective character taken on his face. He almost laughed - not at the seriousness of Caleb, but because of something else. Emerson had sought a certain thing for a while now. You could say it was adventure, but it didn’t have to have a stranger whisking him away on a journey. Simply, he wanted interesting things to happen. Emerson was a sucker for a good feeling, a good ambiance. He loved rainy days and sitting under an overhanging of his school’s building on a weekend, with no one around; he loved sitting in a tree in a stranger’s five-acre backyard and reading a book; he found a message and fortunes in papers on the ground and omens everywhere. He left a note in an unused mailbox and hoped some kinful soul would open it and find it. He frequented public places, outside and indoors, thinking something might happen there beyond what he could find in his uneventful home. He coveted with all of himself something, anything to happen to him, to single him out in the Universe and made the ride more fun. And so he had laughed because it seemed that in the present he was doing something to achieve this wish. Climbing a tree with a friend in the early hours of the morning. And the rest of the day would only have other activities.

Emerson faced the suburbs now and naturally his eyes gravitated towards his neighborhood in the distance and then Caleb’s several blocks away.

If he turned around, he would see in the faraway distance the River of Saints, Its sparkling azul surface was surely gleaming in the rising sun, but the water seemed to catch the light of the sun for a second which caused a red snake to appear on its waters, a wavy line of the color of a painted women’s lips somehow in its atoms of hydrogen and oxygen: a red color in the waters.

Emerson moved his eyes from the current non-enchanting view and rose higher in the trees. Caleb turned and looked at him, a questioning look on his face. He was about to breath a warning but Emerson stopped climbing. He could see the River of Saints now through an opening in the leaves. He could lean on the branch in front of him, which enabled him to raise his arms symmetrically in the arm and to hoarsely whisper:

“Day. Of. Fates!”

Caleb burst out laughing. Emerson grinned. The river churned.