Short Stories

When the third major settling of San Diego occured, after the Native Americans and Spanish friars lived within the valleys, future residents came to the “Panama Exposition,” a bumbling cause to repopulate the area. The incoming residents built small craftsman style houses interlocked with wavy roads that (no matter how hard they tried) always left foreigners feeling lost and confused. 

            Of these new buildings was a meek barbershop. The facade of the one-story building was plastered with a pale, mustard yellow, and the base had been treated with crimson red planks fused over crannies where mice had entered the night before. It featured a thin, yet magnificent glass pane on the right side, which rested under the black shingles of the roof. From the street, it could be glanced through to investigate the usual customers sitting down and explaining to the barber which new haircut they thought would express their individuality the most. All the sounds, sights, and feelings crescendoed against the slanted curb that sat before the edifice. The phrase “627 Johnson Pl.” was chicken-scratched into the concrete; the “1” that preceded it had been weathered away by the rain.

Tobie was the owner of the shop. Before him it was his father’s, and before his father’s it was his grandfather’s during the “exposition” days. The seemingly insignificant plot of land held a sort-of generational weight, complete with the pressure to keep it active for the family namesake. But he did not subscribe to this idea; he barely even acknowledged it.

In the early morning, a muted collage of turquoise and lapis shades of blue formed the dome of the sky. Tobie lurched awake in the small back room which adjoined the shop, exacerbated by a headache that seemed to slice through nearly every nerve of his brain. He lied there for a few minutes. The faint tic-toc, tic-toc, tic-toc of his alarm clock hammered his weary mind. Crisp cold air sifted through the half-opened window and wafted across his face. He finally roused enough energy to shakily remove the light-weight bedsheet from his body and ambled over to the mini fridge. With a glass of orange juice, he gulped down one aspirin and began sweeping the front room before he shop opened. That was all he could do.

            He rested, reclining on one of the swivel chairs and stared blankly through the door until the first swell of patrons arrived. It was always packed on Sunday mornings.

“Good morning, Mr. Olsen. How are you?” He stood up and welcomed the stout, elderly regular inside with a swift spin of the chair, revealing a comfortable cushion.

“Very… very well. And yourself?”

“Slept great, drank some orange juice, took a walk. The recipe for a great new day, I guess.” The older man nodded coherently as if he understood what Tobie said, but he didn’t. He forgot to stick another battery in his hearing aid that morning and was only hearing every other word.

“So what cut d’ya want today?” Tobie said with a wry smile. The man’s forehead crinkled as his eyebrows peaked.

“Who you calling a shmut?”

“No, no, no. Haircut.” He raised his hands past his shoulders and gave a short snip of his scissors as a visual aid. 

“Same as last time, or are you thinking of switching it up?” 

The man grunted and his mood fell back to a resting state. 

“Give me a number 2, blend to the top and part on the right. I don’t have s’much hair as I used to, ya’know.”

The two kept talking until the man felt confident about his appearance. Tobie had become a great conversationalist over the years. Sometimes, it would even seem easier for him to speak to others than to speak to himself. It is often simpler to listen to what you don’t know, than to fully contemplate what’s in front of you; what you don’t know cannot hurt you.

After a few more customers were serviced, Tobie retreated to the back porch to eat lunch: a single piece of ham shoved between whole wheat bread. The package that held the bread said that it expired two days before, but he didn’t seem to mind. In the back, cypress plywood covered the length of the rest of the property. He trotted back and forth, and used the last of his bottled water to sprinkle the hefty flower pot that sat right outside his bedroom window. It was an innocent apple tree or, at least, was going to be if it would ever grow above a foot. Every now and then the wind would dance with its blossoms, picking them right off the spindly branches and setting them back down gently through the open window and into the back room.

Tobie’s ambition always danced in a similar way. Whether inflicted by his own doing or someone else’s, the stem of worldly treasures and spoils never took root in his life. Any blossom of hope had blown away, and he became committed to living day-by-day and night-by-night with the humanity of those around him.

At the end of the day, he emptied his pockets of any cash he had collected, counting it quickly and tallying the numbers in his head. He placed the last few bills in a brown envelope, in a shoebox under his bed, and rubbed his eyes until his sight became a blur, the blur became darkness, and the darkness became the black of his shutting eyelids. He would have all the time tomorrow to allocate the money. For now he needed to sleep.

The summer afternoon heat glazed over the streets like an angered plague, passing over the houses that boasted an air-conditioning unit and flooding through the half-way-open windows and breached screen doors of the houses without one enjoined to their sides. 

Two houses stood adjacent to each other. One belonged to a wealthy family, whose members were eating a magnificent brunch on the back terrace; both of their dogs laid asleep in their silk beds in the front room, defended from the outside heat by the cool, crisp breeze that flowed from the vents. The other family lived simply; their front door was ajar and their back windows were open, as to let the heat flow through to the other side, and the brass-colored fence that enveloped the green plains of the front yard was embossed with the phrase “5115 Johann Ave.” and an icon of a sheep on the fence gate. That family was composed of a mother and her sons, who were washing the family car, and their grandfather, who was sitting on a fold-out plastic chair on the porch.

“Pull it out all the way to the sidewalk,” the mother said in an irritated tone, “just make sure the setting is on flat!” She twisted the foamy blue sponge clean and the suds dripped into the Home Depot bucket that rested on the porch. She shook her hands dry in the stark summer heat. One of the young boys, the taller one, treaded to the side of the house where the hose lay wound up like a desert snake in an old whisky bucket. As the boy slowly turned on the waterflow, the head of the serpent began to hiss, and the pressure animated the rest of its body. He grabbed its neck and underhandedly adjusted the red nozzle to “jet”. He spewed an icy stream at his brother, dousing his torso. “Alright,” he said, switching the gear again, “it’s on flat!”

Both took their turns rinsing off the turquoise SUV, as the inconsistent droplets cascaded against the metal with a consonance of tinks. The condensation that appeared around the vehicle dripped into a splash of water, the splash grew into a puddle, and the puddle became a pool. Onlookers from five cloth-covered porches across the street envied the frosty wonderland. They sat like fans at a basketball game, with their entire body weight resting on the edge of the concrete, and waited intently for a drop to soar through the air and soak into their dry skin.

“Hahaha… What good fun, boys!” The grandfather’s voice was deep, heartfelt, and raspy. He ran his fingers through his spindly cotton combover, braced his hand against the wall, and arose like a crooked and feeble robot.

“No! No, Dad, stay. Sit!” His daughter urged him back to the sturdy chair.

“Whad'ya… Howd’ya know what's good for me? I wanna feel the water, Jenny. I wanna play with my grandkids.” She ignored his plea as she set him back into place. She leaned over to adjust the collar on his plaid, short-sleeve shirt, and a white card fell out of her pocket. It read “Cottonwood Estate ~ Elderly Homes for those with Dementia.” She quickly picked it up and stuffed it into the right-hand pocket of her dark blue jeans.

Her name was not Jenny, that name belonged to the grandfather’s late wife. Last week she had taken him to get a physical and the doctor said that the physical signs of Alzheimer’s would be proliferating: he would forget what he ate that morning, his favorite show as a child, and, above all else, his atrophying brain would let go the names of loved ones that once resided in the epicenter of his mind. Within the length of two years, her willingness to fight back was exhausted; it wasn’t her war to wage anymore.

The loud squeaking from her youngest son’s crocs abruptly pierced a hole in her daydream. His small feet slid in the slippery sandals as he innocently waddled over to the faucet to which the hose was connected and gave the gear one big twist to the right. The deflated hose retracted back into a coil-spring and rolled up next to the bucket. He trotted over to his brother, who was plunging his hand into the chilly and soapy bucket of liquid. Together, they tossed the contents on the Mars-colored mulch and went inside to wash up.

All that was left was the father and his daughter. The hose sputtered its last breaths, time froze like the soapy water, and the stunningly bright sun adhered to its rightful position. She gazed out at the olive-green bushes and the red-breasted hummingbirds and the pale shade of the sky and audibly inhaled a deep breath. Her dad’s head tilted toward hers. He instinctively analyzed where her eyes were focused and his gaze intertwined with hers. “It's beautiful, ain’t it?” he coughed at the bite of the dryness, “Ain’t it beautiful, Jenny?” He rubbed his hand on the outside of his beige slacks. Her diaphragm partly swelled up. “It…” her frail voice softened to a whisper, “it is.”

For the whole morning, it seemed that nature was listening to them, offering its beauty to a few weary settlers. The silhouettes of palm trees hung precariously about the yard, watching over them from divine parapets and providing a temporary safe-haven from the heat in a still formation. Her father reached out the tip of his foot, and dug into the now-moist soil. The cool feeling traveled through his leg, past his heart, and sparked the neurons of his brain. The sun illuminated his face as it opened into a one-sided grin. She placed her hand on his knee and sighed. The heat had passed over.