A Short Story a Day

by David Michael

The light flickered, never quite dying, never quite deciding one way or the other. It’s strobing made motion along the street seem to jerk, stop and start, pedestrians and cars alternately frozen and propelled.

Gary had felt like that all evening, as he walked the city streets, stopping and starting, deciding and reconsidering, wanting and fearing. He paused, leaned against the lamp pole, and decided to let the lamp be indecisive for him. For a while at least. He needed a break.

He felt the lamp pole shift slightly as he settled his weight against it, and the light shone steady. A woman passing by alone smiled at him, her eyes flashing in the clear light. The woman’s eyes and the sudden clarity surprised him, and he slipped, stumbled off of the lamp post. The flickering resumed.

“Great,” said a man walking past. “You broke it.”

“What?” said Gary, turning around. “No, it was like that … already … “

But the man hadn’t stopped, and none of the other pedestrians seemed interested in his explanations.

Gary turned back to look at the lamp pole. Reaching out a hand, he touched the pole. The strobing continued. He pushed on the pole. No effect. He put both hands on the pole then, placed his feet, and pushed again. This time he felt the pole move. With a buzz and a pop, the light went out.

Darkness poured down from the lamp, covering Gary, the few people walking nearby, flooded onto the street, which had suddenly become empty of cars.

Loud footsteps pounded the concrete of the sidewalk, then a scream and sounds of a scuffle.

“Help me–” a woman’s voice said, somewhere in the darkness.

Her cry for help ended with a meaty thump, a grunt, and then the sound of someone falling.

Gary felt someone walking past him, close enough to touch. He took his hands off the pole, started to reach out into the darkness. Maybe he could catch whoever had attacked the woman.

The lamp hummed and its flickering light resumed.

The sneering face of a woman appeared right in front of him. One of her eyes had swelled closed, the skin around that eye red and black. The other eye seemed to taunt him. Her lips pulled back from her teeth and she leaned towards him. Their noses almost touched.

“I don’t need help anymore,” she said.

Gary pulled his face back. On the sidewalk behind her, he saw the body of a man stretched out, face down. Blood trickled from a split scalp.

Gary looked at the woman again. She was putting something into her handbag. She paused when she spotted his gaze, and made as if to pull–whatever it was–back out.

Gary shook his head and backed away from her.

“Gutless,” she said.

Gary said nothing as he watched her walk away in stop-motion animation.

He turned his attention back to the lamp pole.

“You’re not helping,” he said.

The lamp flickered, random surges in intensity and diminishing.

“You’re not helping either,” said a man’s voice behind Gary. “He’s just lying there. Bleeding to death. Call an ambulance or something.”

Gary turned. The man struck by the woman still lay on the sidewalk, blood still oozing from his scalp. A couple of pedestrians had stopped, including the man who had spoken.

The lamp continued its light show. The flickering made the scene seem unreal, like Gary was watching this on a movie theater screen. He didn’t know how long they all stood there, looking down at the body as the lamp hummed and buzzed and the blood on the sidewalk shifted from red to gray to black in the shifting color spectrum.

“I don’t have a cellphone,” Gary said, finally. “Do you?”

One of the women in the group of bystanders nodded. Maybe. The flickering made it hard to know if she had really nodded, or just shifted her head a little.

Gary blinked, trying to focus through the noise, aural and visual, put out by the lamp. When he could see again, more people had gathered around, looking at the body on the sidewalk, watching it die in on-again, off-again glimpses. How long had they all been standing there?

“Are you going to call someone?” Gary asked.

No response. Not from the man who had spoken before, nor from the woman who had–maybe–indicated that she had a phone.

“Anyone?”

Was either the man or the woman still there? Gary tried to spot them in the crowd that had grown still further, but he couldn’t be certain. Only the motionless body of the wounded man remained constant in the ever changing illumination.

What he needed, Gary decided, was for the damn light to stop flickering. He turned and saw that he now stood in the middle of a crowd. He pushed his way through the men, women, and children that had gathered until he stood beside the lamp pole once again.

Where had all these people come from? How long had he been standing there? How long had it been since the woman with the handbag had walked away from the scene of the attack?

Gary pushed the questions from his mind and leaned back against the lamp pole. The pole shifted, ever so slightly, and the flickering stopped, the light blazed forth in a steady brightness.

“Does someone have a phone?” Gary asked. “A phone,” he said again, raising his voice to be heard over the sounds of a crowd of sleepwalkers coming back to life. “Someone call an ambulance.”

A couple of the people in front of him turned to face him. One of them, a man, reached into his pocket and pulled out a clamshell phone. The man seemed surprised to see both the phone and his hand holding it.

Gary reached for the phone, careful not to let the lamp pole shift back into its original, flickering position. The man’s face showed a moment of hesitation, then he let Gary take the phone.

Gary dialed, heard the emergency operator answer. “Yes,” Gary said. “We have a wounded man, he was mugged I think, or he might’ve been the mugger, I’m not sure. Either way, he’s lying here on the street … near the corner of 8th and Denver … his head is bleeding …”

When he handed the phone back to the man, Gary asked, “Can you lean here?”

The man took the phone, put it away. “What? You want me to lean against the pole?”

“Yes,” Gary said. “It’ll keep the light steady.”

The man shrugged and leaned against the pole when Gary stepped away. The light barely had time for a single flicker.

Gary looked up at the lamp, thought about waiting for the ambulance to arrive, shook his head to clear it, and walked away.

Copyright © 2006 by David Michael. All rights reserved.