A short story

Here's the short story I wrote last night, the one that occupied so much of my time in its--research, let's say--and its writing. I can't quite get the formatting right, but oh well.

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    I was out walking the dog this evening. We rounded the corner, she did her business, and just as she finished, diagonally across the street from me, a guy poked his torso out of the third story window and chucked something—maybe a printer?—out. He cleared the second story balcony, and it made what was no doubt a gratifying crash onto the sidewalk below.
    Well, that was unexpected, I thought.
    Not long after, what appeared to be a desktop hard drive joined in the fun, and though it only made it to the little garden patch, the sound of its destruction had sufficient power and gravitas. Really, it was an impressive throw. No doubt it’s awkward enough to lean out of a window while bearing a hefty little appliance, but then to hurl it with sufficient force to arc out so far? Impressive.
    I decided to hang around for the third act, which followed after a brief intermission, as something with considerable glass content found its way down to the sidewalk.
    I couldn’t decide what to make of it. What my dog made of it was a strong desire to go home. She didn’t freak out, she just made it clear that she did not want to continue our walk if it took us any closer—even across the street from—whatever human drama was playing itself out.
    Back in the apartment, I mulled. I hadn’t heard any yelling. No sound at all, in fact, beyond the crash of things that weren’t made to defy gravity making the acquaintance of the ground and its varying degrees of hardness. It’s May, I figured, the end of the semester for Brown and our other local universities. A computer on the fritz in the midst of a very stressful time of the semester could occasion such a dramatic gesture. To hell with you, technology, and thanks for nothing! You want to crash? I’ll show you crashing!
    Maybe that wasn’t the most likely scenario, but it seemed at least plausible. 

 

 

I didn’t like not knowing. The story needed resolution, because I knew there were other possibilities—perhaps it was something truly bizarre, beyond my imagination to create. I decided to go investigate. Maybe I could at least pin down what it was that had been thrown, for a start.
    I’d been wearing a hoodie and walking a dog before, so I decided to wear a leather jacket and a ball cap. The tosser might very well have seen me there with my dog. No sense looking like a nosy neighbor returning to the scene, right? Well, whatever.
    As I approached the corner, I could see several people engaged in some activity outside the house in question. It seemed like a parting of ways, though not a particularly volatile one. Nothing that would indicate that, minutes before, any of them had been practicing the shot put from a great height. It’s a big house, probably crawling with college students—these folks might be just as curious about it as I was.
    I crossed the street and started down the block toward them. As I did so, a girl broke off and started walking toward me. No particular emotion on her face, I gave a perfunctory hello and she gave as good as she got. I didn’t gawk as I neared the scene of carnage, so I also didn’t get a good look, but it appeared to be two college-aged guys who were starting to clean up and a more land-lordly type talking to them. No way of telling what precisely had met its appointed end here: it was at least that thoroughly broken. I reached the next corner, one house beyond, rounded it, and… stopped with bushes between me and them to listen in.
    What? Don’t look at me like that.
    I didn’t really catch much anyway. The guy sounded vaguely land-lordly, I thought, and I might have caught something about the end of the semester, moving out, definitely about cleaning up. The older guy said his goodnights and cleaning up continued. I also continued, on around the block. 

    I still had no idea what had happened. People are weird, people are quirky, especially the sort who express themselves with hurled hardware—it could be anything. I really needed some certainty.
    Coming back around the fourth side of the block I was making, I decided that, what the hell, I would stick my nose into it if I still could. There’s a core of shyness at my heart, and it counseled strongly for minding my own business. Normally I’d listen to it. There’s another part of me that wanted to know. I thought of that as the writer part of me. Sure, I suppose a real writer would probably have taken this ambiguous occurrence and invented some scenario to go with it, maybe even one better than the truth. I guess I’m a lousy writer—or, more charitably, let’s say that I’m still learning the craft, so I need to know the actual motivations rather than jumping right to the stage of making things up.
    Anyway, there are plenty of things like this, unusual happenings, for which it just isn’t possible to get the real explanation. In this case, if I put myself and those involved through a little discomfort, I could, potentially. So, what the hell. 

    It turned out they were still there, still picking up the pieces.
    I walked up to them. They were sweeping up broken glass, the one guy was a little testy about something. “Hey fellas,” I began. “I don’t mean to bug you, but… I’m just curious about… all of this. Can I ask what happened?”
    “Why?” asked the cross one. Crossly.
    Why indeed. “Just curious. I… saw the stuff get thrown down. Just idle curiosity.”
    “You’re curious,” he said, halfway between a statement and a question. Was he asking for confirmation? Asking whether I was sure I really wanted the truth, wanted his confidence? Telling me to mind my own business?
    “Yeah, I’m just curious. I know it’s none of my business.” His silence seemed to agree. “I know it’s none of my business, just idle curiosity.”
    Symmetry, oddly enough, didn’t make it seem any less awkward.
    “You’re curious,” he repeated, walking toward the dumpster. And, incidentally, in the direction I had to walk to go home.
    I followed. “Yeah, I am.”
    Silence. Then, as he lifted the dumpster lid, “There’s this girl…”
    “Ah. Say no more.”
    “Yeah.”
    I should have taken my own advice. “So… your stuff or hers?”
    He looked incredulously at me, stunned briefly into silence. “Are you serious?”
    A defensive part of me thought, hey, people do weird shit when they’re upset. Maybe you just needed to throw something.
    Or several somethings. With relative deliberation. Yeah, sure, it could be anybody’s stuff.
    Okay, so it was a completely asinine question. Before my brain could take a place at the table, my mouth had spoken up to fill the awkward silence. With, it turned out, more awkward silence.
    “No,” I said, “of course it was hers.”
    “Fourteen months, man.”
    I walked away, nothing to say, shaking my head.
    “Dirty fucking slut,” he said.
 

Closure for me, it turned out, wasn’t all that satisfying. Odds probably are, in any given case of possessions flying out of a window with reckless abandon, that someone’s been abandoned, their heart’s been broken, causing an equal and opposite reaction with the heart-breaker’s stuff. Part of me was disappointed that the answer was as commonplace as it was. Part of me was remorseful for bugging the guy in what was obviously a lousy situation, and part of me was sorry for doing so and having nothing better to offer in return, not even decent words of sympathy. I just took my little truth, a banal enough thing, shook my head, and walked on home. He’s probably still picking up the pieces, and will be for some time.

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