Why I’m in Need of Professional Help: An Illustration Through Fiction
by MPTGraves
I left the diner about one, as stuffed as the Owl and only slightly less bedraggled. I was getting a vibe off the waitress but I wasn’t interested, which should’ve been the first sign that I wasn’t thinkin’ straight. This thing with the dress was starting to get to me, and I needed some serious walk time with my good buddy Jack to sort it out. Jack didn’t talk much, but I never met a Daniels who did. I’m not much of a talker, and less of a listener, so we got on just fine. My friends choose hip flasks and shot-glasses to cars and carriages.
I started mulling over the past week’s events… kinda drifting back to the beginning like tom sawyer and his Negro on that raft… whatsisname? Oh yeah, Jim. I fancied myself as Jim, big and black and stupid, with an annoying white boy mussing a good trip down the river. I hated how I always seemed to end up There… that damn owl perched yonder, its eyes glass and its feathers frazzled. I had to-
”Hey Mister, you dropped this.” The paper man said. He was out late, getting papes ready for the morning runs. I looked down blankly. I hadn’t dropped anything, what was he offering me? I took it without comment, a packet folded out of a page from the paper, and stuffed it in my trench-coat pocket.
I wasn’t wearing my trench coat. How did I stuff anything into my pocket? This troubled me for a block or so, but then I realized what was going on. They were following me. They had to be, it all made sense. My missing trench coat, the waitress, the dress-maker… The Owl! It had to be behind all this. But why was the dress-maker after me? The Owl had been wearing the dress… At least, that’s what I kept trying to explain to her.
”The owl, over at McKinley’s Books… sits up in the corner of the store, looks out into the square through the showcase windows. Things gotta be a hundred an’ fifty if it’s a year… It has the dress, not me!” I’d paid for it, a night in the slam and the axe from work. Three days later and I couldn’t even remember where I had worked. It had to be that Owl. He was doing things to my head. Just like the old Negro who played checkers on the corner used to talk about. Old, shriveled black man. Think his name was Jim… just played checkers and told stories. Nobody’d play him… he played both sides. But we’d sit there and listen to his stories, playing truant…
They were closing in. I walked into the street to avoid passing the mouth of the alley coming up on my left, and nearly got run over for my efforts. I could feel them then… getting closer. They were gonna catch me. Then I’d be taken back… like the runaway slave I was. Back to the master to be whipped, or even hanged to be an example.
I turned up the collar of my trench coat and kept walking, gaining speed as I went. In the reflection off the window pane I saw my face, white and middle-aged, but not too old yet, and quickly hunched my shoulders for fear of being spotted. I was coming up on the overpass, a mess of discarded building materials and abandoned machinery. I’d lose them on the way to the other side.
I was looking back now. I’d dropped my hipflask and plunged my hands deep in my pockets… but it was too late. I broke into a run, my hand reflexively gripping the packet that had been in my coat, hoping to make it to the safety of the construction. I yelled and thought I heard them yell back… the first noise they had made, now that they were closing in. I looked back but ran on, I was almost safe.
Static crackled on the radio as the channel came into tune. “A man was found dead this morning on 16th street, beneath the new interstate overpass. No one has been able to identify the man yet, but he appeared to be under the influence of alcohol and carried nothing but a folded piece of newspaper containing three brown feathers…” Frederick McKinley shook his grizzled head, switching off the radio as a customer wandered in. “May I help you?” he asked, forgetting the newscast as easily as a passing dream. In the corner the Owl cocked its head ever so slightly, blinked once, and froze. -mg