FREE WILL
by Mark Joseph


   The light bulb flared and burned out.

   I felt a sickening feeling begin to grow in my stomach.  "Now what?"
I asked.

   "I'm... unsure," Thorne responded.  "There are several options left
available to you, Alen... the one you pick is your own choice."

   Thorne opened the door to the closet and stepped out, shutting it
behind him.

   I stood there in the dark, with his words ringing in my ears.  I
don't exactly remember how much time elapsed between Thorne's
departure and the moment I opened the door.

   I grabbed my overcoat from the recliner and threw it over my
shoulders, sliding into the arms as I walked out the door.  (What the
hell did Thorne mean?) I asked myself.

   The sky was alive with a gathering storm as I walked down the
sidewalk, looking for him.  I went past the empty field on my side of
the road.  There was a tree that stood achingly in the far left corner,
that had withered with the passage of time, but something seemed
different about it today.

   I kept on walking past the empty, abandoned houses of the street I
lived on.  The red one (with white shutters), I remembered, was the
home of Mr. and Mrs. Kensington.  They were an elderly couple who owned
a few cats.  They'd left for a retirement home to the south a few
months ago without selling the house first.  A real estate sign hung
still in the calm.

   I stepped on the sidewalk cracks as I came to the church at the
intersection of the streets.  It's roof had caved in about a month or
so ago, and Pastor Leonowich's sermons had to be held in a high school
about five minutes away.  The weathered bronze anchor still sat by the
entrance of the parish, with one word engraved upon it: "HOPE."

   I walked for a while, taking a turn here and there, when I thought
I might have seen Thorne walking down the sidewalk or across the
street.  I felt some moisture on my face and realized it was beginning
to drizzle.  I took a left and realized I was walking down a lane back
to my house.  There was a graveyard on the right side of the road; one
that stretched back almost as far as I could see.

   Flowers rested at the tombstones, and a few people moved here and
there, seemingly without thought or desire.  I walked with my head
turned towards the burial plots, examining the uniformity of every
single cross created in a manufacturing plant in the southeast, by
old men with fading eyesight who drank beer on the weekends and watched
professional baseball on television as the sun circled the earth, and
some people started breathing, and other people stopped, and it really
didn't matter what you wanted or what you thought, because the world
would rotate just as indifferently without you as it would with you,
but you never wanted to admit that kind of thing to yourself, because
of the chilling truth it would bring to your life among the wreckage
of misconceptions and perceptions that you'd always taken security in,
along with the feeling that what you did mattered to everyone around
you, and that life just wouldn't be the same if you weren't walking up
to the porch of my house, as the rain suddenly stopped.  I brushed my
shoes off on the welcome mat and opened the door.

   I stepped in.  Thorne was standing there, dressed all in black, as
usual, smoking a cigarette.  I shrugged my overcoat off and tossed it
on the recliner.  "I've been looking all over for you," I began.

   Thorne nodded.  "There's something we have to discuss, Alen," he
replied, taking a long drag from his cigarette.  "But not here; not out
in the open."  He put his cigarette out against the sole of his shoe
and dropped it in his pocket.  "This way."

   Thorne turned around and opened the door to the hall closet.  He
motioned for me to enter, and I did.  He followed behind me, turning on
the light inside the closet before he shut the door behind us.

   "You have to get out of here," he said.

   "Huh?" I asked.

   "Real life is elsewhere," he stated.

   The light bulb flared and burned out.



The Sunburst Project, Week 2
http://www.chaoseed.com/btr/sbp/
3/23/00