Joel Pedersen
“Heard there’s a big storm on the way,” said Lucien from behind the register of a gas station in
Moose Lake, Minnesota. “Gusts up to ninety miles an hour. They say it’s gonna be pretty devastating.”
“Oh yeah?” Mark asked as he paid for his coffee and gas.
Lucien nodded gravely. He always warned of disasters; bad weather, price hikes, shortages, war,
disease, any of the negativity that he’d read in the paper or online. More often than not the threatening
potential of these impending calamities didn’t fully realize, but that really wasn’t the point of his
warnings. Lucien enjoyed watching the recipient of his bad portents process what he was saying and
note how their expression changed from relaxed to tense. It was an emotional delicacy. Like tinkering
with electronics, which he did to pass the time, this was an indulgent pleasure. That was the point. If
pressed, Lucien would swear his warnings were born out of a neighborly concern; a warm regard for
his fellow human. At times, he even believed this explanation himself. In truth, however, he felt a profound sense of power in altering the trajectory of a mood, preferably for the worse. After all, why
should they walk around without worry and happy when he never was?
—
Mark left the gas station thinking about the stack of unsecured metal roof panels that lay next to
his house in the yard. A surge of anxiety coursed through him as he pictured the sheets of metal caught
in the wind, flying through the air and wrapping around trees, landing on powerlines, or injuring
children. He was almost to work so turning back would mean repeating his hour commute, twice. As he
was in charge of opening the business, the boss would not be happy. For a few blocks he was torn. He
tried to estimate the potential for disaster, to talk himself out of the possibility of harm coming to
anyone or anything due to his lack of action. The more he thought about it, however, the more he
realized that even the slightest possibility of harm was unacceptable, and there was no way he could
live with himself leaving those sheets of metal loose. He’d have to drive back and weigh them down.
He turned around and got on the phone. It was the only responsible thing to do.
—
Lana answered her phone.
“Two hours?” she gasped. “I’m still in Duluth. So, you’re just not going to open this morning?”
Mark explained the storm coming in, the high winds, and his fears about the school children
sliced in half by his negligence, and she found there was no talking him out of it. She hung up thinking
seriously of firing the man she had hoped would relieve the stress and attention her business demanded.
Instead of being helpful, he seemed to be introducing new, unforeseen stresses, and she wondered if
having him on was worth the trouble.
It seemed to her that the men in her life were not meeting her needs, and she looked at the man lying in her hotel room bed. As a pleasant dalliance Rod was fine, but as a long distance boyfriend he had introduced his own unforeseen stresses. In addition to having to take time off to visit him, she was also never completely certain of his fidelity and could never locate his level of seriousness in the relationship with any certainty. When they were together he conducted himself perfectly, but lately it was harder to connect with him on the phone, or to pin him down for visiting dates. It was all getting a bit laborious.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“The guy I hired to run the store, so I don’t have to worry about it when I’m gone,” Lana
replied. “What kind of person abandons his job because of a little wind?”
Rod stretched and sighed.
“It’s not the end of the world,” he said, “come on back to bed.”
She looked at him. His raised eyebrows and gentle pats on the sheets were sweet and alluring,
but in the circumstance also felt trivializing of her worries and responsibilities. She began to get
dressed and Rod pushed himself up on the pillows at the headboard and watched her without speaking.
“I need to get back home,” she said. “The shop’s not going to run itself.” She paused, keeping
herself from blowing a fuse. “While I’m thinking of it I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
Rod looked at her confused.
“I don’t think this is working for me,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, I love spending time with
you, but I’m not in the right place right now.”
“Okay,” Rod said tentatively.
Lana grabbed her overnight case and paused by the door.
“Goodbye, Rod,” she said, and walked out.
—
Rod lay in bed and after a moment lit a cigarette. Though he didn’t think of his relationship with
Lana as anything serious, just a bit of fun, her ending things so unexpectedly left him feeling annoyed
and perhaps a little hurt. He was always the one to end things, perhaps he thought, because he got bored
easily. Now he wondered if it might have been to insulate himself from this foreign feeling of
insignificance that was sparking an anger in him. To sooth his hurt pride, he began to dwell on her
flaws. He had overlooked these for the sake of his own physical needs, and he luxuriated in the notion
that doing so was a sort of self-abuse. When he tired of this line of thinking, he set about dismantling
any importance or dignity that she might have held in his mind, with a childish violence, until
ultimately she was nothing, and he was satisfied with himself again.
With the cigarette hanging from his lip, he got out of bed, walked over to the bathroom sink,
and extinguished it under the faucet. As he looked at himself in the mirror there was a knock at the door
and, anticipating Lana’s return, he switched his expression from contempt to beatific forgiveness in the
reflection.
A woman’s voice called out, “Housekeeping!”
—
Dot tentatively opened the door and peeked into the room. Rod was standing next to the
bathroom sink with a bath towel haphazardly wrapped around him.
“I’ll come back later,” Dot said. “I’m so sorry to disturb you.” She started to leave but caught
his eyes, and paused. His gaze locked with hers. He was very familiar. His eyes narrowed and he
grinned awkwardly.
“Hey Dot,” he said.
“Rod Carter?” she asked.
In the figure that stood in front of her she could see the boy she knew from her suburban St. Paul
childhood; the same mischievous smile and awkward, boyish movements.
“What are the chances?” she said.
“It must be fate,” he replied, pausing. “Say, my day has opened up. What time are you off? Let
me take you out to lunch.”
She remembered her childhood crush on him, his magnetism, and the kiss he stole in the
pristine snow of an empty field next to their neighborhood, days before he and his family moved away.
It was an abruptly interrupted story, the ending of which she had imagined in dozens of variations over
the following spring and summer. Her heart quickened when she realized that this chance meeting
could be a continuation to that story: a fortunate conduit that connected the present with a more hopeful
past. They made plans, and she closed the door to continue her work.
—
“Who was that?” asked Mr. Patel.
“A boy I knew when I was a girl,” beamed Dot.
Mr. Patel nodded thoughtfully. “It’s not good to talk to guests when they are wearing only a towel.”
“Yes,” she said, “but we recognized each other.”
“But if you haven’t seen him in so many years does that mean you can forget your manners?”
“No, you’re right,” she said, but after a moment she continued energetically, “He’s taking me
out to lunch after my shift to catch up.”
Mr. Patel felt a pain in his heart, but made an effort to conceal it. In the two decades he had
been working as a hotel manager he had cultivated dozens of work infatuations, and he understood that
they had all been foolish fantasies. Dot was different. In the early mornings he’d watch her walk across the employee parking lot arriving for her shift. There in his office, with the lights off, without notice, he
could allow a thrilling charge to run through him as he drank in her face and hair, and admired the
shape of her body from afar. Convinced of a mutual flirtation, he had given her the best shifts (as long
as they aligned with his) and any day off she asked for. He even made sure that she received more than
her share of housekeeping tips. It occurred to him with a jolt that, like all the others, she had merely
been taking advantage of his kindness and generosity, and he was indignant.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to work a double today, so lunch with your friend is
out of the question.”
Dot looked stunned at his uncharacteristic resistance.
“But can I at least take a short lunch?” she asked.
“No,” said Mr. Patel, “I’m sorry we’re too short-staffed,” and he strode away.
—
Later that afternoon, Marta Patel welcomed her husband home. She had prepared dinner and
was looking forward to spending the evening with him.
“I’ve made a stew and flatbread,” Marta said.
Mr. Patel leaned against the counter staring at the ground and said nothing. After a moment he
asked, “why are we always eating the same meals, night after night? Don’t you get bored?”
Marta, who had been gathering bowls and cutlery stopped and looked at him.
“The same meals, night after night. The same TV shows, night after night. It’s enough to drive a
person insane.”
“What’s gotten into you?”, Marta asked, exasperated. “You don’t like your life with me?”
“It’s too much,” complained Mr. Patel as he walked out the kitchen.
“Too much?” Marta scoffed. She stood there and chewing on her cheek until she heard the
screen door slam. She rushed to the living room and watched her husband walk out to his car and drive
away.
“What the hell,” she said to the empty room.
Half an hour later, she was on the phone to her brother, a morose gas station owner in Moose
Lake.
—
“He just left me here alone. No explanation, not even a goodbye,” Marta complained. “Our food
is getting cold.”
“That’s terrible,” Lucien replied somberly.
“What would possess him to do this thing?” his sister asked.
“I don’t know, Marta,” he said, “maybe he’s going to leave you.”
There was a tantalizingly lingering silence on the line, and he was positive that she was
contemplating the terrible possibility. He closed his eyes and listened, filled with a sense of awe at his
own capacity.
Marta, familiar with her brother’s draining pathology responded with a note of disappointed
loneliness in her voice. “No, Lucien, I’m not going to play that game with you,” and hung up.
Lucien sat at the kitchen table in his cramped one-bedroom apartment listening to the phone’s
dial tone. In front of him was a circuit board he had been toying with. Smoke from a soldering soldering iron at
his elbow floated leisurely toward the ceiling.
Before completing his degree in Sociology, Summa Cum Laude, from the University of Arizona in 2009 (later in life than most) Joel Pedersen floundered around in film colorization, animation, and pre-digital photographics. After graduation, he floundered around in graduate school, computer programming, cgi, ceramics, writing, painting and sketching. Though he envies people who have had a well-defined and focused career arc, he really prefers to flounder. He lives with his partner of 20 years, two cats, and a very cute pug in the California desert.