Samuel’s mother just had to die on his birthday. Even in the hereafter she just had to steal away what little Samuel was given; his name day in this case, gifted to him by sheer coincidence, but taken from him by sheer malice. He knew it. He just knew she chose this particular day over all others to pass away.
“What are you doing for your special day?” nobody asked.
“Oh, you know…same old,” he had not replied, and told no lies.
The bouquet of roses meant to crown his mother’s headstone began to wilt the day before, but no bother. It was better this way, he thought—rotting flowers for a rotten corpse.
Ah, but the trains; all of them delayed, and for what?
Red Line: Fire on the track.
Brown Line: Fire on the track.
Fire on the tracks, was it? Fine, then fire over the entire city, for fuck’s sake, another Great Chicago Fire. Burn it all and start again, thought Samuel, and maybe build some tracks that fucking work. But, confound it, had he really spoken aloud? The CTA attendant glaring at his groveling figure sidling through the turnstile suggested he had, and it wouldn’t be the first time, either, since Samuel often spoke aloud without realizing it, figuring himself mute the way a tree makes no sound without anyone present to hear its fall.
“The buses are still running fine, sir,” said the CTA attendant, to which Samuel nodded, although it was a gesture not processed by its intended recipient who, given Samuel’s increasing distance, became a static image which would not survive the moment’s passage into memory.
So, the buses, was it? What inconvenience could Samuel expect thereby? Fire on the roads? No, misfortune, at least insofar as Samuel understood his old friend, was too ingenious a phenomenon to confine itself to one unvarying motif. Perhaps a wreck was in order. But back to Samuel’s dead mother over whom this narrative has bulldozed. Back to the wilting flowers. Back to…no, not memory. The fact of her burial, producing the attendant image of a body eternally at rest, would suffice for our miserly Samuel.
What a fool, his mother grumbled through the soil of the earth as she watched her son negotiate with the trilogy of bus transfers which would deliver him to the graveyard. The idiot can’t even bring his mother flowers on her special day.
“Your special day?” Samuel yelled, and spat on the asphalt which, sure, by some immoderate extension, could be said to inevitably reach toward and cover over his deceased mother.
“Hey, watch it,” said the owner of a suede sneaker slightly stained by Samuel’s saliva.
“I’ll show you, you bitch,” replied Samuel.
“The fuck did you just say?”
The rest of the man standing inside of the spat-on shoe rolled his shoulders and neck in a show of aggression.
“I was talking to my mother, thank you very much! Not you!”
The stranger stood leering at Samuel’s figure before disappearing into the obsolescence of a soon-to-be forgotten experience.
Samuel scoffed and said to himself: “Some people have no respect for the dead.”
Here another oddity burst into Samuel’s phenomenal world; a notice, a warning.
“Gates close in ten minutes.”
But how long ago had he entered into the cemetery, and why was it allowed to pass without mention?
Samuel turned to a pile of leaves in confusion, although it was not the leaves themselves but the groundskeeper standing behind them who spoke.
“Well, happy birthday to me, then, huh?” Samuel replied.
“What?”
“May as well not be since she just has to take everything away from me, even when she’s very much deceased! You know?”
No subsequent expression of confusion issued from the groundskeeper who had since dematerialized, leaving the pile of leaves behind (or in front of?) him. All life save for Samuel’s—though he was loath to call his a life—was absent from the grounds, although he would enjoy his solitude walking among the stone and marble swarm; those monuments to the fulfillment of an inequitable bargain struck between man and the void, the void which grants us a momentary reprieve from perpetual formlessness, only to demand we return to the Ithaca of our black eternity some paltry decades later.
“Gates closing,” shouted the rematerialized groundskeeper, posted this time behind another pile of leaves newly swept.
“But where is my mother’s grave?”
“To heck if I know,” and to heck he may have been banished.
Samuel turned after hearing a rustling in the leaves behind him.
“Gates closing.”
Samuel turned to the left.
“Gates closing.”
“Gates closing.”
“Gates closing.”
“Alright!” Samuel shouted. “Well, happy birthday to me, then, huh?!”
“Ah, so today is your birthday?”
“It is.”
“Well, happy birthday to you, then, huh?”
Samuel smiled.
“Gates closing.”
Samuel, with seconds to spare, discovered his mother’s grave marked by a slab of limestone too modest to share any detail beyond her name. His eyes skimmed over the text engraved on its surface and he read aloud: “Here lies That Bitch,” as though the stone really bore such a profane epitaph.
“Hey, Mom, it’s me, your idiot son,” Samuel whispered. “Remember me? Yeah, I’ll bet you didn’t expect to see me here on this day of all days, now, did you? You always thought I was so stupid, didn’t you? Didn’t you?!”
“Gates closing.”
Always the same notice. Always the same man. Always a different pile of leaves.
“I was having a moment, here, sir,” Samuel yelled back.
“Sir, the gates are closing.”
“Yes, I’m sure they’re closing this very second!”
Samuel then returned his attention to his mother’s grave.
“I don’t have much time, so I’ll have to make this quick. I know you never thought I’d amount to much—GATES CLOSING—but here I am now standing over your grave. You’re alive, and I’m dead. I-I mean…you know what I mean—GATES CLOSING. Despite every obstacle; the fires on the track, your detested son’s idiocy, the three bus rides across town to get here, I still made it on this special day—GATES CLOSING—a day that doesn’t belong to you any longer because I’m taking it back after you robbed me of it yet again by dying on my birthday, something I know you did on purpose. This day is mine now—GATES CLOSING—and we’ll see how you like it; to have the roles reversed, to have your death day stolen from you. GATES CLOSING. Now you will be forgotten on this day for the years to come as I was on this day for the last thirty-four years of my shitty, shitty, very shitty life.”
“Gates closing.”
“I know!” shouted the groundskeeper from his distant post. “That’s what I’ve been telling you this whole time!”
“Well, happy birthday to me, then, huh?!”
“Yes, I said it before.”
“Ah-ha! So you did,” Samuel said with a smile.
The gates closed behind him, dividing the dead from the living, freeing him at last from the memory of his mother—that you-know—and as he walked back to the bus stop to begin his long journey home, Samuel spat on the ground and smiled, chanting, “Happy birthday to me, then, huh?”
©
Leonard Klossner has had short fiction published in Adelaide Magazine, The Birds We Piled Loosely, and Corvus Review. His novella, The Dominance Bond, was published in December 2017 through Zeit|Haus.
Instagram: @communicatingvessels
Twitter: @leonardklossner
