"Practicing"

From the new collection "Dreams, Desires, And Dead Ends" All Rights Reserved. 
©2012 Robert Alan Chappell Reproduction in part or in whole of this work constitutes property theft and will be prosecuted. 


You just never know what some of the homeless around the city are thinking about.  Some of them when I walk by are just repeating numbers, others are carrying on 'conversations' with people you and I don't see, but they obviously do.

One of them that I usually find at the bus stop that I use to catch the bus to work, Thomas, always has his arms outstretched and pressing himself up against the chain link fence.  I occasionally feed him, and at other times just give him spare change.

I'd meant to ask him what it is he's doing, spread eagled as he is against the chains everyday.  So I finally just decided to ask him.

"Practicing learning how to fly," he said, with all the due seriousness of the mentally ill focusing on whatever they focus on.

Ok, I thought, with one of those, 'Right!?' sort of sounds in my head that I hear people use when they hear something totally crazy.  He just wants to fly.  That's all. "Good luck on that," I told him.

Without opening his eyes, he tells me quite graciously, "Thank you.  I'll let you know when I do." Right?!  I think.  But instead, I say, "Ok," and continue on my way.  "Have a good day."

And he does.

And I go off to work.  I'm an account by day, a drinker and carouser by night and weekend.  It's not exactly what you'd call a fulfilling life, but it's what I've gotten used to.  I do it pretty much the same way I have since I graduated from college.

Of course I take a break from it every now and then by going on periodic vacations, where I switch up counting by day and carousing by night, with carousing by day and dancing and finding a different hotter number to digitate with each night.  It's a rough life, and I hadn't really thought much about it until I'd began talking with Thomas (when he wasn't practicing flying, that is).

He's about my age I found out, except that his life took a rather strange turn during college.  He went from being a mathematician thinking lofty thoughts about numbers, to having a little too intense of a trip on some psychotropic substance he ingested at a party and thinking about flying.  His life had been pretty much the same since too, except different.  Very different.

That night when I got off the bus, Thomas wasn't where he usually was this time of night — namely, up against the chains of his existence.  I didn't think about it for more than a few minutes before I wandered off in the direction of home.  I just figured he had wandered off somewhere as well, having come on a new thought.
Except that he wasn't there the next morning as I walked up.  This made me start worrying, as I hoped that he hadn't been roughed up in the night and might not be lying close to death somewhere.

So I began calling his name.  I was surprised when he answered.  I looked around me trying to figure out where his voice was calling from and couldn't see him.

Finally I heard, "Up here!" and looked up to see that he was indeed flying.  At about a hundred feet or so.