Ducks

Here's my workshop piece.  It's a little over four pages instead of three, but I figure it'll get cut down a bit tomorrow.  Anyway, enjoy!

Rain pounded steadily down as the medical examiner ascended the stained marble steps to the city morgue, carefully fixing his beaten old hat over his still-thick salt-and-pepper hair.  The bell tower across the street tolled melancholically, alerting the world that six o’clock had arrived.

He took the stairs instead of the elevator, though more out of habit than choice.  It didn’t really matter anymore.

I’m sorry, the doctor’s voice echoed through his head.

He’d understood.  How long do I have, he’d asked, a crushing feeling descending through his stomach.

At best? the doctor’s eyebrows creased sympathetically, probably two months.

“Hey, doc,” a voice from below broke through his mental haze.  The medical examiner waved quickly at the police officer, pasting a smile across his face.

“Got something waiting for me down there?” he asked, his accent obscuring any tremors in his voice.

“Yeah, real weird one actually,” the police officer shook his head, “twenty-nine, dropped dead.  No one’s quite sure why.”

“Should be interesting,” the medical examiner replied, still smiling.

He went through his preparations mechanically, carefully aligning every tool and adjusting the body on the table until it was perfectly placed under the hanging light.  The dead man’s face watched him carefully, eyes cracked open as if spying through a window.  The examiner gently slid them shut.

“I guess I should be happy for two months,” he whispered to the body as he readied the scalpel.  “I’m sure you would be.”

As he made the first incision, his mind began to drift.

The screen door slammed as he careened out, following his sister into the warm summer night.  Little flashing lights blinked in and out of existence, hanging suspended above the ground, defying time itself.  He reached out and plucked a little light from the air, watching the tiny black bug crawl along his finger before lifting back off, unfazed, into the breeze.

Joyously, he dashed down the sidewalk, watching the lights flutter around him with pure amazement.  Every few seconds he’d reach out and cup his hand around one, watching the fire blink out as the bug closed its wings and reignite as it took flight.  For a few moments, the world was made of magic.

“Oh no!” he heard his sister’s voice, saw her looking down at the ground a few steps in front of him.  He knelt down, knees brushing the rough concrete.  The firefly lay there, trembling faintly, its wings crushed and its brilliant light slowly withering away.  He moved closer, fascinated but with no idea why, as it extinguished forever.

The medical examiner jolted himself out of his stupor, surprised to see the body already open beneath him.  He looked around for a moment, wondering where his assistant had run off to before realizing that he’d called in sick.  Maybe I should have done that, he thought.

The dead wait for no one, an internal voice replied.

He continued, the bell tower ringing faintly in the distance, signaling eight o’clock.

Sharp grassy fronds whipped around his knees as he dashed through the park on his way home from school, the near-summer air hanging heavily like an invisible fog.  The day behind him, his mind was fixed on the future.  There was a dance on Saturday, the last one of his middle school life, and she had agreed to go!

“Gotcha!” he heard a voice emanate from his left and spun to see a group of three boys.  One was standing back, his face pale, almost bloodless with fear.  Another was watching with fascination as the third held up a wriggling garter snake, its body thrashing from side to side as it tried to escape the boy’s grip.

“Dude, get rid of it,” the pale one shook his head, “those things’ll kill you.”

“Sure about that?” the other grinned.  In one fluid movement, he snapped the snake’s fragile spine.

The boy who had watched, fascinated by the fading of a firefly’s light on a slate gray sidewalk, felt something clench inside his stomach as that thin crack echoed around the park.  From a distance, it looked as if the snake were still wiggling, still trying to escape, but its lopsided head affirmed the story that sickening sound had already told.  Without a second thought, all images of the dance ripped from his mind, he began to dash madly toward home.

The medical examiner looked down at the blank report, blinking confusedly at the box labeled cause of death.  For a second, he almost wrote down broken spine, but caught himself before pen touched paper.  Natural causes, he scrawled, brain aneurysm.

Time bombs, those things, he remembered one of his med school professors announcing to a sleepy lecture hall.  Millions of people don’t know they have them, little life clocks inside their heads, waiting for the right trigger.

He shook his head for what felt like the thousandth time and filled out the rest of the report.  Signing it without a second glance, he flipped on his hat and headed for the door.

A few moments later, he exited the darkened building into the muggy night.  The rain had stopped, but the pavement was still dark with moisture, exhaling that thick musty smell that the medical examiner found strangely comforting.  Beside the steps was a black metal bench, still damp with rainwater.  Without a second thought, he sat, placing his hat down beside him and gazing up at the shadowy tower across the street.

As if on cue, the bell began to toll.

The ripples lapped lazily against the pond’s muddy banks as he watched the family of ducks swim contentedly through the murky water.  It was a large family, twelve ducks that it seemed he’d known ever since he could see.  Some were young, bright yellow adolescents that had appeared as chicks that spring, while others were beginning to gray, their plumage growing fragmented and sparse.  His sister had never understood why he spent so much time watching the family of ducks in the pond across the street, and he’d never quite found the words to explain.

As he watched, one of the ducks began to flap, taking off from the water and launching itself into the cloudless sky.  As if in response, a faint autumn chill crept through the air, signaling to the rest of the family that it was time to move south.

One by one, the ducks ascended into the sky, hovering over the church at the end of the street as they waited for the rest of their flock.  One by one, he wished them goodbye, looking forward to the day the next spring when he would see them return.

Soon he was left with one solitary duck, the oldest of the bunch, swimming gently through the strangely calm water as its brothers and sisters winged south.  The boy watched the duck for what felt like hours, waiting for it to rise up and join its family.  And, at times, he could swear the duck was gazing back, its dark, tired eyes telling a story too solemn for words to express.

Down the street, through the strangely rarefied air, the bell in the church tower began to toll.