Constellations

By Scott Cimarusti

A collection of dramatic short fiction. "The Old Man's Briefcase", "I Finally Figured It Out", "Roses on the Doorstep", "Modern-Day Orpheus", "Coffee Shop Confessional", "Windy City Nocturne", "Another Coffee Shop Confessional", "Buzzsaw Briggs's Last Day".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scott Cimarusti
• Release date: May 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458173096

Scott Cimarusti

Scott Cimarusti was born in 1970 and lived in the Chicago area until heading downstate to attend the University of Illinois. He now works at his alma mater and currently lives in Champaign. An avid reader of all genres--mainly horror, suspense, and sci-fi--Scott started writing short fiction as a hobby while in college. "The Last Archer of Laummoren" was his first novel. (http://lastarcher.com) Find Scott on the web at http://scott.cimarusti.com or on Facebook, Twitter (@scimarusti), and LinkedIn.

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CONSTELLATIONS

by SCOTT CIMARUSTI

Constellations

Scott Cimarusti

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011, 2016, 2018 Scott Cimarusti

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover photo Autumn Night, courtesy of Oskar Vikman, available under a Creative Commons Attribution license via flickr.com. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/vikmanoskar/3948915904/in/photostream/)

ISBN: 978-1-4581-7309-6

http://scott.cimarusti.com

The Old Man's Briefcase

I Finally Figured It Out

Roses on the Doorstep

Modern-Day Orpheus

Coffee Shop Confessional

Windy City Nocturne

Another Coffee Shop Confessional

Buzzsaw Briggs's Last Day

The Old Man’s Briefcase

He was just an old man sitting toward the back of the bus with a brown leather briefcase on his lap, but once I’d spotted him, I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed him before.

There was nothing remarkable about his appearance, mind you; he was just another typical frail-looking old man that blends into the crowd like everyone else in a bustling city. But still, something drew my gaze to him one day; and ever since then, I found my eyes seeking him out (sometimes, seemingly of their own accord) every time I boarded the bus on my morning commute to work.

If I had to guess, I would have estimated his age to be somewhere in his late seventies or early eighties. And even though I couldn’t help thinking of that as being old, it wasn’t as far off for me as I would have liked; I’d already weathered the better (or worse) part of forty winters when I first spotted him. And for those of you who haven’t seen that many years pass, and may not think forty and eighty are all that close, wait until you hit that milestone, then come talk to me.

Seeing the old man on the bus day after day, week after week, quickly became a source of comfort for me. Finding his wizened frame hunched over that briefcase was becoming one of a dwindling number of consistencies in my tumultuous world.

Susan and I had just gotten divorced, and she was wasting no time with her campaign of disinformation to brainwash our two children and turn them against me, spinning her lies the way a black widow spins her web. I still don’t know what lies she made up about me—my children have never told me, and I don’t hear too much from them these days, anyway. But it really doesn’t matter; the irreparable damage has been done. Whatever it was she told them proved to be enough for them to gradually distance themselves from me over the years, to the point that I’m not even sure I would recognize either of them even if they took the empty seat next to me on my morning bus ride.

That period right after the divorce had been a really rough time for me; I can still remember that with painful clarity. Even though I had tried everything to make Susan happy, she had been determined to be miserable, and I happened to be a convenient scapegoat for her at the time.

As I had feared and expected, the judge had awarded her primary custody of our son and daughter, and I had to settle for seeing them every other weekend instead of every day. Those four days a month (closer to three, actually, because Friday night to Sunday afternoon is not two full days) proved to be precious little time to undo the damage that Susan was able to do the rest of the month. It didn’t take long before I could feel both of them pulling away from me. Whatever emotional trauma they must have experienced from the divorce (the vision of their eyes brimming with tears the day I packed and moved out still feels like a hole in my soul) must have been smothered by the constant barrage of lies their mother blinded and deafened them with.

The separation from my children had been the most painful for me, because throughout everything else, they had always been my one remaining salvation. No matter how stressful work or my marriage got, I could always retreat back into their world of simplicity and black and white; where the villains of the world were trolls or witches or big bad wolves that could always be vanquished just in time to turn out the light and drift off to a blissful sleep. And now that my oasis was drifting away from me, I was feeling increasingly disoriented and helpless.

Caught in a whirling maelstrom of despair and hopelessness, the world had become a very bleak and lonely place for me, and I was beginning to entertain thoughts that one really shouldn’t.

All of this was going on right about the time I noticed the old man with the briefcase.

As I mentioned, once I saw him, I couldn’t unsee him, and I made a point to look for him every day. It became a ritual; like making sure my apartment door was deadbolted every night before bed, or switching on the coffeemaker first thing in the morning.

I always found him in the same seat on the right-hand side of the bus, second row from the back. Whatever the weather, he was always neatly dressed in a coat and tie, his silver hair slicked back off his pink and wrinkled forehead. In the wintertime, he usually wore a salt-and-pepper wool overcoat and a gray fedora. In the spring, it was a beige trenchcoat with an umbrella hooked over one bony forearm.

And on his lap, his arms wrapped around it almost lovingly, was that battered brown leather briefcase.

I never saw him break physical contact with it—much less open it—so I had no idea what its contents were. He always kept it clutched to his narrow chest while his shimmering eyes peered over it from the wrinkled parchment of his face as he watched the world lumber past outside his window.

As the months marched by, my natural curiosity about what the old man kept inside that briefcase mutated into a strange obsession. I remember wondering why I was so interested in what an old coot lugged around with him, and I could never come up with a satisfactory answer. In retrospect, I think it was a convenient distraction from the rest of my life disintegrating around me. Whatever the reason was, one thing was certain: I needed to find out what he kept in there.

Despite my almost overwhelming nagging curiosity, it still took me quite a while to muster up the nerve to approach the old man about it. I wasn’t afraid of him or anything—after all, how threatening could an old man be? But still, how do you walk up to a complete stranger and pry into their personal business like that?

My main concern—other than coming across as a nutcase—was that I didn’t want to alarm him; I didn’t want him to think I was trying to steal the briefcase from him or anything. I was just curious about what was inside—even though I knew perfectly well that it was really none of my damned business.

Almost a year had slipped by before I finally did it. It was right around the time I was feeling like I had reached the end of my rope coping with Susan and the kids, my dead-end job, my dwindling finances, and everything else…and I found my eyes wandering more often to the handguns on display in the pawn shop window around the corner from my apartment. I remember thinking that I had nothing to lose, so why not just ask the old man? If for no other reason that to satisfy my curiosity before…

Before the lure of one of those guns became too urgent to ignore.

So when I boarded the bus one fateful morning in late May, I marched right down the aisle and plopped down into the seat right next to him.

As the bus lurched forward, wheezing and groaning back into the herd of morning traffic, I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and finally addressed the keeper of the mysterious briefcase that had consumed my thoughts for the past year.

Good morning.

He didn’t respond right away. Perhaps, like the rest of us in this increasingly impersonal society of ours, he was unaccustomed to even the most generic greeting from a stranger. So I repeated myself. This time, he swiveled his head in my direction and favored me with the first genuine smile I’d seen in quite some time (it almost brought me to tears, actually—that should give you some sense of my emotional state at the time). His eyes beamed, his already wrinkled face creased even more, and he replied in kind.

’Mornin’. His voice had clarity and timbre to it that betrayed his age. And though his tone was light and friendly, it hinted at a considerable wisdom beneath.

I nodded. Nice day.

He returned his gaze out the window. Not too bad. Not too bad…

I figured I’d better get to the point quickly before he decided that I wasn’t worth his time or his breath. That’s quite a briefcase you have there.

He patted it appreciatively, pride touching his eyes. Indeed it is.

I tried my best to mask my unhealthy obsession as mere innocent curiosity. Looks like it might be time for a new one.

The man’s smile became wan as he shook his head slowly. I don’t think so. It’s pretty special to me.

So you’ve had it a long time, then?

Not really…only a few years…

I raised my eyebrows in interest. Really? I wanted to get to the bottom of this mystery before my stop came, so I screwed up my courage and continued to plunge ahead, my hands nervously fidgeting in my lap. I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I was wondering if you could tell me where you got it. Time for a small white lie. "It may sound strange, but I’m a collector