Part 1 (cont.)

"Megan, don't hang up, I need your help!" He urged clutching the payphone close to his mouth.

She did not obey. She actualy did not even hear beyond the don't hang up part. He didn't try back. There was no use in it, and the truth was he deserved it and he knew it. Another screwed up victim of the commitment conundrum.

Still, Megan made him smile. Even hanging up on him was perfect--she was always perfect. Megan always did the right thing. In reality, even when she made mistakes she made them so healthily and so passionately that you could hardly call them mistakes.

For a little less than a year, Megan was home to his wreckage. She was his spiritual comfort, his emotional harbor, his social opposite, his physical equal, and most of all her voice was like the morning mist burning off of a gentle river pouring itself centuries long through two patiently surging mountains--at once both pure and clean, but so fragile that if you listened too long you began to worry that she would break under its shimmer. But now, Megan was mad, and rightly so, and that was over.

Oh God, what now. He lit a cigarette--smoking was the one thing he had never been able to un-commit to...god bless addictions. Actually, he wasn't sure he wanted to quit--it reminded him of his mother. She used to sit in a rocking chair beside his bed and smoke long slender cigarettes and drift off into another world, maybe even channeling another voice or spirit, and tell him stories at night. These stories weren't bedtime stories; they were much more real than that. They had depth and pain and joy and angst so much greater than bedtime story fluff.

Once she told him about a young man who learned that he could fly but did not tell anyone. No one else knew about it, and he thought it best to keep a secret. Often he would dream of flying to the rescue of some person in trouble--being the hero of the damsel in distress, or maybe his brother falling off of a cliff, or a cop shoved off a building by a mobster...anything and everything. Eventually, of course, the young man went mad. He could neither share his gift, because of his fear of the spite of those around him--even his family, he feared, would resent him--nor could he keep it a secret because he knew he had a gift for a reason. As the story went, his sister ended up falling from the second story of their home, and the young man watched her fall and did nothing to save her as he was convinced that he was dreaming again. Having been so trapped, so special, and yet so uselessly special, he had lost connection with what was real, which him was even the real him, which life was actually alive.

He never learned what this story fully meant. She died before he could ask. But even if he had asked, she would have smiled and said, "Was it beauty or selfishness that makes you ask?" and then followed up with, "What does it mean to you? This is probalbly right."

This is no time for stories, now stop thinking. He threw down the half-finsihed cigarette and pulled his unzipped hoodie closed by jamming his hands hard into the pockets up front. As soon as he did it he realized that something was out of place. From his left hand pocket he withdrew a small envelope with something very hard in it. He certainly had not put it in his pocket. His mind was racing. Oh god, they 're following me. He looked closely at the small envelope and on the front was written a single word: HOPE.

What did that mean?

He opened the small envelope and inside was a newly cut, still on the cardboard shelf hanger, brass key. He took the key out only to see that on the cardboard backing was written: Jackson's #214.