The Terminal, Submission 6 by Ryan Wrenn

The display illuminates green and Alexa flips open the phone. Tim will be here in two minutes.

Carmen Electra fills the screen selling some bubble gum, this one the ever-so-exotic mix of strawberry, banana, and something called ‘acai’. A berry only found in the jungles along the Amazon River, where Carmen now effortlessly paddles in a long, hollowed out tree trunk. Alexa wishes she had that smile.

Just then someone at the bus station switches the channel from some unseen location in the crowded terminal. The small television perched in the upper corner of the room blinks to black, then to some celebrity criminal she doesn’t yet recognize. She tries to follow the story as close she can but the buzz of fifty conversations swirling around her makes it harder than she expected to concentrate. She closes her eyes a moment to focus, to maybe isolate just once voice among the flat, blank hum.

She opens them again, finds herself staring across the area of crowded seats where she’s planted herself, near the door so she could see Tim’s car pull up. A man, nondescript but for an inordinately large pair of industrial gray headphones hanging loosely around a bone-thin neck, stands in the automated ticket line. His hair is flat and blond. His clothes also loose fitting, gray sweats. Her gaze would’ve passed right over him had his face not begun to scrunch up in some exasperated anguish of a yawn. How the creases around his eyes folded, how his nose looked pushed up above his mouth. The face exploded in her memory and for just that instant, almost imperceptible in her subconscious and entirely forgettable had his eyes not locked with hers when he finished. Jonah, from middle school. That day of the final presentation where he had paused and his face contorted in the same painful way. He collapsed and his muscles flexed, seized. How scared she was. How she never had to say anything to that boy, sitting next to her and staring as the teacher draped a small blanket over Jonah so as to better conceal his embarrassing convulsions, to know they were both terrified. How they kissed for the first time that afternoon. How she hadn’t spoken to him in six months.

Jonah evidently doesn’t recognize her and looks away as the line moves forward a step. She pulls her phone out again and thumbs through her contacts, finds his name. Looks out the window for Tim.

Kiss Me, Submission 6 by Lee Martin

“Kiss me,” she said.

“No.”

She sat in orange streetlight and looked up into the mist of insects in the beam. She remembered how light used to pour from holes in clouds and how it never fell on her. But now…her turn…this. They leaned against the dirty brick wall of the old bar, which had not always been a bar; it used to be a tailor, and before that a pizza store (take-out only) and before that a bank and before that a bar again. Now its lights were permanently off, part of an isolation project of the city to sequester deteriorating locations before they became cancerous. They were alone for at least four blocks in each direction.

He studied a soda can as it was blown down the dark street and rolled into the waiting mouth of a sewer.

He dug into the olive drab sack and pulled out a black and white composition book, flipped a few pages, then pulled out five more books just like it.

“There. Hold on.”

Book 14, page 52, table 2, line 5, column 33: Book 33.

“Almost,” he said, diving back into the bag for Book 33.

She came with him on his observation nights in order to enjoy the almost-silence of the isolation corridor. He would sit patiently and watch the dead world around them, waiting for some mundane event or occurrence so he could document it and consult the tables. She would stare at storefronts and imagine fat kids tugging the skirts of their mothers on a summer day, shiny cars, the smell of real meat cooking.

“There,” he said, and she heard him hold his breath. He always held his breath after he finished tracing a long trail of events and coincidences. It had taken over 40 years of hermit-like seclusion to observe, compare, compile, consult, document. She turned to face him as he finished scrawling on a scrap of paper.

corridor/bar--->date?/June/Tuesday/trash/soda can--->environment?/wind/sewer=….

He held the sheet of paper next to his watch. “Ready?” She didn’t answer; he knew she was.

“Three…two…....….now,” he breathed softly as he closed his eyes, and not a moment later a soft blue thread connected the street and sky, not 100 yards from where they sat, followed by a train wreck of sound sprinting down the street.

“Wow!” she said, feigning her excitement. His predictions were almost always correct, but the pragmatist in her was always disappointed by lack of application. She saw no purpose. They sat for a while longer before he packed his notebooks. He placed them in the bag, one at a time, like jewels, while he mulled over the idea of meaning. She watched his weathered hands and wondered if he was paying attention to the right coincidences.