Ryan Tullis


Chopin's March




"I'm terribly sorry for your loss." Dan bowed to a puffy-eyed, gray haired woman.


"Just know that Paul will be left in precious and caring hands," Steven replied perfectly afterwards.


The woman exited via the held-open wooden door to the freshly cut lawn. The sun hung from a streetlight, and 
Dan had to squeeze his eyes until the wooden wall creaked shut again.


"I hate bowing. It hurts my back."


"Everything hurts your back."


"You'll understand when you're older."


"I'm fourty-seven."


Dan waved his hand behind him dismissively and walked down the neutral-colored hallway. Copies of paintings that contained no significance taunted him from the walls over fake-gold and silver table lamps.


"We look like a church."


"You say that every day." Steven didn't move a brown eye towards him, and instead moved casually forward with his bald spot held high in his oak hair. "And besides," he continued as they moved along the hallway, "isn't it similar, anyway?"


An unmarked locked door stood in front of them. Steven snapped a key into his hand, twisted it, and the it cried open for Dan. He shuffled himself into the office. Papers were spread all over the wooden table, which in itself had looked like a war. Dan had gotten it at a garage sale years ago. Chips in the paint and dents in the grain were common accessories to it, but Dan loved it. A plastic chair covered with tie-on green cushions waited for him below.


"You need to clean it, with all due respect."


"Why? It'll look as stale as the rest of this building!"


"You're the one who decorated it," Steve mumbled.


Dan leveled himself with the chair, using his hands to help him down. The motion made him feel out of breath. His lungs always ached. A window draped heavy purple vines of cloth beside him, and he pulled down the wire to drag them open in a ballet of dust. "Who's on the list for tomorrow?"



"We have Bill Peterson's at four o'clock."


Dan's eyes settled on the side street from his window. The view was terrible, but every now and again he'd see some twisted-hat punk riding down the road on a skateboard. "Bill and I used to go to school together. He's ladies man, you know." He caught Steven rolling his eyes, but continued, anyway. "He was a ladies man. There was this girl in Math, can't think of her name. Started with a P? Pam? Patty? I can't remember. But he would make these googly faces at her until she'd scream out and the teacher would throw the eraser at him." Dan chuckled to himself, and was the only voice in the room, but he didn't care. He put his hand up and felt the broken platoon of thin white hairs left on his head. A translucent version of him looked back from the glass some phantasm of an old, wrinkled blanket. "Go home, Steven."


Steven might have turned to look at him, but he didn't move his eyes to tell.


"What do you mean? I don't normally leave for another hour. There's still closing procedures to be done! The floors and the windows have yet to be swept or cleane-"


"Go home, Steven! It's my rules. It's my building. I can do what I want with it. You'll have it to clean all you want in a few years. I'll do it."


"With all due respect, you can't possibly do it yourself--"


"God damn it, Steven! I'm not one of those old widows! Don't give me that cold, polite talk. Just go home." Dan's voice came out as more of a whimper than commanding. It was as if he couldn't even raise it to be dominating anymore. He leaned forward in the chair, his elbows on the windowsill.


"Yes, Sir. Try to rest tonight. Chemotherapy is only half the battle." Dan tightened his lips as he heard the door shut. 


He stared out the window until only the moon and street lights beat on the outside asphalt, and that's when he went outside to the graveyard. It was a small plot. There were no keepers. Just him and Steven. They closed the gates at night, so the metal appendages of the fence were left baring their open arms to the unwilling. Dan walked slowly into it, as if passing a barrier. It never felt like that before. Like he was crossing into somewhere. The grass was green. It was perfect. Not a fly, a bee, or a bird settled on the stones or the perfectly set rows of flowers that lined the fence. Dan walked along the gray tablets. Everything around them was city. Cars without identities that hid behind their headlights shot down the road. A light would engulf Dan and a few of the names carved into stone, and then vanish, as if erasing the name with it. Polite night-lights stood in the center though, so that the yard as a whole could still be viewed.


Dan knew too many of the names on the stones. There was Phil, and Carmen. Phil was a baker and always gave his old bread to Carmen, because her kids would always play outside his house when he was trying to sleep. It was his way of revenge. Always passive aggressive. Now they laid next to each other like neighbors, their feud nothing but peaceful silence. 


And then a figure moved beside him. It was so fast that Dan had to catch himself on Phil. The moonlight only left the silhouette of it zigzagging this way and that. He couldn't find the voice to yell. And then it came up to him. Maybe two feet high. A stick tapping this way and that behind it. Panting. A dog. Dan laughed, and getting himself painfully down onto one knee cupped his old hand around it. He couldn't get his hand away fast enough to avoid the wet tongue going over it, so instead he simply laughed. 


A boy with a baseball cap ran up to them. He looked fresh into the double digits by his height, and his hesitated, 
rigid look of the area. "I'm sorry! He got away from me. I thought he was going after a squirrel."


"It's fine! It's fine. A beautiful dog you have there."


"Yeah," the boy muttered as he wrapped his hand back around the leash and began to tug at it.


"I like your dog very much. I would give you candy if I had it."


The kid cocked his eyebrow. Maybe kids didn't like candy anymore. He couldn't tell. No kids ever had candy or toys at viewings.


"How about this!" He smiled, leaning forward to the boy, rubbing his hand on the boy's cap. "When your dog dies, he can have any plot in this place you want." He grinned happily.


For a moment, the kid stood there, mouth agape. Was he so happy? Then, the next moment, he shivered and screamed, his figure shooting off, dragging the panting dog behind him.


"Wait," Dan tried to shout after him, but his voice failed as it always did, and the boy was gone, disappearing into the night. He didn't go back up onto his knee. He instead lowered himself all the way into the grass. He rested his back on Phil. Thirty five years. Thirty five years he had been bowing. The cool touch of the stone almost felt good on his throbbing back. Steven would take over the business. He would hire someone younger than him and pay him to roll their eyes at his stories. Steven would hold open the door for people and then have the door held open for him, and finally a door would be opened for him one more time and then shut once more, and that would be it.


The night was just cold enough to feel comfortable, and the grass just wet enough to feel alive. The perfectly trimmed trees shared silent witness to the light of the stars being snuffed out by growing daylight, and somewhere, Dan could hear a car honking its horn in an already passed moment.