Traveler by Karen

Note from the author: This is an absurdist short fiction work I wrote after an odd dream I had while Justin was briefly unemployed in 2013.
 
It happened to be a bright, warm sort of day, but she would have carried on, with the Sun, or without him, engrossed in her own sequence of proximate, tangible experiences. Truth be told, she had not yet discovered the Heavens. They were presently too far out of her reach for examination. Thermal variance she felt only at the sub-conscious level. Or so I hypothesize. Even an omniscient narrator, like myself, is limited to observations within reach. Of course, I can read the girl's thoughts, and feelings, but if her [something] is pre-conscious—well, then, there's nothing for me to read, is there? She had, as yet, never complained (even to herself) of being too cold or too hot.

During her first few days of adventure, she had thought Rain problematic, because whenever she turned her face upward to taste him, he tapped her on the eyes, a great nuisance. Her discontentment was overcome, however, when she realized that in keeping her head down, and mouth agape, she could drink him without trouble if she slurped.
 
On this pleasant day, our young novice was engrossed in sidewalk concretery. The talent of extending only her forefinger was new to her, and she practiced manipulating a Pebble with her pointed digit in newly-conceived pathways. It was a trajectory not easily diagrammed on a dance worksheet, or in a secondary geometry course. But it was not without pattern; it was fractal in its thorny symmetries like the growth of veins within an organism. All this finger work was accomplished in a kneeling position. Her eyes were led, then, to a yellow fire hydrant to her left. She crawled toward the hydrant on calloused hands and knees, then stopped, suddenly, switched around, and returned to the Pebble, grasping him in her palm, and depositing him directing into her mouth. She sat up, staring ahead of her at nothing in particular, and marked the flavor, texture, and size of her subject using an analytical code not yet cracked by science.
 
Satisfied, she made her way to the hydrant again. She crawled with laughter and increased velocity, Her hands and knees slapped the ground with each “pad-pad, pad-pad” of her tread. She saw a thin object dangling from the large industrial nut on one side of the hydrant. Ah, recognition! She had seen one before and knew immediately what it was. She climbed the hydrant with her hands until she had pulled herself up to standing. Then, leaning over a little, she yanked the Rubber Band, and
 
“Snap!”
 
“Heh!” she chuckled, and pulled him again.
 
“Snap!”
 
“Snap!”
 
“Snap!”
 
And then a peal of merriment like resurrection.
 
The man squinting at her from down the street was not close enough to hear. Neither did he believe that it was really an unaccompanied infant he spied there.
 
“Maybe it's a dog.” He wasn't sure.
 
He turned the corner, and could no longer see her. He was on his way to work. That is, he was looking for work. “A day’s worth of work, at least,” he told himself, walking with his eyes closed. When he opened them, there were tall buildings, cars, heels clicking on the pavement, but no work. Next, he followed his ears, followed the sound of a jackhammer. The man hated loud noises—but was willing to grit, grin, teeth and bear it if it meant making a few dollars. The disquiet led him down a ramp and into the lower level of a many-storied parking garage. His eyes adjusted to the obscurity. Why was the garage unlit? 

“Hello?” He called out to the only thing he could clearly see, a circle of empty space before him lighted by a dingy florescent lamp.
 
The jackhammer surged and subsided.
 
“Who is here?” a female voice rang out, then echoed. “Is somebody? What do you want?” She spoke with an accent he didn’t recognize.
 
“I need to earn some money,” he said, approaching the lighted space. He squinted, turning his head this way and that, trying to determine in which direction he should point his dialogue. He was embarrassed by how loudly his own careful footsteps resonated as if he were stomping. “I’m good with tools . . . can you hire me for a day?”
 
She stepped into the yellow circle, and lifted her goggles.
 
That's when a monstrous Chevy sped down the entrance ramp, blaring horn and headlights. It lurched at the yellow circle. The man stumbled backward, arms flailing. He blundered into the woman, who kept her hands on the jackhammer. There was a screeching stop. The woman was face to face with the grill. The engine sighed, and the woman flared her nostrils in answer. The man now cowered a few feet behind her. The yellow circle was imperceptible now that two long cones of white light shone from the truck's face to the back wall, illuminating the swirling dust. The man could see now that the woman had waist-long, frizzy hair, and that the garage was much larger than he had imagined before.

The doors opened. A husband and wife stepped out. They walked right past the woman still facing the engine. She smelled them: hairspray, shoe polish, and dog.

A truck bed's worth of dogs were racing and cavorting around the perimeter of the garage. The unemployed man covered his ears and folded his body into a crouching squat, knees to forehead, a zealous attempt to keep out the clamoring, and clicking, and yapping, and jingling, but it all bounced off the cement walls, and echoed inside his head.

The couple walked past the crouching man. “Oh, look, honey,” said the wife to her husband, “the parking spaces are angled just the way you like—45 degrees. It's a lovely garage.”

“Yes, this lot reminds me of the one we had in Colorado Springs,” he replied. He smiled, took her hand, and together they began to dance, admiring their shadows on the back wall.

“Is not for sale!” the woman no longer facing the engine shouted. The husband and wife swiveled around to have a good look at her. The dogs' excitement waned, and the crouching man quietly crawled away from his spot at the center of the stare-down triangle.

“You don't know why we're here, do you?” The husband used a threatening tone. “No. Not anymore than we know what you're doing here with that jackhammer. You can't add a drain by jacking a hole into a garage with a cement floor that isn't tilted to run the water to the center.” Then he laughed. 

“Don't tell me, you're trying to demolish the whole structure, but you couldn't afford a caterpillar, so your plan is to crush the entire thing, one jacking inch at a time?”

“But she's doing the job inside-out.” The wife chimed in, now. “She's going to tear out the bottom and let the whole thing come crashing down on her head!”

“Or maybe she's on her way to the center of the earth.” The husband concluded. “Well, in that case, Madame, don't let us stand in your way!” The woman clutched her instrument tightly as they stepped toward her, and finally exhaled when she realized they were simply returning to the truck. The husband clapped his hands to call the dogs back into the truck bed. The wife took a small suitcase out from behind her seat. She tossed it onto the concrete to the right of the truck. It snapped open on impact. They backed out of the lot, and the man on the floor crawled over to inspect the open case, taking advantage of the bright headlights until they vanished. Therein he found a collection of complimentary soaps and shampoos from various hotels. He turned to speak to the woman with the long hair, but she was back to her hammering, and he was disinclined to bother her again about a job.

The couple in the truck, meanwhile, sped away. It's possible they passed a naked babe playfully inspecting leaves in the gutter. Whether or not they witnessed her efforts I can't say. If they saw her, they certainly weren't conscious of it.