Dreams of Many Colored Glass - excerpt

A man finds his life changed – against his wishes – by someone else’s dreams.


Beauty is truth and truth is beauty, and that’s all you need to know. Until you drop and break it, when you get the bill for truth and beauty, plus the twenty-two per cent revolving interest charge, and a free speeding ticket.

Sitting in Buffalo Bill’s Fabulous Family Burgers (Buffalo, NY - in case they thought some of their customers might miss the predictability), wondering what she was going to do after she walked back to the booth, I thought about beauty and truth, life and death, breaking things and being found. I peered out the window to the parking lot for the third time. Yup. Truck was still there. Nice and tidy, angled neatly between the yellow lines. If you were an ordinary observer, you could believe Old Marsh was anybody’s truck, filled with cardboard boxes which were probably filled with deliveries. Donuts. Yeah.
I settled my back solidly against the seat cushion and watched her silent, sneaker-footed, grey-eyed advance.
“Listen, uh.”
“It’s Ran,” she said slowly.
“Ran. Right.”
“Ran. As in ‘Run, Ran, Have Run.’”
“Is ‘Ran’ short for something?”
“Yeah. It’s short for, ‘Start talking if you want me to keep listening.’”

I didn’t want her to listen at all, but she wasn’t going to give up. So what was a clean cut guy with dark circles under his eyes, an average looking jacket, size 12 nondescript sneakers, and fingertips drumming the tabletop wanting to get out of there going to do?

Ran: the woman who had been following me across the country finally had a name. Or half of one. She also looked familiar. My mind rummaged inside my brain, opening and closing file cabinets, trying to remember where I had seen here before. Flowers: she reminded me of flowers – which was pretty incongruous, since she was staring at me like someone gauging the distance from home plate to the outfield fence. I stared at her. She looked back at me. I lifted my coffee cup and gave a half-shrug.
I considered what I should say, what I could say without jeopardizing Fritz’s plan, and what would make her go away. I gave Ran a glance. She was still staring back.
I wondered how much of this was well founded suspicion, and how much was my desire to not get caught again before I finally reached where I was going, and how much was Fritz’s insistence on covering every aspect of the situation. Fritz believed that paranoia could be healthy. Fritz.
Sitting in the restaurant, my back feeling grateful for a booth instead of a truck seat, our past broke over me like an explosion of colored glass. I set down my coffee cup, looked at Ran who must have fit into this some way, and started talking.