text: This is part one of a two part short story. Looking for any and all valid critiques about any aspect of the story. **Memories of Darla** Norris Reight’s knee surgery six years ago had converted his enthusiastic morning jogs into spirited walks. At seventy-six, it was a disappointing concession to age, this immobility. As he attempted to stretch he felt a sliver of pain pierce the back of his left knee for a moment, then disappear. He spewed a few mild invectives into the sleepy morning air and set out in search of Darla. He’d first seen her two days ago near the end of his street. She’d been leaning against a telephone pole like the cutout silhouette of a cowboy he saw on front lawns, one leg straight down, one bent at the knee. He’d crossed the street to avoid her. He looked back after he’d gotten past her, but she was gone. Just like that. Poof. Two steps later his head felt like he’d been pummeled by the round end of a ball peen hammer. The next day he saw her again. Her head popped up over a long length of square cut forsythia farther along on his route. He avoided her then too, and was left with another thunderous headache. He thought if he saw her again this morning he would walk right up to her and say, “Are you Darla?” Just like that. Maybe just confronting her would ward off another one of those cranial assaults. He hadn’t actually seen Darla in nearly fifty years. He couldn’t imagine what she was doing here all of a sudden. With the exception of an occasional dream now and then he thought he’d finally expunged her from his life. No such luck, apparently. It seemed like she was back, and inflicting a different kind of pain this time around. He and Darla had been like a chemical compound through two years of high school and four years of college. They were so nearly inseparable that their friends would often refer to Norris as Darla, or Darla as Norris. One time, in college, on the first day of class in the one class they shared, Social Injustice in Medieval Europe, they both responded “Here,” when the professor called Norris’s name. Professor Chavez, tall and thin as a coat hanger looked at them over black, square topped reading glasses. “Will the real Norris Reight please stand up,” he said like a game show host. Norris and Darla looked at each other, each starting to rise before sitting back down, until Norris finally shot up straight and tall. “I’m Norris Reight,” Norris said. He smiled down at Darla. “Are you sure?” the professor said to a smattering of laughs. After college they’d bought a house together. The money came from a trust fund his father had set up for him from a lottery windfall. Norris had gotten a job as an English teacher at the same middle school he was a student at ten years before. Darla continued with her schooling, aiming at a Masters in Engineering, working part time at an electrical supply house two miles away from their home. Norris thought they were going to spend the rest of their lives together. They were a perfect couple. Every one said so. Darla’s best friend Octavia, a rotund, sweaty woman, once said she would have been willing to go on a diet if it would guarantee her the kind of relationship he and Darla had. “I’d like to see that,” Norris had said. Stupid thing to say. Norris knew that before he’d a chance to slap his hand over his mouth. “Did I say that out loud?” he asked sheepishly. Both Darla and Octavia glared at him. Octavia, finally relenting, said, “Really, you guys make a perfect couple, even if one of you is a jerk.” Then suddenly they were not so perfect a couple. If fact they were not a couple at all. They were nothing. Darla had gone. He remembered he’d left Darla under a mountain of covers that morning before he went out for his morning jog. She’d told him to turn the heat up before he left. He said roger that, and pushed the little metal slide switch on the thermostat outside the bedroom to 68 as he headed for the front door. He’d had exceptional legs that morning. His outward bound route took him to the center of Hazardville by way of a hill that sometimes seemed nearly vertical, but this morning seemed like little more than a gradual incline. He felt like he could’ve pumped his way up a hill twice as high. At the top of the hill he’d stood in the center of the empty road beneath the amber winking of a street light. He’d rose on his toes, stretching his calf muscles. A motorcycle screamed out of the darkness and sped around him, blaring at him in annoyance as it did so. Norris turned, saluted the single red light that blinked off as it veered to the left behind a line of houses, and pounded his way back home. He’d expected Darla to be up, the house warming, the coffee brewing when he got back. When he closed the front door, however, the house was as silent as when he’d left. In the kitchen, a single fluorescent light was on over the sink. Through the kitchen, down the hallway to the bedroom Norris had seen a sliver of light peeking out from a nearly closed door. He’d walked toward the light calling to Darla as he did so. He’d pushed the door open and saw an empty bed, the covers on it made to Darla’s usual anal requirements, so taught they felt like a plank of wood. On the bed, on her pillow, was an envelope so white against the deep red bedspread that it looked like someone had cut a hole in the cloth to expose the white pillowcase beneath. Norris suddenly felt like he was sitting on the sun. He unzipped his sweatshirt and tugged the hood from his head. He pulled a paper towel from a pocket in his sweatpants and wiped it across his forehead. He stared at the envelope, positioned exactly in the center of her pillow. NORRIS in large block letters was printed in the exact center of the envelope. Norris reached a hand out to the envelope. He traced its crisp edges with the tip of an index finger. He picked it up and stared at it for a long, agonizing minute before tearing at the flap and pulling out a single square of paper inside. On the square of paper Darla had printed, in perfect block letters, seven words. Norris looked at the words, mouthed them silently, and finally spoke them aloud. He read, “PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO FIND ME.” By the time he was done the house they’d lived in together for six years looked like it’d been the victim of a home invasion. In his desperate effort to find some reason for Darla’s disappearance he’d yanked open all the drawers of the bureau they’d shared, his lower drawers, her upper ones. He’d upended their contents on the bed, spilling out everything Darla had left behind. He’d run his hands over her things; panties, bras, sweaters, jewelry, winter gloves, socks, nylons. He’d felt their varied textures, had recognized some as birthday or anniversary gifts he’d given her. He’d strewn the clothes he tore from closets across the floor where they covered the oak hardwood like a madman’s idea of a rug. He’d pulled every book off every shelf, opened them, had fluttered their pages and let the books fly across the room to land where they may. He’d pulled unpacked boxes from the attic and upended them where he stood and watched their contents spill to the floor in small heaps. He’d called their friends, who were as surprised as he was that she’d left. Octavia had said, “No! You two were so perfect together.” “Apparently not,” Norris had said. The police were no help. They couldn’t do anything unless Norris suspected some kind of foul play. Did he expect foul play? No, he didn’t. “Well,” a woman’s lazy voice had said, “since you two weren’t married, she’s really free to do what she wants.” “I understand,” Norris said. “I guess I’ll have to wait until she turns up dead.” The private detective he’d hired was no better. After taking Norris’ money for three years all he could offer him was a reluctant admiration for her talents. “She obviously knows what she’s doing,” he’d said shrugging. “Where do you suppose she learned that?” Norris had glared at him. “You’re the detective!” he’d snapped. “You tell me!” In the end, after all the time, money, and effort Norris had spent to find Darla, he’d discovered only one thing for sure. There was not a trace of her anywhere. Darla was truly gone. For the next three years Norris tried to get his life back. His obsession with finding Darla had cost him his position at Hazardville Elementary. They were indulgent there for a time, sympathetic even. But he wasn’t being paid to hunt down an ex-girlfriend. Norris began accepting various substitute teaching positions. He gradually began jogging again and quickly lost the ugly fat he’d gained since Darla’s disappearance. He dusted off a cellar full of woodworking tools and lost himself in a swirl of dust long into an endless stretch of nights. He re-filled the five handcrafted bird feeders he’d made to Darla’s meticulous specifications and watched as the poor neglected darlings came back to feed once again. Still, Norris found that he couldn’t stay in his house. He tried. Even though there wasn’t the faintest hint of Darla to be found anywhere in the house, she still seemed to be everywhere. It was like she’d become a ghost, a haunting presence that the floors, walls, and ceilings absorbed and exuded, a breathing essence that infiltrated his dreams and shocked him awake each morning asking the same maddening question. Where was Darla? He didn’t know. It looked like he would never know. And staying here would only constantly remind him of that. So he decided it was time to go. He didn’t know where. He didn’t think he really cared. Anyplace that wasn’t here would be fine. In the end he’d simply opened up an Atlas of the United States, had covered his eyes with one hand and had stuck a pin in the map with the other. When he’d removed his hand from his eyes and had seen where the pin had landed, he’d smiled for the first time in what had seemed like a very long time. He’d stuck a pin in Dacula, Georgia and could not help but imagine the delightful possibilities of a misplaced ‘r’. **Starting Over** He met Sylvia while jogging, a little over two years after moving to Dacula. He hadn’t actually been jogging when they *met*. He’d been jogging, but had twisted his ankle in a dip in the road he’d navigated successfully hundreds of times since moving there. Sylvia jogged slowly past him, She looked like a spilled bag of M&M’s; red sneakers, blue shorts, green top, and gray blond hair clipped just past delicate ears and secured with a yellow sweatband. She stopped just past him and turned and waited as Norris limped toward her. “Are you hurt?” she asked. She looked down at Norris’s ankle. “You’re limping.” Norris shifted a little of his weight onto his ankle, testing it. “Not really,” he said. “I twisted the ankle a bit, I think, but I don’t think there’s any real damage.” He gave her a weak smile and noticed that her left eye seemed to shift in color from gray, to almost blue, then back to gray. It was disconcerting, hypnotic, and he found he was staring at her. She butted the side of her head with the heel of her hand. She shook her head and closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them. Her left eye was now as gray as the right eye. “It does that sometimes,” she said, smiling. “Don’t know why. I have to reset my head to bring everything back into sync.” Norris felt an overwhelming desire to smile stupidly, and did so for just a moment before he could stop himself. Sylvia smiled back at him. “I have that effect on people,” she said. “I don’t doubt that for an instant,” Norris said. A car rolled by just then, a tap of the horn, the spell broken. The two of them moved closer to the curb, Norris carefully steering Sylvia to safety, the tips of his fingers pressing lightly into the soft flesh of her upper arm. “My name is Norris,” Norris said. “Sylvia,” Sylvia said. She added, “Do you live around here?” Norris looked at her. “I do,” he said. Sylvia smiled. “Maybe we’re neighbors,” she said. “Maybe we are,” Norris said. **Ravaging Sylvia** Two months later Norris met Sylvia’s family. At a party Sylvia held every 4th of July he shook the slender hands of her twin daughters who wore matching blue jumpsuits, each with long, luxuriant tresses of shimmering hair, Dana’s white, Diana’s red. He said, “Nice to meet you Darla,” when he shook Dana’s hand. “Dana,” Dana said. “Oh, my god, I’m so sorry,” Norris said. “I’ll get over it,” Dana said. Norris wasn’t so sure he would. He worried the way Darla just popped up sometimes - like a wack-a-mole. Daniel, Sylvia’s doctor son, eyed Norris from beneath the lone spot of shade in Sylvia’s barren back yard. He plucked him with vampiric swiftness from the searing sun where he stood with Sylvia to the relative cool beneath the withering canopy of a dying sycamore tree. Norris could have hugged him. He was beginning to melt. Daniel stared at Norris and took a long swig of dark beer. He swallowed the bitter brew, and leaned unsteadily forward until his lips brushed Norris’s left ear. “What are your intentions toward my mother?” he whispered. Norris peered into dark eyes hidden beneath a ridge of bone so pronounced it looked like the brim of a baseball cap. He wasn’t sure he’d any intentions toward Sylvia, if he was ready for that sort of thing yet. “I plan to ravage her on the kitchen table as soon as everyone leaves,” Norris said. The beer Daniel had just swallowed erupted in a brown, frothy geyser from his nose and mouth. Norris caught Sylvia giving him a worried look. He shook his head. *It’s O.K*. Norris leaned in as Daniel was bent over, sputtering and coughing. “Calm down, Daniel,” he said. He tapped him lightly on the back until the coughing subsided. “We’re just friends, nothing more.” Daniel straightened. “You couldn’t just say that?” he said, still coughing, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. Norris smiled. “What fun would that be?” he said. **Is That What You Kids Are Calling It These Days** One morning, six months later, Dana and Diana were startled to find Norris, barefoot, in a black t-shirt and a pair of grey sweat shorts, heading toward their mother’s front porch, a newspaper tucked under his arm. They looked at each other across the front seat of Dana’s car. Norris heard the car. When he turned and saw Dana and Diana he gave them a short wave, pulling the folded paper from under his arm and holding it modestly in front of him. “Tell me you’re delivering that paper,” Dana said as she got out of the car. She was bundled in a thick sweater, puffy mittens and a stretchy yellow cap tugged down past her ears. White hair, cut short now, poked out of the cap like sparks of lightning. “Would you believe I was out for a jog,” Norris asked. “Is that what you kids are calling it nowadays,” Diana snorted over the car’s roof. She rubbed her nylon gloved hands on the nylon fabric of her short, puffy coat until the two squeaked. Norris smiled. “Good morning to you too,” he said. “Mom about ready?” Diana asked. “Atlanta awaits.” It was a shopping, dining excursion that Sylvia referred to as their January jaunt. “Pretty much,” Norris said. She’d actually been ready for over an hour and had quickly been losing patience at her daughters’ tardiness. Dana walked up the driveway to the porch. “Maybe we should go inside so the neighbors don’t see you standing around half naked in my mother’s driveway, in the middle of winter,” she suggested. She edged around Norris and started toward the front door. “Good idea,” Norris agreed. He waited for Diana who sprinted across the driveway and scurried into the house behind her sister, giving Norris an exaggerated wink as she did so. **Norris Steps In** That summer, Norris gave Diana away. Dan, who was scheduled to escort her down the aisle, got an emergency call from the hospital an hour before the wedding was to start. A woman had sped her car into a bridge abutment doing sixty. “Can’t someone else do *that*?” Diana whimpered. “You have to do *this*.” She looked up at her intended, Greg, a tall, square, implacable man who smiled and shrugged. “I’m on call,” Dan explained, holding his hands out, palms up, like a penitent. “But what about *me*?” Diana moaned. “This is my *wedding*.” Norris, who was standing behind Sylvia with his hands on her shoulders, bent forward and whispered something into her ear. Sylvia nodded. He detached himself from Sylvia and walked over to stand beside Dan. “I know I’m not your father, Diana,” Norris said, “But I would consider it an honor if you would let *me* give you away.” Diana looked at him. Her eyes began to glisten with tears. She stepped forward and buried her face in Norris’s chest, mumbling something and nodding her head. Raising her head she dabbed at her eyes with the back of a finger. “If you make my mascara run, Norris,” she said. “Your mother already told me I’d better not screw this up,” Norris said. “Do you need a minute?” Diana barked a laugh. She looked at Greg. “Do *you* need a minute?” she asked. “No, I’m good,” Greg said. Dan gave Diana a kiss on the cheek. “I’m so sorry Di,” he said. “It’s not your fault,” Diana said. She hugged her little brother. “Go. Go save a life. ” Dan hugged Diana again. He gave Greg a fist bump. To Norris he said, “If it can’t be me, Norris, I’m glad it’s you giving my sister away.” “Thank you,” Norris said. “Now go.” “Going,” Dan said. He kissed his mother and threw an unseen wave to Dana who was whispering into the ear of her latest concubine on the other side of the room. After the wedding Sylvia sighed into Norris’s shoulder. They were resting on a cozy loveseat that faced a large bay window, “It was a lovely wedding,” she said. “It was that,” Norris agreed. They were silent a moment. Sylvia finally said, “I’ve only got one more wedding in me, Norris.” “Dana?” Norris asked. Sylvia pulled away from Norris’s shoulder, turning to look at him. “No, not Dana,” she frowned. “Dana will never get married.” Norris thought for a long second. Finally understanding she meant she planned to get *married* only one more time, he said. “I see.” He suddenly imagined himself standing at the end of a long isle, Darla slowly gliding toward him in a long flowing white gown. He turned to Sylvia. “Well, maybe one more is all you’ll need,” he offered, coaxing her back into his shoulder. Sylvia let herself be drawn back in. “One more is all I’ll be able to handle,” she said. “And keep in mind, I’m not a woman of infinite patience.” **The Muse** Two years after Norris and Sylvia consolidated residences (she hated the way Norris referred to their arrangement as shacking up) Dana decided to move to Arizona. Her seniority with the Post Office allowed her to bid on a letter carrier position in Flagstaff. Grace, her friend, companion, lover, would be coming along to paint in the desert. “Paint. In the desert?” Sylvia said, when Dana called. “Isn’t that...interesting.” “She’s following her passion,” Dana explained. “I admire that.” “But you’re paying her way,” Sylvia observed. “That’s not the way I see it.” “Oh? And how do you see it?” Sylvia asked. “Think of me as her Muse,” Dana said. She could feel Sylvia’s eyes rolling. “Don’t say it mom,” Dana said. “Far be it from me to say a thing,” Sylvia said. “That would be a first,” Dana said. When Sylvia and Norris came to visit for the first time, a little over a year after Dana had moved to Arizona, they discovered that her role as Muse had been transferred to a local businessman. He spent most of his time with his business, giving Dana’s ex even more of the time, and money, apparently, she needed to pursue her passion. “She said I was getting too clingy,” Dana told her mother. “Clingy,right!” Sylvia said to Norris that night. They were in a small bedroom the size of their bathroom at home. They could hear the faint mumbling of a TV from Dana’s room next door. It was a little after one in the morning. “She could have been as clingy as she’d wanted if she’s had a little more of this,” Sylvia said, rubbing her middle finger and thumb together, indicating cash. “You can be so jaded sometimes, Syl” Norris said. “Am I wrong?” Sylvia asked. “Probably not,” Norris admitted. “So?” Sylvia said. “So nothing,” Norris said. “It’s just that you seem to think she invited this upon herself.” “Do I need to remind you of the number of failed relationships she’s had?” Sylvia said. “We all make mistakes in love, Sylvia,” Norris said. He turned his head on his pillow and ran his eyes along the lines of her profile, from her squarish chin, to the flattened tip of her nose, to the small red mark the size of a dull pencil tip just below her right eye that he’d once tried to remove with a tongue moistened napkin. Sylvia could feel him looking at her. “Have you?” she asked. “Have I...?” “Made mistakes in love,” she said. “I’m sure I have,” Norris said. Turning on her side Sylvia said, “Give me an example.” She raised her head, supporting it with the palm of her hand, her upper arm wedged into her pillow. “I can’t give you any specifics,” Norris said. “I just know you can’t get to the age we are without having made some mistakes, somewhere along the line.” Sylvia looked at Norris a moment longer before settling back into her pillow. “If you say so,” she said to the ceiling. “But she makes more than her fair share of these alleged mistakes.” “All the more reason to give her the occasional benefit of the doubt,” Norris said. “I suppose,” Sylvia said. “Really, you just need to give her a break,” Norris said. **The Ultimatum** Dan didn’t even have a chance to have a drink on the plane. From the time he took his seat in Flagstaff after visiting his sister, until his plane landed in Los Angeles three hours later, all he did was sleep. He was picked up at the airport by a hospital shuttle and was in an operating room twenty minutes later. When the operation was over, he rushed through the gleaming tiled hallways on the second floor of Mercy hospital to his office on the fourth floor clasping his hands together as he did so to stop them from shaking. Once in his office he wasted no time in pulling a very expensive bottle of British whiskey from the sliding doors of a credenza behind his desk. He managed to get two quick shots down and put the bottle away before nurse Wilson opened his door unannounced. She stood in the doorway like a Viking wench, pointing a thick index finger with a cobalt blue nail at him. She told him that would be the last time he ever, ever! performed a surgery in that condition. What condition would that be, he wanted to know? She gave him a tired smirk. Do I really have to say it? she asked him. I wish you would, he said. O.K. then. Drunk, she said. Satisfied? Not really, Dan said. Dan thought it ironic that he should be called to task for being drunk during a surgical procedure when, for the first time in he couldn’t really say how long, he’d actually been sober. If only the patient had lived. He looked at the nurse. She *was* like a Viking. Her thick hands were planted on her narrow, boyish hips. A wild electrified mane of strawberry blond corkscrews that seemed to sputter with untamed energy framed her long bony face. “No one could have saved him,” he said. “Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “We’ll never know. I just know that was your last surgery. I’ve been keeping records. If you’re not out of here in a week I’ll give them to HR.” Dan didn’t know what kind of records she might have. She was a bit of a techy. He imagined a miniature camera clipped to her lapel or secured to the inner sleeves of her scrubs, recording his every unsteady move since who knows when. He wanted to argue with her, but he knew she was right. The chorus of disparaging voices he heard, or maybe only imagined he heard, in his operating room would probably back her up. The nurse pointed her finger at him again. “I mean it,” she said. “Records.” Dan watched as she did a crisp military about face and squeaked down the hallway to some Viking retreat in the bowels of the building somewhere. He pulled the expensive bottle of British whiskey back out of the credenza and did two more quick shots before getting up and slamming his office door shut. **A Rainbow of Possibilities** Norris took Dan to a woodworking show in Atlanta a month after Dan left Mercy Hospital. He told Dan it might give him a different perspective on things. He took him down cluttered aisles full of woodworking tools, jigs and bewhiskered hawkers. “This is my version of your medical convention,” Norris explained. “Minus the sex,” Dan said. “Minus the booze. Minus the blow.” “That’s tomorrow,” Norris said. “Make sure you get your hand stamped before we leave.” At dinner that night, at a karaoke club in the Sweet Auburn Historic District of Atlanta, Norris watched as Dan finished two thirds of a bottle of wine. He played more with his food than he ate it, going so far as to construct a fairly precise replica of the Arc de Triomphe with his stiff mashed potatoes. As he carefully sculpted that edifice Dan confessed that he felt like an imposter. “An imposter?” Norris had asked. “An imposter,” Dan had confirmed. For eleven years, he said, he’d been pretending to be a doctor. Norris had told him he hadn’t been pretending anything. He’d been a doctor, and a good one at that. Dan shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. He told Norris about the voices he heard in his operating room, his nurses snickering at him, second guessing his every decision. Did he really want to make that incision there? Shouldn’t it be six inches lower? Does he even know where the abdomen was? He said he even half expected his patients to sit up on the operating table to plead that he not work on them. ‘He’s not a real doctor,’ he would imagine them crying. ‘Can’t anybody see that!?’ He said he started drinking to shut them up. Norris asked Dan why he’d bothered becoming a doctor at all, or why he hadn’t tried some other profession, if he felt that way. Dan had shrugged. “I don’t know, Norris,” he’d said. “I really don’t. I guess I always thought it would get better. It never did.” He said being confronted by Nurse Wilson would turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. Now he could stop pretending. He said he could have fought the accusations. The hospital would have sided with him he was sure, but then what? More voices, more lies, more pretension? No, this was an opportunity, one he didn’t see how he could refuse. “An opportunity for what?” Norris had asked. Dan stared down at his plate. Norris wondered if he’d heard him. Just then, on an isolated stage on the far side of the dining room, a small, blond woman tapped the perforated surface of a silver microphone. She adjusted a long silver stand to accommodate her height and said softly, “This is for August.” Then, in a voice so clear and pure it could have broken the hearts of angels she sang a plaintive song of a land she once knew in a lullaby. Norris and Dan watched her as her face contorted around the lyrics and she softly swayed to the flight of bluebirds and the images of rainbows. When she was done Dan rose from his seat and gave her a thunderous applause. “You go girl!” he yelled. The girl turned and smiled at him. “Thank you, thank you very much,” she intoned, like Elvis. Dan sat back down. “I don’t know what’s next Norris,” he said. He poured enough wine into his round bottomed goblet for a toast and held it aloft. “Here’s to whatever that might be,” he offered. “Roger that,” Norris said. He lifted his glass of dark beer. Clinking it against Dan’s goblet, he added, “To a rainbow of possibilities.