Synopsis: I have no synopsis

Author's Note: I don't even have anything to say about this one, guys. I don't know what I'll do with it. I'll move it to my scraps later, I suppose. I just had to write it. I suppose it's just something I was compelled to do. I can't tell you to enjoy this. I can't even tell you to peace out.
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The house was empty and the slightest of sounds echoed off of the high ceiling of the living room. Mary rose up her eyes and stared at the oak beams that ran up the ceiling from the walls, all meeting at the notch at the top, holding up white walls and seemingly the entire house. The room itself had changed about as much as the walls and ceilings in over twenty years.
A brown sectional couch ran along the long of the wall across from her and then bent into and out of the corner to the right, just barely hiding windows looking out onto the front porch and then the lawn and street beyond. A little coffee table sat before it on a throw rug. A large computer was sitting in a cabinet to the right but it was hardly ever used. Danny hated computers but kept it because it was his fathers.
A black rocking chair sat just opposite of the coffee table, on the left side of the room. A big empty aquarium on wooden legs stood against the wall behind it, making a little doorway into the kitchen with the sectional couch just opposite it. A big television, from the eighties and weighing four or five hundred pounds, sat directly to her left.
Lifting up her eyes, she stared up at the brick and mortar fireplace to her right. Her eyes darted back and forth at the objects on its mantle which included a wooden clock, several pieces from M&M Mars, a matchlock musket and a large screaming steel eagle. Her eyebrows twitched as her eyes went over it and her lips parted as her mouth fell open. She had never even noticed it before.
Suddenly a cuckoo clock that hung above the aquarium began to scream out its warning and she twirled her head around to stare at it. A red robin poked out of the black wooden box and tweeted at her nine times before disappearing back into its cage. The clock on the mantle played chimes and a grandfather clock halfway through the house sang back its response, low and dull.
But above the chiming of the dozens of clocks in the house, she could hear a strange little sound. It sounded like a low bit of music playing through distended and worn speakers. Holding her arms across her body, she began forward and across the wooden floors of the living room.
Upon entering the kitchen, she looked down over the plastic tile floor and up to the cabinetry that filled the large kitchen. All of it was cherry except for the table to her immediate left. It was made of some wood that nobody could identify anymore. A big telephone with a rotary dial hung from the wall and large painted birds on plates stared at her from above the bay window beyond the table there.
Turning away she strode forward and between the cabinets that ran the length of the kitchen on the right side and where a peninsula jutted out to hide a washing machine and serve as a buffet, in the old sense. She passed a refrigerator that must have been made in the eighties but she hardly noticed it.
The kitchen was still the same way as always. Danny made sure never to change anything. He clung to the old as if the new would ruin it. The only thing new he ever bought was food. Even the sink, an old beige one that felt like stone but wasn’t, didn’t even have a spray nozzle on it.
She ran her eyes over the cooking range that was attached to the peninsula and the area between it and the sink. It was all stone tiles, real tile, not the fake plastic kind. But its luster had been lost over the years of being hidden from the sun by cherry cabinetry that was above it. The only other light that came in did so through a window behind the sink.
She shook her head, knowing the man who owned the place most likely barely ever used it, but obsessively took care of it. She couldn’t help thinking about Danny. She hadn’t seen him in weeks, not that she had gone out of her way to speak with him. Ever since he was little, he’s been reclusive, only coming out to do some crazy vigilante work or put his life at stake. And once those deeds were done, he would disappear into some dive bar along the river or his home outside of town.
But this time she began to worry, more than usual. The last time she had spoken with him was nearly two weeks ago and then he was so disassociated with himself. He barely even knew who she was, even though she said her name five times to him. He just blinked at her, cocked his head and then said, “Oh, yeah, sure.”
By then she had forgotten what it was she wanted to speak with him about and simply let him walk away, more confused than ever. She figured it was just Danny being Danny: meaning, a reclusive, half-mentally disturbed man who does crazy, dangerous actions all in the name of selfish vendetta. But as he walked to his car, he stood by its side and looked at it as if he had forgotten who owned it.
She remembers just blowing air out through her lips and marching away, but, now regrets it. Mary noticed as she began to enter into the dining room that there were no pictures in the entire house. Even as she entered the old country-style dining room with large windows, a sliding glass door and a glass display cabinet in the corner, she saw no pictures at all.
Danny hated seeing his own face, felt disgusted by it. He would never look himself in the mirror either. He never explained why, he just did it. Mary knows that there are only two pictures in the entire house, of his parents, in their bedroom. She slowed her pace as she stepped up onto the dark wooden floor.
Her eyes were drawn to a table to her left and all of the books on top of it. They were all old but the one that caught her eye was a book nearly six inches thick and with size that would put any extended dictionary to shame. She stepped around the table and ran her hand across the cover and found it bounded in leather.
It was a Methodist Bible, which she could barely decipher from the cover. Taking a few smaller books from on top of it, placing them gently beside it, of course, she opened the cover gently and looked in. On top of the thick stack of bound papers, she found newspaper clippings.
Mary took up a few and saw that they were very old and very well maintained. The dates ranged from 2003 to 1928. They were birth dates, obituaries, marriages, divorces, paper articles and other things. As she dug deeper she found the dates began to get older and older. The one at the very back was an obituary from 1862, a family member named Paul Gantz had died at Shiloh.
Beneath the paper clippings were birth certificates and death certificates. She found love letters, last will and testaments, property deeds and even drivers licenses ranging back as far as the bible they were stuck in. Turning her eyes to the inside of the cover, she found a huge tree drawn on the inside. It had names, all written in black India ink. At the bottom was scratched 1860, or something like it.
Her eyes silently went over anything and her face just barely reacted. Her lips moved back and forth as she read bits and pieces of each article. Her eyebrows rose and fell and soon her face felt tired and heavy. Something stung at her eyes and she quickly shut the heavy bible’s cover and turned away.
“Danny!” Mary cried out.
Mary had done it before several times but had gotten no response at all. When there was no response from anywhere in the house, she expected it. Her eyes turned away from the sliding glass window and towards a closed door that lead into a front writing room. Mary knew that he wouldn’t be there; he barely ever sat in there. He only used it when bills came or laws or business needed to be done or checked.
Finally she looked towards the glass door and slowly stepped towards it. Her arms resumed the same position clasping around her body, as if she were cold. In fact the house was chilly. The furnace wasn’t running, or she would have heard and felt it. It was warm for a fall morning and he wouldn’t run the furnace if nobody would be there but him.
As she approached the window, her eyes immediately squinted as the light began to peak over the heavy forest behind the house. Her eyes quickly made out the old electric fence that used to hold in horses as well as a cinderblock barn that Mr. Blackwater built himself and was probably filled with beer cans and cigarette butts. Then she looked down to the big pond that sat into the ground just beyond the concrete patio.
The thing was clean and beautiful and the waterfall ran completely. Goldfish as big as trout swam around and koi fish came to the surface to search for food. A little bucket sat at the edge of the patio which was filled with fish food. A little paper cup was at its side.
Her eyes scanned across the patio until it came across two large figures sitting there. The first figure was a small table on which sat a record player. Its long extension cord ran along the patio and to an external plug on the side of the house. Its top was open and she could see it spinning.
Beside that was a metal and plastic patio chair that is most likely twenty-five years old if not more. An arm was propped up on the metal arm of the chair and two booted and jeans-covered legs fell down from its plastic-mesh seat. A white figure sat in the chair, slumped forward. It was Danny, she could tell, but why was he out on the patio so early in the morning?
Her lips pulled backwards into a half-smile and her eyebrows even lifted up slightly. Her ears perked and she dropped her arms to her side. Inside she was still worried and angry, but at the same time she was glad to see that he’s still alright, still there. Grabbing the handle, she slid the door open and then stepped out.
Without closing the door she began to slowly approach where Danny sat in the chair. Mary focused her eyes on him and smiled wider and wider with each step. She looked over him, his white t-shirt, his heavy black hair and his gray fur. She looked over his ears and his hand and his arm and his watch and smiled just to see him still there.
His head slumped forward and his eyes were closed as if he had been long asleep. His body was relaxed and comfortable, despite the cold air of the disappearing night. His lips were still and he was silent and she smiled, thinking she’d get the drop on him for once in her life.
But as she approached him, she noticed that the record player must have run out of record a long time ago. Its needle was in the center of the record but didn’t stop playing. It continuously scratched against the vinyl record making a constantly repeating ‘rrr-rip, rrr-rip, rrr-rip’. She stopped smiling and her eyebrows fell a bit as a chill ran down her back.
She stopped walking and felt her tail begin to pull in against her legs. Her eyes looked over his face and felt something was wrong, something was off. Then her eyes strayed down and saw something hidden against the white base of the chair. Its little black form was hard to notice at first, but, when she saw it, it was clear.
Her heart leaped and she gasped. Without thinking, she took three wide steps forward and then stopped. Raising a hand up, she reached towards Danny’s body. Going forward, she placed her collie hand onto his neck and then took several shallow breaths as she felt the dew that had collected on his fur.
Grabbing his shoulder, she pulled him gently and pushed him back. His body was limp as a noodle and suddenly she gasped and felt her eyes begin to tear up. His white shirt was stained immensely and his left arm hung down over the side of his chair. His right arm fell into his lap as Mary rocked him.
Looking over him, she stepped up directly to the side of the metal chair, just beside the record player. The little object that was hidden down beside his foot was a pistol, one of his favorite revolvers. She dared not to reach towards his head and quickly turned away. Looking at the record, she lifted a hand and then turned it off.
The sound stopped and then she put the needle back into its receiver. Her eyes were drawn to the center of the record where something was underlined. She picked up the record from the rubber stand and then read it. At the very bottom was a track listing, number four, which read ’49 Bye-byes’. It was underlined with pen.
Mary dropped the record which hit the ground and simply laid there. Tears formed in her eyes and began pouring down through her course fur, matting it together. Although her mouth hung open limply, she couldn’t make a sound. Her body shook like an old jalopy and soon she grabbed the table to keep standing up right.
The tears hit the concrete and made it dark as night. With each tear, it began to seem more like a sullen painting than a mass of wet spots. Her legs refused to support her and she shook around. Her arms didn’t listen to her and she wavered until finally she collapsed onto the ground.
Curling up out of pain, she grabbed her own body and hid her face into her shirt. Everything was silent, terribly silent, even nature seemed to mourn. No birds visited the feeder, no squirrels dashed across the lawn. The horses that were boarded there stood along the fence and held their heads down. The entire neighborhood held its breath.
Danny had shot himself sometime in the night. It was his twenty-second birthday, to the minute. Mary was a wreck for hours afterwards but when she collected herself together, she found a last will and testament that was hidden under the second record of Four Way Street.
In it, Danny claimed sole responsibility for his own problems. His blamed all of his problems and half of the world’s problems on himself. He blamed ruining her life on him as well and told her directly, as it seemed he penned it solely for her, that he was sorry, something he could never do in life. He left everything to her, without prejudice. He promised she would do with the things he stole from the world as he could never have. The last few lines told her that the blame was his and thus only he could end it.
There was no one to phone. He had no children, no wife, no female he considered a girlfriend, no brothers or sisters, and no parents. His only relatives were distant and very old. Most of them hardly even knew he was alive, despite his World War II veteran great uncle and his wife as well as a few second cousins.
He had few friends and few people he trusted at all. He trusted no one fully, not even himself. In all, the things he amassed over the years, which included cars, motorcycles, guns, electronics, properties and enough valuables within them to value over three million dollars. He claims he stole it all in one way or another and thus made him guilty. Unfortunately in this case he made himself judge, jury and, sadly enough, executioner.
The lawyers were notified, the press did their thing and the coroners arrived around three in the afternoon. The neighbors offered their regards, but said they hardly knew him. He kept to himself. Mary didn’t know what to do. She lingered around his house, the house she now owned, and sobbed on and off. Everything made her weep and soon she simply sat down on the wooden steps that led up to the second floor and stayed there for hours.
She couldn’t understand it, she couldn’t understand him, his choice, or why it made her so miserable. He hated everything, hated everyone and made sure everyone knew it. He pushed her away no matter how she tried to get him to open up and it angered her at the time. He never played, he worked eternally, he never dated and truthfully she could say he died a virgin.
But still she wept for him, wept because he had nobody else that would, because in the end only enemies remained to weep for him. He called very few people his friends and trusted nobody with everything. When she was able to pull herself together again, she went upstairs, a place she had never been, and began to look around.
His parent’s room was dark, sullen and untouched. A bathroom was bright and lively but old as ages. There was a spare room upstairs that was turned into a storage closet. Finally, at the end of a long hallway, was his room. She was very hasty to open up the door, feeling that Danny would yell at her. But, realizing that he wasn’t there to do that, she opened it up and pushed the door in all the way.
Inside she found strange things. Despite normal things like a bed, a dresser, a gun closet and a computer desk, she found things that hit her like a ton of bricks. In the far corner was a tripod on which stood a canvas painting of a reflection in a chrome wheel. It was beautiful, but the wheel wasn’t the subject. In the shiny chrome was a reflection of the painter, unmistakably Daniel.
As she walked along the foot of the bed, looking at the painting a whole cache of paintings are revealed to her, sitting on the floor one up against another. There are ones of trees, of houses, of cars, of people in the park, of buildings around the county, of the Amish, of a baseball game and so many other things. Mary couldn’t understand where he found the time or why he did it at all.
She sat down gently onto the down cover of the bed and looked at each painting, not willing to touch them even lightly to see the ones behind. They were all beautiful, though some were more stunning than others. Turning her head to the right, she looks back at the desk that sat across from the foot of the bed.
On it sat dozens of thick bound collections of computer papers, sitting vertically almost to the ceiling. She rose from her seat and walked casually to it. Taking one from the top of a little pile, she read the front and then flipped through the entire one bounded piece and found it to be a novel. It was something about a dystopian world where everyone is the same, gladdened and stupefied medically, until one man who is outside of this perfect society begins to reveal the mistakes to one man who escapes it unknowingly.
She didn’t even know he could write. She just assumed he was all guns and cars and explosions. She went through each manuscript and found them to be a range of topics from detective drama to pure high fantasy. They were beautiful; all of them interesting, but Danny didn’t seem like an author. He seemed too low brow.
Mary put them back and then sat on the bed, staring at the mirror that serves as a backboard to this desk. She stared directly at her own face, her willowed frame and her shaking eyes. Then she noticed something even more shocking. A picture of her hung in the edge of the mirror. It was four years old, her senior picture.
She didn’t move to look at it, didn’t move to even take it down. She just began to cry once more, tears rolling down her face in her confusion. Danny never expressed a love towards anything or anybody. But at the same time he did, she just probably never noticed it. These were the thoughts that came to her and how stupid she believes she was.
Mary had become blind to the friend she made so many years ago. She painted him with one picture and held that picture every time she saw him. But how many times had he changed himself from that picture? How many birthday parties had he been there when her controlling father had become the Colonel again? How many times had he run all her errands when she couldn’t go out because of her college work? How many times had he made her life so interesting or done little things without her asking and she hadn’t even noticed?
This unsettled her the most but she could no longer cry. Mary had run out of tears. She simply sat in the darkened room and felt her heart crack down the center. By now she was broken, simply broken. Her sadness had run out and she was simply numb to it. Then it hit her how painful it must have been for him, having lived through neglected and abusive households and then on his own. This must be what it is like, having seen so much, read so much, done so much that everything, no matter how painful, no longer affects him. He had numbed himself to the world.
Mary rose silently from the dark bed. She slunk out of his room and down the hallway. Soon she was stepping down the stairs and was crossing the hall. She blindly went back through the house and exited through the living room into the garage. Her mind didn’t know what to think. Her body didn’t know how to feel. She just went by his car and towards her own in the driveway.
She had to ready herself and whoever dared to come to the funeral. She expected it to be no more than herself, a few distant relatives and the priest. When she got into her car, she shut the door and sat there. Inside the vacuum of her brand new car, everything was quiet. It was a world of its own. But no matter what she did, she couldn’t escape what had happened. There was no changing history.