Grapes (Fiction)

The phone rang and rang, but there was no answer. An automatonic mailbox receptionist prompted Sam to leave a voicemail, but he took the phone away from his ear and ended the call. He grabbed another muscadine from the green cardboard pint by his side and tossed it into his mouth with the easy nonchalance of someone enrolled in intramural sports by his parents at a young age. His lips stung. Too many muscadines are known to make a body’s lips sting, and Sam had had many.

“I’m about on my last leg,” he muttered to the pint of muscadines. 

The grapes, unresponsive, sat in their pint like oh-so-many placid eyeballs.

“I mean it,” he said, “she’s just about driven me off the edge. I woke up with the sweats again, 5:30 in the morning, dark silence in the house, dreams of— of— I don’t even remember the dreams. But they were the kind that wake you up in the sweats, that’s for damned sure.”

His phone rang. He looked down at it in his lap and watched her name fill the screen, his eyes, suddenly, taking on much the same placidity he’d observed in the muscadines a moment before.

“Hello,” he mustered.

“Sam!” Her enthusiasm cut through god knows how many hundreds of miles of trans-continental electromagnetic radiation, its single syllable obliterating all his promises to himself to enter this conversation with a righteous curmedeonaiety. 

“Hello,” he said again, his smile of relief not only audible, but in a yet more visceral—nearly spiritual—  sense, also palpable. 

“You’ll never believe what I’ve just been through,” she said.

He did not doubt the veracity of this statement. Jules had a knack for both finding and creating situations that Sam could not have fathomed had he spent a psychedelic night locked in his mother’s basement doing his best to think creatively.

“I’ve been calling,” he said. “I’ve called a heck of a lot of times.” Though the relief overwhelmed him—notched up his heart seven or eight ticks from where it had been in the bowels of his chest–he was nonetheless contractually obligated not to forgive Jules outright. He could not forget that, for the last five days, he had not lived, so much, as passed the time corporally, while his mind played endless loops of Jules necking bartenders in back alleys, dancing wild nights until sunrise, and, worst of all, suffering in the crumbling ICU of some underfunded mid-western hospital.

“I’m sorry,” she said in such an infinitely genuine tone that it sounded as if she might cry.

He sighed. He glanced up at the algae growing on the plexiglass roof which covered the smoker’s bench. Sam did not smoke, but he used the spot for activities he deemed to have an analogously morose and habitual nature to smoking, such as flinging muscadines up to the mouth from a cardboard pint.

 “What, pray tell, have you just been through?” he asked.

“You really won’t believe it. You really won’t, Sam. Betty and I were on the Missouri, Kansas border. We were almost to Holmes’ place, almost there, when—” her voice stopped.

“When what?” Sam asked, sitting, quite literally, on the edge of his seat.

No answer came, and Sam removed the phone from his ear to find the words “Call Failed” filling the screen.

He called back. Once. Twice. Three times. Each time he was met by his old friend, the automatonic receptionist, encouraging him, in her indefatigable monotone, to leave a message. 

“Naturally,” he said, chucking a muscadine with force, so it skidded and scudded across the fading, gray asphalt parking lot. “It’s only natural.”

He stared at the warehouse, fingering the remaining grapes absently, swapping them around, one over the other, and then the other over one. As it would so happen, at that moment, Bill came to the bay doors, and gave a wave and a whistle.

“Bout time to go,” he yelled.

“Be right there,” Sam shouted back. “Just a second.”

He opened his phone to the photo album he kept of her, swiping through. If it were 30 years prior, when photographs were still experienced as physical and material things, these scenes of Jules—climbed up in a tree, picking pears gleefully; nuzzled like a kitten against his shoulder at some late summer barbecue; looking, simply, at the camera, with that mischievous glint of hers, kudzu-choked forests behind her— would by now show torn edges, coffee stains, and ultraviolet discoloration. But as things stood, in the age of transcontinental electromagnetic radiation, the pictures remained identical to the moments in which they’d been captured. 

“Fucking hell,” he said, grabbing what remained of the pint of muscadines, rousing himself from the bench, and feeling, at least for the moment, his corporal and mental faculties realigned.