Storied By Josh

As he shaves he looks in the mirror and sees where his skin is ageing. When he was young he was handsome, he remembers. He was brave and adventurous. His life was so much more open and the opportunities were endless. He was also very stupid and arrogant.

Now the wrinkles grow and his body betrays him. His weight is gained quickly and slowly lost. His hair is grey and the imperfections, once small now seem to grow with every day. The Girl with the Sunkissed Hair walks into the bathroom and kisses his shoulder.

She looks at him and today is a good day, she thinks. He is a grumpy person, a hard person sometimes. She says she loves him because he is kinder than he pretends. He can smile like day break and laughs to where anyone else around him would very much like to as well. But sometimes…

Sometimes he loses his happiness. He thinks about the things he wishes that can never happen. And this makes him sad, she knows he will be morose for days like the rain in April in Scotland. There will be nothing to do but to kiss him and hold him for longer than usual until he decides to not be. She loves him as saints love broken things and people.

He doesn’t know how she loves him or why. He is just happy for it. When they were young they loved with a fire and a passion of youth. It burned into something not as hot with time. Life and time had pulled them across oceans and hardened them together. They were unbreakable together now, like driftwood.

Sometimes when they are in bed together he asks her how she could love him as ugly and forlorn as he can be, but she will merely roll her eyes say he is silly and to go to sleep because it is late. He will become quiet and hold her and close his eyes because he knows better than to tempt the patience of gods and goddesses.

The face in the mirror is familiar to him but sometimes it doesn’t feel like him. It isn’t my body that makes me, he thinks but he is thankful that it somewhat does. In the old days there was no promise, only opportunity.

He recently drove to his home town and sat in the café he used to go to when he was young, with his friends. A waitress asked if he wanted anything other than coffee. He asked if she had baked bread and she said no. He declined anything else and she walked away. The building is old with a copper ceiling and dusty furniture. The kitchen is breaking down because the town cannot find money to repair it. He sits in an old chair at the table he used to sit in with The Chess Club. The members now are grown, some with families. Luke joined the marines, Ben became a manager somewhere. He lost contact with Kade, but knows Kade went on many adventures. Phillip goes to Antarctic every year. The waitress walks over to him after a time. It is strange to spend so much of one’s formative years in a place and to know it like the back of one’s hand but not be recognized by the new inhabitants of it. It is a small peek into what the world will do when we cease to be here. The waitress asks him if he will wants his check. He says maybe in a little but for now he will stay. She smiles and walks away to an empty restaurant. He closes his eyes and remembers.

They were juniors and seniors in high school. The Chess Club included originals: Phillip: the Thinker, Luke: the Almost Anarchist, Ben: The Popular, Kade” the Partier and Him, he didn’t know what they called him and didn’t know who he was anyway. He wished now and then girls were there, but they didn’t allow it. They would meet on Thursdays after school; sometimes in the mornings. They discussed popular events and gossip in the valley. A chef who stayed there for a time and tried to bring life into the small town would bring them free freshly cooked different breads and they would drink watered down coffee as they passionately argued over film and music. His favourite topic was mid-nineties films: Pulp Fiction, 3 Kings, Usual Suspects, Natural Born Killers and others. They would argue about the best director, he would always argue Spielberg and someone would counter with Tarantino. Someone would speak up with Bergman and they would laugh them down. Whatever the answer wasn’t it could never be Bergman, probably Kubrick.

They were in theater together. One day toward the end of the year the teacher announced that they were to clean the prop room. The Chess Club had other ideas and covertly agreed to hide from her for the rest of the period. They hid in the catwalks. When they’d hear her footsteps they’d run to the ladder and slide down to the back stage. When they heard her coming they would again run outside through an alarmed fire exit someone had disabled. Then they would come through an unlocked side door into the gym. The gym teacher didn’t want to get involved and would pretend he didn’t see them.

After nearly an hour He knew the gig was up and slid into the prop room. The other students knew better than to rat him out and when she asked where he had been he told her he had been in and out of the prop room all day of course. She never believed him and asked where the other boys were. He told her he had no idea. She cursed under her breath and left to find them. They of course were found after some time. Ben was found with Luke under the school. Phillip was found on the roof. Thanks to him the school installed cameras so no one could sneak up there anymore. The ones that were found were given three hour detentions on the last day of school. It was an oversight as the last day of school happened the day after their graduation, so none of the seniors showed up for school at all, let alone detention.

The popular one: Ben, had played basketball with Him until the small town coach with delusions of grandeur had ruined the sport for Ben. Now He played it alone so he could meet girls in different towns. He was young and handsome. He always loved women, and some of them loved him too.

The basketball team only won three games that year, He was there to get into arguments and fights, sometimes with his own teammates. He had met a beautiful girl named Shayla. He dreamed of marrying her and maybe having children. Instead they parted ways and she won a statewide beauty pageant. He watched her from the back seats of the auditorium. He never told her but he was afraid because she was beautiful and her family was rich so he sabotaged their relationship because he knew he wouldn’t ever be enough for her and the future had already played out in his mind. He wondered now and again how she was.

The Chef brought them steaming garlic and oat wheat bread. They cobbled it up and sang his praises. His joy at their approving taste buds was palpable.

This was their last year together. They knew it. Inside he felt a sadness that would soon become, not a friend, but familiar. It was bittersweet. The future was beckoning, but the past would only be a memory. The last couple of months they started having their meetings more often. Kade would regale them with stories of his escapades, Phillip would duel Luke over music. Ben would argue with him about film, they would laugh at improper jokes about improper things until their parents would call them home. Ben was something of an amateur film director. He was also quite convincing and it wasn’t long until he had talked the others into helping. Phillip, Ben and Luke would write screen plays, film them and show them only to a select few. He always felt a little bit of an outsider, because he was. It would be like this for most of his life.

There would be a small Fourth of July parade down the only street of the town in the summer. A few of the older men in the town had classic cars they would pull out once a year for it. The local fire department would be in it, the veterans group, the boy scouts, the police and the native corporation. Sometimes guests would show up: Lions Club or a horse riding group. He remembers walking down the side of the road and spotting Luke in nothing but a bathrobe. Beside him was a jug of milk and a box of cereal. He ate it out of a bowl and would wave his spoon at the passing floats. This brought him much amusement and he chuckled to himself. That was Luke in a nutshell.

The snow was washed away quickly in that year by an unseasonably warm April that brought ice and rain. The warmth lasted until summer began. He remembers specifically trying to navigate the roads in his dad’s old Ford pickup. They would walk down the street together to the old Christian college, where they sat in the commons and tried their best to seduce the good Christian girls who went there. It never worked out despite their best efforts.

The last year of school for him was marked by trial and error. He absconded with women and girls in a bid to find something tangible. It wasn’t until he moved away that he realized he had just been looking for an adventure. Woman can be some of the very best, and some of the very worst. He had been in that small town for so long he forgot what the world was and what it could be. When he realized the time lost on the silly things he would be morose again. He never regretted the women.

The last week they promised to meet every day and only once. They all sat together at the table and the Chef brought them their bread, dutifully. They drank their coffee but it was eerily quiet. In their minds they were already onto the next adventure which didn’t include anyone else in the club. Ben told Phillip, who still had a year left of school, that it would be up to him to keep the Chess Club operational when they left, Phillip promised he would but of course he couldn’t. Things always change and the Club couldn’t stay the same. It was too good to share with anyone else. They were the Kings for the Year as all seniors are and especially in small towns. After when they moved onto the bigger world they discovered they weren’t kings but small dust in a world of men who would be King. Some of them made their peace with it. Others couldn’t and made their way back to where they grew up. They spent time there before they moved on again.

Ben would be off to England soon. He would spend his savings there learning about life and return home completely changed. Kade was going to find a good time anywhere he could. Luke wanted to stick it to the man a little while longer. He didn’t know what he wanted, except to be famous. After two hours Luke’s phone rang and he answered. It was his mother and he needed to come home she said. He waved goodbye as the doors shut behind him. Kade’s girlfriend came to pick him up and he left too. Phillip had to help set up for graduation so he stood up and slid his chair in. Ben stayed there and so did He. They were quiet. The Chef brought one more loaf of bread which they cut into pieces and buttered. They ate and occasionally said a thing. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t left yet and after the bread was gone he stood up. Ben looked up with his eyes and there was an age of sadness in them. “Won’t you come?” He asked Ben.
“In a little. For now I will sit here a while.” Ben smiled at him and as He walked to his car he looked through the window one last time. Ben didn’t notice but instead stared down into his coffee.

He is pulled out of his memory. The waitress comes up to him one last time in the old café. He knows that now it is time to go home to see his goddess. “I’ll take the bill. He says. She smiles. She is young.
She pulls out the bill from her worn apron.

“Lots of memories in this old restaurant.” He says.
She wrinkles her nose. “You aren’t from around here are you?”
“I spent time here in my youth, actually. In high school. They used to have a pizza parlor back there.”
“I remember hearing that.” She replies.
“We once had a group that would come here.”
“All good groups have names.” She says.
“We were called the Chess Club.”
“What did you do?”
“We drank coffee, visited. We would discuss movies and futures.”
“Did you play chess?”
“It was an ironic name.”
“What happened to the club?” She asks.
“Time pulled us our separate ways.” He smiles and feels a small lump in his throat. He stands from Ben’s old chair. He puts on his coat.
“Like driftwood.”