Across a garbage-strewn field stood a building, a structure so ambiguous in its design that it was almost certainly indescribable. The common categorizations didn’t help to pin down its design and purpose either. Residential? Commercial? Vintage? New? Perhaps Mid-century bland and non-descript would be apt.
Bob stood looking at this grandiose question mark of an edifice. He stood on the sidewalk at the intersection, gazing across the weedy, trashy expanse that used to be an oversized bank headquarters before being demolished several years before in the latest round of urban metamorphosis.
He zipped his coat up higher over his neck area as a cold wind gust shot out of the north, and started marching hesitantly toward the building, wondering if he had the right address. He squinted and scanned the topography ahead of him, searching for the typical sign that he had expected to encounter- for rent, leasing, now available, going fast. But, he didn’t see anything. That didn’t sway him enough to abandon his mission, so he kept shuffling his feet forward in his soft, amorphous, billowy shoes, moving ahead.
He searched his pocket for the slip of paper on which he had written the info for the apartment, but it wasn’t there, most likely having been left on his end table before leaving the house- their house, the one he and Carol had shared together during 27 years of marriage. Now the rooms were cluttered with boxes of stuff as Bob made preparations for moving out, if only temporarily as had been decided.
Not having found the paper in his pocket, he paused and glanced around again, his eyes squinting and his mouth agape, looking like some 21st Century version of Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart, bewildered in a stark tableau of black and white, the wind blowing as everything familiar dissipated into the atmospheric fog.
Well, at least it’s not one of those new constructions, Bob thought, with a ridiculous name like Prairie Flats or the Isaac or Origami. He wasn’t sure what kind of place he wanted to move into, as no conceivable option seemed to click in his ongoing mental processing of the situation.
He and Carol had come to an impasse in their marriage- 27 years of intimacy mixed with the unavoidable brusque bitterness of trying to inhabit a shared space, compounded by the usual tests of time, and the unusual ones as well: depression, self-doubt, COVID, George Floyd, social media, 09/11, Amazon; all of the subtle yet diabolical forces swirling in the air outside the window and seeping in through the cracks.
It was only temporary, they had decided, and Bob was unsure whether to hold out hope for a reconciliation with Carol, or to turn and face the future and move on. He couldn’t decide what to do, what he even wanted to do. He had already, prematurely perhaps, signed up for an online dating app, but had deleted it before undeleting it, and then deleting it again. Meanwhile, the building stood before him- a mish mash of stucco, transit siding, stone, brick, even some kind of red plastic polyurethane material that framed the windows. It was quite ugly, but Bob had an appreciation for these kinds of buildings; a soft spot for people, places and things that didn’t know what they were, or wanted to be. He at last saw a small sign in one of the windows- For Rent- and he rung the doorbell and stood there with his hands in his pockets, waiting.
THE MOSSY BOG 