The Gaps

(short fiction)

He’d not touched a woman’s flesh since Sarah died, which was now almost two years. So when Jessie Randall grabbed his bare arm to steady herself (she was wearing “wobbly wedges”) she might as well have hit him with those chest paddles they’re always using on late night medical dramas. He’d later tell his best friend, Bo, “She fried my circuits.” Bo would’ve laughed at his longtime friend had he not been so pitiful in his awkwardness after Sarah’s death. Many were the friends who tried to set him up with a stable divorcee or a smart widow. And he went on those dates, if for no other reason than out of gratitude for good friends who were only trying to help. There was just one recurring problem—not a one of those women was Sarah. So he’d resigned himself (almost) to the likelihood that his later years would be spent solo, one shoe always missing the other.

He’d simply reacted, tried to keep someone from falling. Grabbing Jessie Randall’s waist was an improper move he would never have made in a million years, especially standing in the 15-items-or-less line at the grocery store. But he simply reacted. Jessie laughed in the moment, easy like a schoolgirl would chasing a friend on a playground. It seemed a laugh light enough to fly over the fence he’d been building around himself and settle on his shoulder. It did not elicit a laugh in return but rather a wide smile, wide like when Sarah was very much alive and he was too. “I’m sorry, Jessie. I guess I’m wobbly as well.” She laughed again, easy like before. “Samuel, you only ask forgiveness when you’ve done something wrong, right?” And with that she took the dozen donuts she’d purchased—six glazed, six chocolate (he noticed)—and waved and walked away. It all so razzled Samuel that he tried to pay for his groceries with his library card. The cashier, a woman he’d actually been on a date with about a year ago, sighed and said, “C’mon. Wake up, Romeo.”

From that moment on, which most people would say was simply an ordinary moment in an ordinary day, he could not stop thinking about Jessie Randall, who most people knew as Rev. Jessie Randall, the minister at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church. In Samuel’s mind, yes, there was an ordinariness to that moment in the grocery store, those kinds of encounters happen every day, simply another instance in humanity’s honky-tonk parade. And while Samuel believed in the beauty of the ordinary, he also believed something else too, or at least he had when Sarah was alive. You see, Samuel believed in what he called “the gaps”—those experiences where the world’s garment gapes and your attention is drawn to something unordinary, something that arrests you and just might seduce you. Samuel believed what you glimpsed in the gaps could only be described by one word—magic. When Sarah died that belief almost died, which is to say a large part of what makes Samuel Samuel almost died too.

But that moment of getting all tangled up with Jessie Randall in the express lane gave him pause, caused him to wonder if the world wasn’t quite finished with him yet, that maybe, just maybe life still had a trick or two up the sleeve.