The Unbroken White Line, Chapter 3

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Read Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Jake woke with a start. He had fallen over in his seat, his head resting on Penny's lap. Her head was dropped forward and a small bit of her drool was pooling on his cheek. He didn't much care. Penny was special to him, being she was his only companion most of the time.

Penny was a few years younger. His mother had told him about her birth so many times, his brain actually tricked him into remembering it. 

He remembered the day they brought her home from the hospital. She was so small. So fragile. So light. So warm and soft. He remembered her beautiful face and the whiteness of her eyes. He had stared at those eyes for hours. When Penny would sleep, he would sit beside her small bed and wait for her to open her eyes. Then he would smile and talk softly to her, keeping her awake. The whites were comforting. Clean. Fresh. Innocent. Undisturbed by life.

He had cried that day. Mother and Father had assumed it was because he was no longer their only child. Far from it. He had prepared for months for this day. As his mom's belly had grown bigger, he looked at it in awe. Sometimes, he would go over to her belly, lift up her shirt, and lay his hand on the area around the belly button. Then, he would wait while his mother held her breath. Sometimes nothing would happen. Other times his hand would jump off the belly as he got kicked from Penny inside. 

Jake found that if he pushed a little so the shininess of his mother's skin would cast shadows toward his hand, he could feel different parts of Penny. Then he would feel her roll, bringing her heels up against his palm and give it a good whack. Sometimes, if he dug his fingers in a bit, he could stop her from rolling and instead, feel her lift her arm up to meet his hand. He imagined she understood he wanted to intertwine his fingers in hers and sit there forever, enjoying the moment.

He wept because he was happy. He had a good life already, but he had felt it was completed with the arrival of his sister, Penny, his soon-to-be best friend and companion. He told his parents this. He was always honest with them, never hiding anything. They gave him hugs that afternoon. Mother cried and Daddy got all misty-eyed, chuckling a little to try and hide the tears that were welling up at the bottom of his eyes.

Jake sat up carefully, being careful not to wake Penny. Then, he took his hand and softly pushed her head back against the seat, shifting her body sideways with his other hand to add some support for her neck. She didn't wake up and her head stayed where it was.

It was then that he noticed they weren't moving. His heart skipped a beat as he looked into the front seats, finding them empty. 

Something bumped the car and his gaze traveled through the front window, resting on the familiar sight of Mother and Father, sitting on the hood, arms wrapped around each other, trying to get as close as they possibly could. He watched as his dad turned his head and breathed in the smell of his mother's hair. Something warm started from his belly and hit his chest. Jake let out a contented sigh. He was happy.

As he sat there, watching his parents, he thought about his friend in school, before the summer started. His name was Frank. Frank was sad. Every day, he would come to school and slap Jake on the back between his shoulder blades.

"Hey Jake. How's life'?"

"Good. Can't complain."

Jake had heard his dad say that on the phone to people he didn't think too highly of. He always loved the way it sounded and decided to say it to everyone who asked how he was. Everyone always did. That was how they started talking in Minnesota. Never, "Hey! Did you see the Vikings lose last night?" Or, "Why on earth is your eye all black and blue and...WHAT HAPPENED TO THE REST OF YOUR FACE!"

No, if your leg fell off and your neck was hanging by a scrap of skin, lolling about, behind your back, the same question would come out of the first person's mouth you passed - "How's life?"

Jake would pause a few seconds after responding to Frank's question, "Did your parents..."

"Yeah....," Frank cut him off. "All night. I couldn't sleep. They yelled. I think Mommy even hit Dad once. Dad might have hit her back, but he's always told me never to hit girls, so I don't think he did. But they..." His voice drifted off and ended in a mumble.

Every day, the same story. Jake, happy, Frank, miserable, no sleep. He began to get bags under his eyes. Slowly, his clothes started to sag on his already thin frame. 

Then one day, Frank didn't show up to school. Jake looked for him all day. Nothing. The next day, the same thing happened. Jake had asked his teacher if she knew anything. She hadn't. Weeks went by. Still nothing. And then he forgot about Frank - until now.

He looked out the window at his parents and began to cry a little, feeling very happy for his perfect life, happy parents, and yet deeply saddened by the memories of Frank's completely opposite existence.

Reaching over to open the door, Jake sniffed, wiped his tears away with his sleeve, and climbed out of the car.

The Unbroken White Line, Chapter 2

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Chapter 2

The car hit a small bump on the highway, causing Jake’s head to move slightly as it leaned against the window. The friction made a squeaking sound and Penny giggled. Jake wasn’t really in the mood for humor, though he wasn’t in a sour mood either. He just was.

Taking his head off the glass, he looked at the place where his forehead had rested. Instead of a nice, clean, glass window, an oval grease spot stared back at him. Jake sat up a bit straighter and looked through the grease at the white line rushing by. It was now distorted. Instead of being crisply edged, it wiggled and jumped around. Keeping his eyes on it, Jake  lowered his head a bit to allow the closer edge of the line to leak from behind the grease, showing its crisp edge again.

“How you doing, Jake,” Jake’s mom asked from the front seat.

“Fine. Just tired.”

But he wasn’t fine. Every so often, he wasn’t. He didn’t know why. It just happened. He would be sitting there and his chest would begin to tighten, his breathing would quicken its pace, his heart would beat faster, making him feel like he could run a few miles. And here he was, feeling all those numbing feelings again, trapped in a car, wanting to stop and get out.

Jake looked away from the window to ask his dad if he could stop the car somewhere, just to get out and walk a bit. But instead of his dad driving, as he turned his head in that direction, he was looking through metal bars, painted green, one with a chip in the middle at about chest height if he had been standing.

His heart sank. He was sleeping again. He hated this dream. Every single night, the same dream. If he drifted off in the car, the same dream. Anytime he fell asleep, for that matter, which seemed quite frequent to him, the same dream.

He was in some sort of prison, going through the motions of a pointless day, waking up, sitting, eating tasteless meals, being acquiescent to the guards who seemed to constantly be looking his direction until he looked their way, just in time to see the last fleeting glimpse of their eyes flit away. The guards would whisper. He was sure they were whispering about him, not that he was a bit interesting.

The other prisoners were the interesting ones. They walked around, pretending he wasn’t there. Sometimes, they would laugh under their breath and nod their head sideways in his direction, speaking inaudible words to their friends or whatever they were. Sometimes, Jake would walk through a group of them and they would part, as if he had some sort of disease.

The other prisoners were interesting because they enjoyed their food. They would take their trays up to the mess line twice, sometimes three times. Jake could barely finish his first tray, let alone want a second. The food had no flavor. He would sit alone at a table, tapping his white shoes against the concrete floor, the cold concrete floor. The food had no flavor, yet the floor had a temperature. Jake always found this part a bit disconcerting.

But the prison life in his dream didn’t bother him that much. He could handle the repetitive nature of his sleeping life. Sure, it was boring, but it wasn’t a bad dream, by any means. What did bother him was that new things started to appear.

One time, he had fallen asleep and found himself standing in the middle of the aisle outside of his cell. It was dark outside. The moon was shining its bright rays through one of the roof skylights, illuminating a path forward. He felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see two guards behind him.

“Jake. Walk,” the one on the right softly whispered.

So he walked. Somehow, he knew where to go. One bare foot in front of the other. The floor was cold. He walked straight ahead, then turned right. The hall became dark, no moon to illuminate it. A faint light began to appear in the distance. He turned left into another corridor and the light disappeared, replaced by piercing light coming from light bulbs, hanging from the ceiling by wires.

The wires were so thin, that Jake always wondered if the bulbs would fall, one by one, crashing to the floor, breaking the thick stillness of the air as they shattered on the concrete, leaving everyone in the corridor in complete darkness. Instead, as he approached each bulb, they appeared to swing ever so slightly his direction, trying to reach out to him, though they were far above his head. When he came directly under them, they hung straight down again, as if they hadn’t even moved.

Jake would stare at each bulb as he approached, trying to trick one into revealing its swing back to its original position. But try as he might, he blinked every single time he caught up to one. There were forty-six bulbs, never one unlit or broken.

He turned right, down another corridor, and entered a room. The room was illuminated with fluorescent lighting, more than anyone would deem necessary to read with. It was so bright, no mouse had ever dared to make a run for the raisin that sat in the corner directly ahead of him. His stomach growled, surprising him. His stomach never growled in his dreams.

Looking away from the raisin, he fixed his gaze on the glass wall in front of him and froze. He heard a squeaky sort of yelp come from his lips and at the same moment, spun around and ran back through the door where he had entered the room. As he turned back up the corridor, he quickly looked over his shoulder.

Penny stared back at him through the window.
 
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The Unbroken White Line, Chapter 1

This Bedtime story will be several parts long. I may even turn it into book length. Who knows. I'm having fun writing it.

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His forehead rested against the window of the car. The sun was shining into the other side where his sister Penny sat, so he didn’t have to squint, as he fixed his eyes on the unbroken white line flowing by.

Jake and Penny were headed to grandma’s house, traveling from Minnesota to Oklahoma. The drive was long – 12 hours to be exact. Their parents had decided to drive straight through, stopping only to grab a bite to eat or a quick bathroom break.

Jake loved bathroom breaks because Mom and Dad hated gas station bathrooms, saying that they were “breeding grounds for new diseases,” whatever that meant, or, as they said, “even worse, the reason the world is overpopulated.”

The last time he had seen the inside of a gas station bathroom, he had stolen a king-size candy bar off the store shelf and snuck into the bathroom, quickly unwrapping the chocolate goodness, taking the biggest bite he could. At the same moment, the door opened and the largest woman he had ever seen tried valiantly to squeeze through the door. She pushed her way forward and saw the boy eating the chocolate.

“Somebody! There’s a boy in here, eating a candy bar,” she wailed, looking over her shoulder.

Frantic to just get out of there, Jake, in one motion, stuck the candy bar into his pants pocket, and raced under the woman’s legs – right into the knees of his father. Looking up, his father’s face was a mix of amusement and irritation.

“Son, what did I tell you about gas station bathrooms?”

His dad paid for the candy bar and they walked out of the store together. Not another word of the incident was ever mentioned, though his dad was muttering a long string of nearly inaudible words under his breath about busybody women who couldn’t fit through bathroom doors and how that was the cause of so much “angst,” whatever that meant, in the world, and if only less people would use gas station bathrooms, his son could enjoy a damn candy bar in peace and how he was bloody good at finding empty wrappers in pockets so he would have paid for it anyway.

But that was years ago. Since then, Jake’s parents made a game of bathroom breaks on road trips. They tried to find the best bathroom they could to go pee in, in peace. Nothing was off limits.

Once, they even walked into a Governor’s mansion and used the private bathroom on the second floor. Jake remembered the whiteness of the towels. They were soft too and smelled like hot cotton, fresh out of a dryer. He remembered burying his face in one of the towels, after washing his hands, and breathing deeply, then holding it there a little longer so he could continue breathing, letting the moistness of his breath wet the towel a bit to enhance the smell of the cloth, forgetting that his parents and Penny were standing right outside the door, waiting. Nobody stopped them.

Getting in and out was an art form. Jake’s dad taught him to always act like he belonged in whatever place he was in. Acting suspicious or whistling like the Three Stooges would inevitably bring a well-intentioned employee or worse, running in their direction, yelling or asking questions, which actually happened a few times.

Jake giggled in his seat, softly bumping his head against the window. His giggle caused his dad to turn around from looking straight ahead and gaze in his direction. His face contorted into a grin, revealing the tooth that got him out of any pickle he ever got into. One smile with that tooth – a crooked ‘I’ tooth – and any detractor was diffused immediately, looking at him as if he was a warm-hearted, lovable, human being. Anyone with that tooth could do no wrong. Suspicion was unwarranted, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Mostly, they were right. His dad was all those things. But he hated his tooth.

“What, Jake?” Penny asked, hitting him in the elbow with the back of her hand. “What’s so funny?”

“Oh nothing. Nothing really. Well…I’m just remembering that time when Daddy got caught by the buck-naked linebacker in the Lambeau Field locker room bathroom.”

Jake’s mom laughed.

“And to think, I dared him to do that one. We did get a free suite out of it too. All the hot dogs you could eat, nachos, pop.”

“BEER!” Jake’s dad said.

“Oh yes, beer. Can’t forget that,” his mom echoed back.

Jake’s smile rested on his lips as he again focused on the white line flowing by. It darted away from the car for a few seconds, then raced back toward it, nearly touching the bottom of the window. 



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