To be clear, this is a love story with some erotic elements (vice an erotic story with a touch of romance), a story about two broken people rediscovering their humanity and, even more important, their faith in themselves. Without that faith, love can never succeed.
As always, my profound thanks to the Megs and the Wills, the men and women who have given so much and who have all too often been discarded like used tissue. We need to do better for them.
God bless us, each and every one.
*
Meg sat on the bench, watching the ducks on the pond in front of her. Behind her was a steep, bramble-covered hill, so overgrown that it felt solid, safe.
The pond was perhaps 120 yards across. On the far side lay a thin beach, green lawns and a playground. Small shrieking children ran in every direction, carefree in the warm May sunshine. Old people sat quietly on benches, treasuring temporary comfort. A park employee slowly emptied trash bins into a three-wheeled vehicle. Everything there was open, visible.
Her bench was in the shade, between two bushes. Few people walked this side of the pond at this time of day.
Meg turned to her backpack on the bench beside her and took out a book of crosswords. She began one, progressed well but tossed it aside as uninteresting three minutes later.
Two newspapers followed. She ignored sections on sports, homes, business and local news, tossed unread a glossy insert on an upcoming auto show. There was so little in them that overlapped her life.
Instead, she read and reread the international news and tech sections and studied news from the capital. She kept the want ads pages for later study but all else was discarded as meaningless to her today.
She lit a cigarette and drew in the first smoke like a hug from a long-lost child. A paper cup with half an inch of cold coffee sat on the bench on the other side of her from the backpack.
Meg was perhaps 5 foot 7, with what her mother had always called 'beautiful brunette' hair. It wasn't until she was 12 years old that she realized that that just meant mouse-brown. It had been cut short, but she had started to grow it out, leaving it looking just a bit ragged.
She had a pretty face on those rare instances when she smiled. Her figure would have been called interesting by most men had she not clearly been 15 or 20 pounds underweight. She somehow looked dehydrated, deflated.
Her nails were short, but well-groomed except for her right thumbnail. That one was chewed to the quick.
She wore no makeup or jewellery. Clean and presentable enough, someone meeting her for the first time might however get the impression she groomed herself by rote, as off a checklist instead of trying to achieve a particular purpose:
Item 6. Brush hair for 45 seconds...
She was dressed as she usually did, a baggy t-shirt and loose jeans. A baseball cap for some long-forgotten garage band lay on the pack. Everything was clean and almost new, as if purchased in a lot, except for her sunglasses. Those were clearly well-used and not particularly feminine, as if designed for sturdiness, not style.
Meg rarely appeared in public without those sunglasses.
She wore new trainers. The one on the left had a foot in it.
From the right leg of her jeans protruded an alloy tube about the thickness of a banana. It terminated in a complicated metal ball joint, below which could be seen the top of a yellow plastic 'foot'.
Something rustled in the dead leaves immediately behind her head. She levitated off the bench, reaching the other side of the broad path before stopping and spinning around, her heart pounding. A squirrel looked at her curiously, its tail twitching, then moved on with some newfound spring treasure in its front paws.
She took a deep breath before returning to the bench. The cigarette butt, discarded in her flight, lay by the bench. She picked it up and deposited it with half a dozen others in the coffee cup.
Looking at the plain watch on her wrist, she dismissed the idea of going to Hank's earlier than normal. Routine was important. It was something she could depend on.
Sitting down again, she tried to purposefully concentrate on her breathing. She could hear the words and instructions of her therapist. They always seemed to her to be better suited for somebody else, something which might work in the abstract, but which had a little relevance in the real world.
Her world.
Precious little in her new world seemed real. There was an artificiality to the peaceful people on the streets, a flatness to television and movies, a lack of flavour to anything she did. Sometimes it seemed that she herself was just a character in a television documentary of what she had once been.
There were times she wanted to grab people by the shoulders, shake them and scream, "You damned fools - can't you see?" She didn't, for there was the lethal danger that one of them would ask, "See what?" and for that she could have no answer.
It was all flat. Except for the whiskey. That had taste. And it worked, sort of, much of the time. Well, sometimes. Sometimes it would bring sleeplessness to an end and that was better than nothing.
She knew abstractly that alcohol wasn't the answer. And she knew to the bottom of her heart that she needed to change where she was. The problem is that trying brought the possibility of failure and that would be infinitely more painful than her present. When yesterday's water was full of sharks and today's crocodiles, it's hard to rock tomorrow's boat. And the bottle helped suppress the relentless, remorseless, unfocussed anger. So whiskey it would be until somebody came up with a better option.
"I'm sorry, Meg," her team leader at the clinic had told her. "We've tried just about everything we can, but the funding just isn't there to keep you in the program when there are so many others we might be able to help."
So, age 25, she was an ex-Air Force certified crazy lady with a 100 percent disability pension, a tin leg and a lot of time on her hands. The VA drones were just that. None of them were bad people, but they too were locked into the vast bureaucratic merry-go-round and, her local office opening at 10:00 AM, most seemed drained of all caring or energy by 10:15 AM.
There was an offer of schooling, but she knew her mind was too broken to spend more years behind a desk in a classbox. Offers to help with her résumé were pointless. Her parents had died years ago and her only sibling, a brother, lived on the other side of the country; she could imagine no greater nightmare than living even in the same city.
So Meg spent her time people-watching. In bad weather, it was the library or the train station. Evenings, there was Hank's.
Whether or not Hank had ever actually existed, his name was part of the city landscape. It was nothing fancy, and not very large, but it was quiet and cool when it was hot outside and the prices were OK. Most importantly, it was rarely too crowded and people left you alone. That mattered.
Meg was now one of the regulars. She sat at the same two-seat table most evenings, back to the wall. She'd stay there until 10 or 11 and then go home - alone. She was lonely enough but knew the perils of being a drunk, single woman and, even though her head was no longer screwed on with the right number of bolts, would not risk becoming a single mother.
It wasn't as if there was a queue to ask her out, anyway. Her time was divided between the park, her room at the YWCA and Hank's. Nobody came by in the park and she had ignored initial attempts at friendship at the Y. Customers at Hank's tended to mind their own business and generally talked only to their own group. She'd been hit on once or twice, early on, by visitors, but the look in her eyes discouraged all but the most desperate, drunk or dim.
She was able to call the bartenders and waitresses by their first names and beyond that had run out of shits to give. They were fixtures that brought her drinks and food and, tipped just slightly above average, provided service reflecting that.
She watched the scene across the pond. At one time, she'd had a pair of binoculars, but two police officers arrived one morning to discuss why she was stalking the children. She hadn't been quick enough to come up with a coherent explanation and her psych status hadn't done her any favours, so now she left the binoculars in her room.
Eventually, checking the time, she left the park and, made her way to the bar. On the sidewalks, she kept close to walls, speeding up and slowing down to avoid clusters of pedestrians. At red lights, she stood with her back to a building, her glare daring anyone to approach. Her eyes scanned for open windows and high points throughout.
A few eyes turned her way as she entered the bar, then recognizing her, turned away. There were the Fans, as she thought of them - five of them tonight, dissecting last night's game in exhausting detail. They were the noisiest, steadily working their way through numerous pitchers of beer each night. Once in a while, voices would be raised, but it never went any further. The Three Old Ladies, always with shopping bags, always leaving at 6:20 or so. Ball Cap Guy sat back to the wall in his usual spot, a draft beer in front of him, another one untouched in front of the empty seat across from him. A couple of others, one reading an ever-present book and the other thumbing at his phone. The usual suspects.
She knew most of their jokes, knew who cheered for which teams, who hated their jobs. She knew some names, picked up from overhearing discussions with waitresses.
She had nothing in common with them, had never spoken to any of them.
Everyone else was a visitor. None looked threatening and, safe in an accustomed harbor, Meg relaxed as much as she ever did. Peggy, the fat waitress, nodded at her from behind the bar. JD on the rocks would be there presently, along with a menu. She preferred Irish, but her budget didn't extend that far. JD would do and she'd be grateful for it.
Televisions mounted high on the walls silently showed highlights from various games. A few were tuned to news, local or otherwise. Right now, they were showing a Memorial Day ceremony - school children, politicians, flags. She turned away, unwilling to watch. Inside, she could feel white-hot rage starting to flare and struggled to push it down.
Numb sucked, but it beat most of the alternatives.
