Two Jethros

A visitor voices concern over the safety of his host's new neighborhood after the Host moves into an apartment building in the city's North End. To quell the Visitor's worry and demonstrate the low propensity for crime amongst the area's residents, the Host leaves his own wristwatch on the building's stoop. Confident that it'll still be there when they return in the morning, the Host ushers the Visitor back inside and the two carry on with the events of their evening.

. . .

Later that night, the watch is stolen by a passerby. Nobody sees. The Thief promptly pawns the timepiece for a quick sum of cash which he uses to purchase high-quality narcotics from an acquaintance who manufactures the goods locally. Given the wholesale nature of the transaction, the Manufacturer sells him a large quantity of product at a rate well below its market value.

With the goods in hand, the Thief travels south to a wealthy suburb located just outside the city limits. Contrary to appearances, the affluent community is home to a populace of heavy users with an insatiable appetite for North End product.

Once there, he reaches out to a longtime neighborhood contact—a regional distributor with a standing offer to buy out any available North End supply. Leveraging the Distributor's urgency to restock, the Thief sells him the goods at a radically elevated price point.

Having recouped more than the original value of the stolen capital, the Thief returns to the North End and retrieves the watch from pawn, paying back both the cost of the initial loan in full, as well as any applied interest. Pocketing the remaining margin as profit, he returns the item to its rightly place on the stoop from which it was taken.

. . .

Emerging the next morning, the Host and the Visitor step outside to find the watch undisturbed. Reiterating to the Visitor how safe the area is, the Host dons the accessory and the two depart for another day's happenings.

The friends diverge for good later that afternoon, and following a text message to the Thief, the Visitor collects his share of the previous night's profits later that evening.

Camping Family

Leaving their Massachusetts home behind, a man and his family set out for upstate New York in a recreational vehicle he'd rented for the summer. His wife rode alongside him at the front, reading the map and telling him when and where to turn. Their two children, a young girl and her even-younger brother, entertained themselves in the back.

Arriving at their destination, a secluded plot on the banks of a northeastern lake, they unloaded the vehicle and began constructing a proper campsite. After pitching a small tent for the children and a larger one next to it for them; the man and his wife unpacked chairs, food, lanterns, and other items before starting a fire upon which to cook. Sitting comfortably around its flames, they all unwound from the hours of travel to the hums of a portable radio.

Sometime later—hot dogs digesting—the man snuffed out the fire for fear of wandering embers in the night. Retiring to their respective tents, the camping family officially turned in; echoes of the unrestricted wilderness lulling their tired minds to darkness.

. . .

Waking the next morning, the man emerged from his tent, started a new day's fire, and began cooking breakfast. A while after, the sizzling sounds and savory scents of frying bacon woke his wife and daughter. Emerging from their neighboring tents, they joined him outside and spoke of plans for the day while preparing to eat.

Having been sent to wake her brother, the girl ducked back into the smaller tent but didn't see him inside; their mess of blankets, pillows, and sleeping bags having become strewn about during the night. She pressed down on the pile in search of his buried body but felt nothing. Having scattered them further to no avail, she left the tent and strolled the short distance to the R.V. at the edge of the site. But her search of its interior revealed no evidence of him.

Alerting her parents, she was instructed by them to sit quietly at the food-filled table and told not to move a muscle. Unsure of how literally the order was meant to be followed, she refrained from beginning to eat.

Initiating their own search, the man explored areas of thick grass and brush close by while his wife walked down the narrow, dirt access road by which they'd arrived—both of them shouting the boy's name as they did. At one point, the man strayed as far away as a nearby stream, hoping the curious youngster'd wandered there in the early-morning hours in search of the source of its burbling sounds. But he found nothing. The woman continued down the road for some time, hoping to encounter a patrolling park ranger or friendly angler who might help her look. But she saw nobody. Eventually, they both returned to the camp.

Upon doing so, their rule-breaking daughter approached them, grabbed their hands, and led them around the back of the tent in which she and her brother had slept. Facing its backside, she pointed down at a large flap-like hole in its surface, near the ground. Squatting down to inspect it further, the man immediately demanded that his wife and daughter board the R.V. Realizing that the hole had been cut, not ripped, he knew it was time to contact authorities.

. . .

Speeding into the nearest town and arriving at its police station, the panic-soaked air about the vehicle's three occupants was immediately clear to the officers with whom they spoke. Despite the situation's palpable urgency, law enforcement remained calm and responded to the family's concerns with composure.

When faced with criticism in the years after, officers attributed the relaxed nature of their collective reaction to the Academy's training.

The station dispatched several officers to the campsite, reaching it via a crude map drawn by the couple while they, and their daughter, were instructed to remain in the custody of those unsent. What's more, each of the three was brought into a separate room in the building for questioning—the nature and intensity of the inquiries with which they were confronted varying depending on the officer administering them. Hours later, with those dispatched having returned, the consensus throughout the department became that one of two possibilities were true: either the child wandered off during a window of insufficient supervision, or the boy's father was somehow responsible for his unknown whereabouts.

When asked to explain this conclusion in the years that followed, many officers cited the man's demeanor during questioning as revealing his involvement, often using the phrase cold and unresponsive to describe it. Those dispatched to the campsite and who weren't present during his questioning simply alluded to the absence of any evidence of suspicious third-party activity as convincing them of his responsibility in some capacity.

Still, in the days after the boy's vanishing, law enforcement continued to examine the campsite and surrounding areas for clues, expanding its search efforts in both manpower and geography. It took nearly two weeks of continuous 'round-the-clock combing of the vast wooded and mountainous landscapes before anyone involved felt comfortable admitting that they were running out of places to look. It took only days after that for investigative efforts to begin dissolving. Before long, they'd grown completely stagnant given the lack of any actionable information.

. . .

Even until his own death, the boy's father never wavered in asserting that his near-catatonic affect in the period after his son's disappearance, that which officers interpreted as being probative of his involvement, was merely the product of shock and disbelief at the reality of the unimaginable situation. For the rest of his life, however, there persisted an insurmountable guilt inside him upon admitting—though only to himself—that he'd always held an affection for his daughter that he never felt as strongly for his son.

His daughter lived the rest of her life largely unaffected. While the logic of the incident sat intact in her memory, it did so void of any debilitating emotional component. She understood the course of events and never struggled to appreciate the reality that she'd never see her brother again. But the gravity of any danger she herself may have been in that night eventually became overshadowed by more traditionally-formative life events which occurred in the years after, and which came to define her youth with greater profundity.

The boy's mother struggled mightily, however. Comprised largely of bouts of mania and rootless sobs, the subsequent tear-filled years of hysterics at the thought of her son eventually silenced any mention of him. And while the items of his which she kept—the pill-surfaced ThunderCats pajamas which she continued to wash; the Lite-Brite on which he'd spelled out his name and whose batteries she continued to replace—remained forever haunting, nothing jolted her core as violently as the sound of the ringing telephone. Sat perched immovably upon the wall in the family's kitchen, the note it expelled became an illusory sound which, to her, seemed to slight eternally upward with a brand of hope that proved impossible to suppress—a foolish hope that an investigator may be on the other end, calling to share a breakthrough in her son's case; a desperate hope that whomever was responsible for whatever befell him may simply be calling to tell it to her; a delusional hope that the voice on the other end might be that of her son himself, calling to say that he still loved her. But the other end never brought any of those things.

Yet the note rang out still—rising, but never dying. Continuing up and up and up, to nothing. No resolution. No catharsis. And each time, there came another climbing behind it. And then another after that.

Misery, Learned

When I was a kid, I believed that happiness could be bought—the logic being that any time I felt unhappy, I could simply buy whatever thing the absence of which was making me feel that way.

New shoes.
Video games.
CDs.
So on.

Like many, my definition of happiness was anchored to the ownership of things. And like many, it seemed simple to me: those with the most, had the most—and those who had the most were the happiest.

I even remember being challenged: "What if you fall in love with someone who doesn't love you? You can't buy them." I thought, "Of course you can. Just buy everything that makes them happy and they'll love you for it."

But soon after that, I fell for a girl in class who couldn't buy any of the things I wanted. And even if she could have, I wanted nothing anyway; only her.

Alongside my attraction to her came the realization that my abrupt unhappiness had nothing to do with any lack of things owned. Lo and behold, it was more complicated than that. And as such, so was I.

And so was attraction.
And love.
And probably others things too
—maybe even everything.

As it was, with that wisdom came the thought that if I felt the way that I did so suddenly, then she may already feel some kind of way too. And if she did, then no matter how much I might ever be able to buy her, the possibility would always remain that it may never be enough—a lesson which introduced me to a brand of unhappiness out of which one can never buy themself, and which goes by the name, Misery.

Perhaps some lessons are better left unlearned.

The Catch

A boy, his sister, and their dad arrive at a shore to fish. The man opens a cooler and grabs a beer from the new six-pack inside. The boy eyes the cans from a distance, hoping to steal one. He asks his sister to toss him a lure from the tackle box at her feet, next to the cooler. She does. The three of them fish.

A short time later, none of them have caught any. Frustrated, the man decides they'll move to a new spot. Fumbling her words, the girl asks to stay, believing she's on the verge of a catch. Impatient, he insists they relocate. They do. Resettled, he opens the cooler and grabs one of the four cans inside. They keep fishing.

Honest Tom Ln.

A man and a woman enter a ballroom arm-in-arm. Their guests all stand and clap while an orchestra plays. The couple walks to a table at the front of the room. She sits at it, but he remains standing. The orchestra fades and the clapping ceases as he picks up a glass from the table, raising it to toast his and her fifty years together. Afterwards, their guests clap once more and resume chatter as the orchestra launches into another number.

Later, the couple dances slowly in the middle of the marble floor, amidst the crowd. With her head and white-evening-glove-clad arms resting upon his tuxedo'd shoulders, neither of them speaks. They merely sway, spinning slowly; their movements never rushed nor out of sync.

. . .

Two wrecked cars rest peacefully in the center of a residential instersection on a brightly lit summer's afternoon. A teenage girl sits curbside in hysterics as medical personnel restrain her, tending to her injuries. She looks towards the vehicles as she sobs.

A Tale of True Crime in the South

In 1971, a man entered a bank in a small North Carolina town and demanded all the money in the safe.

The police arrived at the scene within minutes of the robbery but mistook another man in the building for the criminal. Despite his cries of innocence, the suspect was arrested while the true thief escaped undetected.

When presented to the public as the alleged perpetrator, the media noted that the case against him was thin and suggested that the incident may be one of mistaken identity. Captivated by the theory, the public grew to believe the accused to be a victim of unjust persecution by the judicial system. As such, they showered him with support and adoration. Subsequently, after appearing in court and having the charges against him dismissed due to a lack of evidence, the accidental martyr was set free.

. . .

In the years that followed, the once-admiring public lost interest—first, in the man's story, and eventually, in the man. Riddled by cold, sleepless nights spent longing for the warmth of the fame and celebrity that the events of years prior had brought, the man entered a bank in the neighboring county one afternoon and demanded all the money in the safe.

Coincidentally, in that bank, on that day, and at that moment . . . the never-previously-apprehended man responsible for the years-old theft was depositing a paycheck to the teller inside.

When the speedy police arrived this time, they inversely mistook the depositor for the man committing the in-progress theft while his once-inadvertent-patsy fled unnoticed. But after arresting the original thief and presenting him to the courts as the present-day culprit—all the while remaining oblivious to his prior indiscretion—he too was released thanks to the case against him having been built upon insufficient evidence.

. . .

Neither man ever contacted the other nor the authorities regarding his respective role in the crime which he committed, but for which the other was arrested.

Neither man was ever brought to justice.