The Mural Gazer

Episode 3 - Pullout

She'll know by now, he calculated, imagined her reading his note, it shaking in her hands like a big white leaf. He tried not to think what she'd be thinking, but couldn't stop the surges of anguish, anger, remorse. Don't. But they persisted, short circuits in the neural network, flashes of contrition and rage that couldn't be fixed, which he'd have to put up with until they burned themselves out.

Then what?

He rolled the sausage over, stabbing it with his fork and pushing it toward the other side of the aluminium pan. It spat and sizzled like a horny cat defending its turf, then gave up, displaying unmistakable signs of submission. "You will be eaten," he threatened. "I shall devour you, tip to tip."

Leanne hated camping, if you could call a pit stop off the Trans-Canada highway anything so grand. Hated 'greasy' sausages, too. But he didn't think of his new lifestyle choices as rebellious, at least not intentionally so. Guy's got to eat.

Got to sleep. And for now, he'd have to make-do. It wasn't as if he'd planned his escape. I'm a refugee, he pleaded. A victim of domestic strife. He would' t go so far as to accuse her of violence. She'd never actually hit him, or even threatened to. But a disgusted glance, dismissive sigh, goading comment, they're forms of abuse, aren't they? Just as surly as a good, old-fashioned scourging.

He'd chosen naan bread instead of hotdog buns to wrap his sausages in. Sausages, not wieners, he insisted, wieners being a cut below in his lexicography. His change in status didn't include wieners, and certainly shouldn't have been lamented as the initial phase of an inescapable spiral down, down to an inevitable crash landing on the hard, urban pavements. He laughed out loud at the very thought, drawing suspicious stares from the motorists, stopped to admire the vista up Finlayson Arm - the glittering water; infolded, tree-clad hills; awe inspiring brilliance of the light.

What? he challenged. Just cause I don't wear polyester doesn't mean I'm crazy!

The naan bread wouldn't fit in the pan along with the sausage, so Buddy speared the doomed tube of meat, and laid it out on the pink plastic plate, where it would have to wait to be eaten. Then he flopped a naan into the pan and shoved it round a bit to get it coated with grease. The totem at the far end of the picnic area eyed him disdainfully, Buddy thought, scornful of the white man's store-bought version of living-off-the-land. Buddy bobbed in agreement.

His mobile, still switched off, weighed heavily in his hip pocket. Sooner or later, he'd have to power it up, and he imagined it exploding with the choking magma of Leanne's outrage. Later, he decided.

Laying the sausage back in the pan, on top of the fried naan, he lifted a corner of the patty and rolled it up. No onions, no mustard, just meat in a makeshift bun. That would have to do. For now, he vowed. He placed his supper on its plate and sidled up to it on the concrete picnic table's slab bench. Beside his dinner, opened as if it expected him to have something meaningful to write, was his brand new notepad, minus its first page.

Buddy sighed. It wasn't as if nothing had happened in recent memory for him to recount, but he just couldn't bring himself to set his current events down on paper - anything he had to say would flow off the nib of his pen like a lie, an attempt at justification, or rationalization. He looked at the date, which he'd logged at the top, right-hand side of the page in his precise notation: 20191005-1536.

He had nothing more to say. Like the runes etched into a tombstone's granite, his date-time stamp said it all.