Another Load of Bull

The sound of the sheet of paper being ripped from the typewriter’s platen brought him back to the present moment—though he wasn’t at all sure how he’d gotten there. Corbin had no memory of rolling the paper or typing to begin with, he only knew that he had done it. For that matter, he didn’t remember typing the few pages upon which he now placed this one.

The same was true of a lot of things he knew had just recently happened, such as realizing when he’d fallen through the snow that it had been the cabin’s roof upon which he had hit his chin & the wooden porch upon which he had landed. He didn’t remember unlocking the door, entering the cabin, climbing into bed with all his clothes still on, starting a fire in the fireplace before remembering he had yet to clear the chimney, putting the fire out as smoke filled the cabin, climbing on top of the roof with the snow shovel to clear the chimney (both of snow which was still falling heavily & a rather nasty squirrel’s nest), restarting the fire, preparing something to eat along with a pot of tea, fetching his supplies from the truck (also while it was still blizzarding), setting up his typewriter & sitting down to get to work.

He just knew that he had.

Trying to remember the events of the day was nothing more than him gathering a bouquet of Forget-Me-Nots he could neither use nor keep. A little ironic, he supposed, considering he had come to the cabin specifically for the purpose of remembering. But memories of what had happened today would only serve to cloud & cast shadows upon those things he needed to recall.

And now that he was looking at this diminutive stack of papers onto which he had typed his many grievances over loves lost &/or never gained, he couldn’t help but feel disappointed. For all the misery they had caused him over the past several years, he had been sure there would have been more.

He picked up the pages, sat back in his chair, & bit his lip as he began to read through them again.

That pretty much stopped him in his tracks. He’d forgotten that his lip was still split wide open, badly swollen, & extremely tender. He picked up the rag he’d been using to stop the bleeding & mop up the pus & pressed it to his upper lip. It was dry & crusty & he quickly realized it wasn’t going to help. He needed to disinfect his wound with some rubbing alcohol he knew he had but couldn’t find.

So, he decided to clean the rag as best he could in the snow outside, then wrap up as much of the frozen stuff as would fit & use it as an ice pack. Maybe if he could get the swelling to go down, it would help. He could find the alcohol later after his mind had cleared some.

“That might be a while,” he thought as he returned to the table. He could have sworn he had been sitting on this side & that the typewriter should be facing him with the stack of pages setting next to it nearer the fireplace. But there it was, with its back to him & the pages nearer the door.

He shook his head at himself & immediately regretted that, too. It’s not a lot of fun having a swollen broken lip. Or a banged-up head, for that matter. It still throbbed from the lump he couldn’t remember getting over his right eye. It was his right eye, wasn’t it? He wasn’t sure of much of anything anymore.

He sat down in front of his typewriter on the far side of the table, managed to position the improvised ice pack with his right hand over both the lump on his forehead & his swollen upper lip, picked up the pages with his left hand & began to read.

He resisted the urge to shake his head again, but he found himself thinking, “This isn’t right. It’s all wrong. I’m not being fair.”

It made him think of what Heather had told him their advisor had them say whenever something didn’t make sense. “That’s a load of bull.” It was something she had used to keep her students engaged with one another, as well as her way of poking fun at the school mascot which just happened to be a raging bull.

That’s what these pages were, just another load of bull. Most of it was simply venting about how he had been mistreated by Heather & all of the other women he had tried to make a part of his life. It was nothing but a treatise on “poor little old me, nobody loves me, think I’ll go eat worms!”

Truth was, none of the women in his life had been the ones who had made him feel so down on himself. That had more to do with his brothers growing up & the other guys in his life with whom he never seemed able to compete, at least not for a woman’s attention. And even that had more to do with him than it did with any of them. He couldn’t blame them for knowing what to say or do to win a woman’s affection. They were just being themselves. He was the one who never had a clue.

And despite his whelming ineptitude, it’s not like he had given up. He’d still flirted with Leah on that first day of freshman orientation. Yes, he knew she thought he didn’t remember. But how could he forget? She was cute &… oh, let’s be fair, she was more than cute. She was beautiful, sexy, funny, talented, smart…, pretty much the complete package. And she seemed to enjoy his “witty repartee” that day.

Until Heather showed up, that is. Ah, who was he kidding? All he needed was to see Leah in her first show to know that she was way out of his league, a fact she had made abundantly clear the last time he’d spoken with her. That’s right, the last time when he was foolish enough to think she might go out for coffee with him.

Her laughing in his face & running out the door had been the straw that had broken him. But it wasn’t the straw that had started him down this death spiral. That had come a couple of months earlier.

He’d been reading the daily from a nearby town that carried a little more of the world, national & sports news than the local paper. It was a university town—their university town. He didn’t even know they’d moved there until he saw their picture. They both had teaching positions, newly tenured. They had a son together—Josiah. And they were getting married. That was the part he learned from the newspaper. The other stuff he’d found out later. Heather Cranston & Patrick James. She would keep her name. It was the name by which others knew her, the name under which she was already published.

So, it wasn’t that she didn’t want to get married. It was that she hadn’t wanted to marry him. And it wasn’t that she didn’t want kids. She just didn’t want to have them with him.

That’s when he had entered his decaying spiral of self-loathing. From that point on, every date, every woman he ever asked for a date, had become a test to determine just how unlovable—how completely undeserving of love—he was.

He couldn’t blame any of them, either, not in good faith. His obsession with proving his lack of worth had predetermined every outcome. That was true with Heather as well. Once she had said, “No,” he had become persuaded that he wasn’t good enough for her. He might have tried to convince himself otherwise, but deep down it was always there. That she left him should have come as no surprise. He practically drove her to it. That it took seven years for her to do so, showed remarkable perseverance on her part.

From the day he first read their announcement, he told himself that it was good. Patrick, no matter how much Corbin might have resented him, was a good man. He made her happy. And Corbin wanted her to be happy.

He just wasn’t sure that he could survive in a world where she was happy without him.

And that was another load of bull. That’s not what he couldn’t live with. He couldn’t live with himself for being so stubborn, so foolish, so stupid, so…

…utterly worthless.

And there it was, his own little echo chamber, the chorus to which he always returned. “Poor, li’l ole me!” That’s why he had come to the cabin. Not to confront them, but to confront himself.

Now that he was here, he faced another question. Would he ever find his way back?

He thought to himself, “No one needs to read these pages. Might as well toss them in the fire.” He watched as each page curled, swallowing the type with brown, then flaring bright orange before crumbling into ash. Those flares from the pages caused him to notice that the fire was dying down. He should add more wood to keep it burning through the night.

He could have sworn he had brought some logs inside earlier in the day, but the wood box was empty. And on the floor where the new logs should have been drying, there was nothing but a puddle of water.

The blizzard outside was where the woodpile lay buried. It was late in the day & already dark. He knew that, though he couldn’t tell it through the windows. The snow had covered them completely. Even the part of the roof that hung over the porch had not been enough to keep that from happening. The path he returned to clearing every few hours in front of the door was his only remaining link to the outside world.

The fire could wait until morning. It might be nothing but coals by then, but they would still have some life. The heavy blanket of snow would keep the cabin insulated & warm.

He needed to sleep. Though he couldn’t remember much from the day, he knew it had been a long one. And there was a warm bed calling.

He never made it to bed that night. He simply curled up on the rug in front of the fireplace. He watched as tiny blue tongues of flame flickered across the remaining pieces of nearly spent timber, then returned to hiding among the waves of orange buried deep within the cracks.

“What a load of bull,” he thought as his eyelids drooped. “Just another pile of crap.”

As the night faded into slumber, one word continued to echo through his dreams: “Worthless.”