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Dark Enough

The Frozen Pond Challenge

By Michael Vito TostoPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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He closed the lid of his laptop, cursed, and stared sadly into the cold Vermont night through the cabin window. Then he pounded his fist on the desk and cursed again. The sound woke his dog, who looked up from her snug spot in front of the fireplace and cast a concerned eye on her master. He didn’t notice. Ever his vigilant partner, the dog knew something was wrong. She let out a quiet whimper, but again her owner didn’t notice.

The man stalked across the room and took a bottle of scotch from the small table next to his bed. He went to an old armchair near the fire and collapsed in it, grunting with exasperation and despair. But just as he brought the bottle to his lips, he felt turned off by the thought of it. In his anger, he screwed the lid back on and threw the bottle across the room. It hit the cabin wall and shattered, raining glass shards and good liquor all over the hardwood floor. Now the dog barked, and this time he noticed.

“Don’t worry, girl,” he growled, not unkindly. “It’s all going to be okay.” This was a blatant lie, of course. Nothing was going to be okay. And the dog knew it.

Growing evermore gloomy and defeated, the man sat in the armchair for a long time, wondering if even now the cops were on their way. They probably were. It didn’t matter. With mounting sadness, he looked around at the rustic cabin and remembered some of the good times. There weren’t many, but there were enough. The thought of those times would have to sustain him through what was about to come.

As cold wind howled outside, and as the usually snug cabin now seemed to become like some sort of malignant womb, the man did what most of us would do in his situation: he started thinking about choices. It was amazing… and baffling… how one tiny decision can alter everything that comes after it. For what is a person’s life if not a series of choices on top of choices on top of choices? Everything we do, or don’t do, ends up having paramount significance in our lives, even if we don’t realize it at the time. Sometimes something as simple as hitting the snooze button in the morning can spell someone’s doom later that night. Existence is a web. A tangled web of decisions made by people who, for the most part, aren’t always taking the greater picture into consideration. Humans are imperfect, and so too, therefore, are their decisions. In this view, it’s almost inconceivable that anything good ever happens at all. But the man knew that good was just as possible and indeed as prevalent as bad. That’s the probability of randomness. When you let the chips fall where they may, you’re going to get good results and bad ones. That’s the nature of a crapshoot.

But even as he thought this, the man knew it was bullshit. Randomness had nothing to do with what was happening now. This was no crapshoot. What he did was done deliberately, with calculation. The coming shitstorm wasn’t the arbitrary result of probability, it was the obvious outcome of a conscious choice. If X equals X, if every action has an opposite and equal reaction, then this sad end to the story shouldn’t surprise him at all.

And the truth was, it didn’t.

A gust rattled one of the window panes, jarring the man from these thoughts. He looked at the old analog clock on the wall. His dad had hung it there forty years ago. “Ten minutes to midnight,” he said aloud to no one, becoming more agitated by the minute. It was the futility of everything. There was nothing he could do. No way out.

Or was there?

Yes, maybe there was.

Thinking that this end to the story was as good as any, he got up and went over to the coat rack by the front door. A thick green parka with a fur collar was hanging on it. He put it on. Then he drew a stocking cap over his head. Before going outside, he went back over to his desk and pulled a revolver out of a drawer. Drawing the chamber back, he saw with satisfaction that it was loaded. “Come on, girl,” he said to the dog, and together the two of them went out into the frosty night.

The full moon cast just enough light on the northern Vermont terrain that the man could make out the mountains in the distance. They were black against the clear, starlit sky. And the piney fragrance of winter filled his nostrils. He realized with regret that he didn’t usually notice such things. But now, with his senses heightened and the distracting clamor of regular life fading away, he took note. There was something very comforting about the smell of pines.

Irritated by these silly thoughts, he pulled the fur collar close around his neck and began trudging through the woods toward the pond. It was frozen now. In some weird way he felt that was an allegory for his life. Once, long ago, things were soft and new and fresh… but now everything was hardened and brittle and uninviting, like ice. Maybe that’s why he wanted to do it at the pond.

The dog followed dutifully, mostly shielded from the wintry night by her thick coat. She wasn’t entirely sure what was about to happen, but she knew, with that strange canine intuition, that it wasn’t going to be good.

It took about six minutes to cover the hundred feet between the cabin and the pond. Not caring, the man walked right onto the ice. He stood there for a moment, waiting to see if it would break under his weight. It didn’t. He turned and looked at the cabin in the distance behind him. The lights were still on. It looked warm in there. It looked safe. Not wanting to feel warm or safe, he turned away and walked to what he believed was the absolute center of the pond. There, he lay down on his back, facing the sky. Out here in the country of northern Vermont, a man could see at least a million stars, even with a full moon. Absurdly, out of some dark place in the ether of his mind, he recalled the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “When it’s dark enough, you can see the stars.” That statement was so ridiculously obvious that the man knew Emerson must have been hinting at something deeper. Maybe you could define “dark” any number of ways. What is darkness if not hopelessness, and what was the present moment if not hopeless? Yeah, things were dark enough now. And the stars were that much brighter because of it. Life is like that. You have to swim in the bad to truly recognize the good.

The man sighed. It was folly to contemplate that kind of philosophical bullshit now. As he lay there on the cold ice, he reached his right hand into his pocket and fingered the revolver. It was cold like the ice. And now, at last, here at the end, he finally let his thoughts dwell on her. For weeks, no, months, he’d been driving any memory of her out of his brain, hardening his heart whenever thoughts of her slid unbidden into the forefront of his mind. Now he lowered the barriers and let it all come crashing in like a flood. He even spoke her name into the dead night.

“Isabel… Isabel…”

It had been for her. All of it. Everything he’d done, he did it for her. And now she was gone. With tears freezing on his face now, he tried to latch onto an image of her in his mind. But he couldn’t. It was fuzzy… fragmented… and just beyond his reach. The only part of her that remained clear and focused in his memory were her brown eyes… and the disappointment he’d seen in them.

As the dog butted her cold, wet nose against his hand, the man began to pet her absently. Somewhere nearby an owl hooted, and Isabel’s last words came back to him, as they’d done so many times in the recent weeks. “This isn’t what I wanted,” she had said. Those words ran to and fro in his mind like a frightened rabbit, tormenting him. This isn’t what I wanted... This isn’t what I wanted…

“Yeah,” the man whispered aloud into the night. “No one wanted this. But sometimes we do what we have to do.”

And that was true, wasn’t it? Life doesn’t play by any rules. Life isn’t held accountable in a court of law for all the horrid shit it doles out. Life just does what it does, and we have to respond as best we can. All we can do is square with the cards that are dealt to us. It’s not like he started out thinking that maybe someday, if he was lucky, he’d get to become some hardened criminal. No one plans this kind of stuff. It just happens. Sometimes, there’s no other course we can follow except the only one that will make things right. And that’s all he did. He just made things right. Even though doing so made everything else wrong. But the batter doesn’t get to call the pitch. He has to swing at what comes.

Shaking these thoughts away, the man sat up. Feeling like he was finally ready, he pulled the gun from his pocket. Turning it over in his hand, he wondered if he actually had the courage to use it. “Just do it already,” some voice in his head said. Cursing, the man wrapped his lips around the barrel and positioned his finger on the trigger. There were no thoughts of “Oh, how did it come to this?” or “Why me?” The moment was too real for that. And he understood, with the precision of some damn rocket scientist or mathematician, exactly how it had come to this. A choice. One tiny, harmless choice. That was all.

He hesitated. Breathing heavily, scarcely noticing the cold now, he reached down into the deepest part of his existence and tried to summon the nerve to pull the trigger. Almost… almost… so close…

But then the dog put her paw on his leg and whimpered loudly. Startled by the sound, the man looked at her. Her eyes were wide with concern and love and appeals to end this foolishness. “Please,” the dog seemed to be saying. “Please don’t put me through this.”

The man surprised himself by chuckling out loud. Suddenly filled with renewed warmth for the dog, he leaned down and let her lick his face. The affection spoke to some soft place hiding somewhere inside of him, a place he was amazed to discover still existed. He looked down at the gun in his hand, appalled now by the sight of it. There was nothing noble in taking the easy way out. There was nothing strong in that.

“Okay, girl,” he said sadly. “You win.”

He drew the revolver’s chamber back again and emptied all the bullets onto the surface of the frozen pond. They hit the ice with a metallic clink. Then he tossed the gun away. It slid across the ice and came to a stop about two feet from the bank. And as the dog put her head in the man’s lap, he glanced up and saw red flashing lights approaching through the trees in the near distance. Then he heard the sirens. They were coming for him. Accepting his fate, the man looked again into the night sky, just in time to see a shooting star fly across the firmament.

“This isn’t what I wanted,” he said hollowly. “This isn’t what I wanted.”

Short Story
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About the Creator

Michael Vito Tosto

Michael Vito Tosto is a writer, jazz musician, philosopher, and historian who lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his wife and two cats. A student of the human condition, he writes to make the world a better place.

www.michaelvitotosto.com

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