Tears
By
Joshua Adkins
Ch.1
He gazed through the window imperiously as though he could not see those on the other side like it was an unsociable two-way mirror. He narrowed his gaze myopically to view his reflection and widened his nose, picking for all to see.
He grew up around to his cousin; all close the two of them grew, side by side in the orphanage. Both sets of parents unknown. Scarlett, his cousin, laid fond of his antics secretly but filed many mental hygiene warrants, causing conflict between the two. As she narrowed her view of him, she widened her eyes to look through his nostrils, wondering if he did this intentionally, and if he were always so obstructive in her absence.
Habitually, she inherited a belief from when they were children, that whatever was consistent never changed, and its consistency of her cousin's heart was admirably warming. Editing what sat atop him, the natural state of his hair was professionally different but its fougasse determinable. He moved from a brunette to a blonde.
In a recurring instance her presence was curative for his eccentricity. Upon her arrival, it were always one competition in which he lost. She would (against an secret appreciation for his antics) apologize and progressively convince him of his insanity until he marginally at first, then wholly succumbed to her will.
"You could have become a recluse, but you changed your hair and had an episode."
She walks parallel to his position but negligent to his tall stature, and says," I support everything you do as long as it's sane."
He squawks like a chicken and twists around in a figure eight.
"See I told you. A smile, I got a smile."
Security of the sumptuous establishment wearing the merchandise in his three-piece suit controlled the ambiance, and he told Emrick, "Chickens are not allowed in this establishment, even if they are in shirts and shoes."
He erects and tells the authority, they will leave, leveling his sanity, he fears another police encounter. Last episode his skull was detained by an officer, and his pride fell into a swamp in which he hadn't recovered from.
All three followed one another, Emrick leading the pack, as kingly in his walk as in his previously mistaken form. As the two exit, the lonely security stayed behind as if he were chained to superficiality.
As the pair are outside one and then the other tells the two of their love, and he plays dumb while she asks," Have you still been looking for our mothers. There are no records of them. There is no trail. You are a mad detective.
Charlotte repeats herself in ethos, only changing her verbiage, "Our parents...leave it alone. Nothing but heartache will come. They left us and the reason we will never know. Don't you want to be free? You have obsessed since our youths only burdening your desire and leaving no room for self-improvement"
He aborts his emotionless absence and complies with his newest feeling to a forbidden place of arrogance and anger for his cousin. He loathed her apathy on the subject, and it was the only thing they argued about that was pure. Everything else was muddied with love.
He resorts to a true form and reddens to his brains incorporation and word by word reveals to her his hidden question that she always knew was lurking in the background and, it was to say, "Will you shut up and never mention their names. They could have loved us. We took a DNA test. Both our parents left us. Both sets. There must have been extenuating circumstances. So will you shut up and realize it. Realize their love for us. Help me find them. All four of them," as he grabs his hair and turns his back to her, before looking to the sky and wondering of it all.
"It has meaning I tell you. It has meaning. The world revolves around itself not the sun, and every event is a superimposed anarchy that can only be found through destiny. It is my destiny to find their real identities and find why we grew up in that inner city slum of an orphanage, tossed around like trash from one so-called parent to another. Look at my face. Look at its dissymmetry. It's clinical I know, but I won't call myself ugly. I am beautiful on the inside, and my father were as well, I know it. What if they were thirteen. What if they were orphans just like us. No adopter could stand my face and no one, no real family would adopt the older we got only for me to be glad of your misfortune. I couldn't have taken it if we were separated. I'm glad you stood there with me through it all. Didn't I not protect you from that monster. Remember that night? I told you to leave him! Not to leave with him, and I followed you in that alley. I knew he didn't deserve you, and those foster parents (homes in which were many other foster children) never did either. Not either of us. He was going to beat you, but I stopped him. We have more than each other, and your mother has your good looks, I know. A burden to someone lonely. Everyone wants to adopt a beautiful girl. I guess until they sabotage something. None wants something from an ugly boy, but I know our parents hold our genetics and know how we feel."
The slowest of cries begins from her duct, as if she were tortured ever so slightly at first just discomforted, then it ended in agony. She forced out whatever she had built up and added inside her head as if she had overdosed on a drug. And when she ran out of what was built up, artificial chemicals sprayed from her eyes as she forced out tears like an actor needing to cry more but not having any natural excesses left. This super aggregate effected her neurotransmitters until she passed out from something she gave herself, not from her naked soul.
Before she hit the ground, he grabbed her like an outfielder catching a potential home run and, as he brings her to his contour the pride he felt were as if he averted a catastrophe in the ninth inning. The respect he felt for his cousin, made his face decontrol itself until his tears matched her's previous, and all dissymmetry between the two rapidly evolved like an organism with a microseconds lifespan, only to leave it superbly ready for its environment and able to control what the other members of its species needed it to see. He wielded the characteristics of his face involuntarily, as its evolution can be, containing the perfect synthesis of the minutia and the meta, until they matched one another as their souls stood at twins, not cousins. She cried again as her chemicals replenished, and he let loose another round of tears, this time he began to get weak. She tells him the following.
"We will find them. We will find them!," as she screams for all on the street to hear. "We will find them. I will help you. We will find them!"
He picks her up and squeezes her as he would a new infant who was brought to the orphanage and felt for her as if she were his own child.
A pair of passersby stop the two and ask if they need any help. In the city it's cold and only relation can bring one from this temperature. Relation built by blood or experience. They had both and knew these people were outsiders who they wanted nothing from, but they wanted nothing from them. If they had been homeless in the moment, they wouldn't have taken a dime from the intruders because anything given them would rot in a garden of proprietary.
He simply tells the two individuals, "Once an orphan, not always an orphan." He looks to his cousin next.?
Chapter 2
Sympathy stopped the hugging, and she composed his eyes toward an absconded store path. A means to the end had the road cleared expensively as if everyone knew their intention. Pointing, she told of the obvious landscape painting the situation had become. They hurried from habit and customarily became slower until they entered the restaurant and became still altogether.
As if attacked, the status quo of the server uplifted the mood of the two, like a decorated object, and the plainness of Emrick was elevated to a normalcy she hadn't seen since even their convergence. The server withheld her name, but left it learnable from her name-tag, the company winning a show for etiquette.
She felt an accomplished woman who disregarded her real job when "educating" Emrick. His state was unique and his antidote difficult to muster. It cannot be created, it must depend on the wilds of the time. Some things cant be tamed. But they can be used, and her cousin had had the perfect environment for his goodness to flourish.
She was holding onto that place, nervous she had handled a geographical cure.
He looked down at his hands as if he had been transformed into another being, impolitely ignoring the server as she returns their interest with a request of her own, "What's your name? I feel like we have met before?"
Emrick turns his hands around and applies the same commitment to figuring out who controls them.
"Who am I," he asks her, "Who am I."
She smiles unafraid of his searching.
He has already won before, however given his new sanity, he doesn't know how far he can take it. He begins to eat before the food arrived, graciously picking up his drink and wielding its power, he takes a chug moving his mouth up and down in the air.
Charlotte knew from 33 years of authenticity that she finally showed her inner appreciation for his antics.
She told him, "I can tell when your acting."
He continued slightly for amusement and ceased.
She sighs and speaks the following, "I'm afraid of ever finding our parents. You don't know. I have given birth to a child and know the feeling, a feeling that would never let you be separated from them."
"Are you reversing. He yells and slightly taps the table with the bottom of his fist. "He showed angrily.
She felt her temper rise. His contempt spoils the situation, disregarding his turn to speak; he growls an informal balling of his fist, nurturing it with his laden hand, sentencing himself to a silence neutering an unhappy potential.
Dually reading his station properly, she controls her interest, reflecting his restraint as if an epigenetic set of puppet strings controlled the cousins, each determinable by their hardware and the qualitative nature of the conversation. Involuntarily measuring his moments, the pleasure of each second's demeanor forfeiting a faux power, to taste for the pleasure of the status quo, like someone whose stomach ached only to bring them back to a boring health, contently monitors itself and its existence through inaction, and while he calms, his cousin followed him again. But this time as if she were his reflection, opposite in display but exact in timelines.
"What if their not real parents Emrick? Just think about it. What if our kinship to them is a superficial as them carrying our looks. Like this whole endeavor, it can be illusory or outright dangerous."
He blows through his cheeks such as a kettle whose steam were all it had left of something void of sustenance, but a brand new untouched tea set set ready for its maker and its company, lubricating the conversation liberally like a ball bearing whose wheel stood still on a slightly elevated ground moving it forward through a world where the potential for movement was eternally there but whose transport was started from an organic place, one more elegant than the simple existence of the road. One where the meaning lye in the lubricator, not it's environment.
"But?," as he soothe the air with his hands, being gently placed palm first upon the table,"Pessimism can retreat all good and life does not exist in a series of safe parameters, where nothing bad can never be. What if your assumption only means their circumstance was worse then than you imaginings?"
She gazed by him as if they were outside, and the foreground were something beautiful because her minds eye had manipulated the wall into a projection of good things to come leaving a look of satisfaction on her face being reinforced by Emrick's words, so she sat controlled for a second time by something within and another without her.
Ch.3
It was southern Florida, and the nights were soothing but the days extreme, the longer you were there the worse the heat got until one day you get used to it, and you wear a suit to work never complaining of its stickiness. The beachgoers and vacationers love it. When they stay for more than a month, they don't. Emrick and his cousin Charlotte hated it from the start; from as long as they can remember they hated it. It's there they first looked while compromisingly strolling through the park thinking of where there parents could be.
He wiggles an assumption into the atmosphere and plainly states, "What about the Northeast? Maybe it's in our blood. We hate the tropical weather, right?"
The rollercoaster rose as high as the sky, and both their eyes followed its trajectory.
They could almost feel the centrifugal force before Charlotte replied, "Let's go back and find that first headmaster again, as early as we can remember. I don't think she was there when we were infants, but still it's a start."
He followed the coaster downward, as she stayed incorporating her vision to the sky only to wonder of a different life, one in which her and her cousin were whole."
"Their marvelous feats of engineering aren't they. Do you ever think of rebounding your life and going back to that profession. You spent so much time in school. It must be taxing to see things like this and know you could be apart of it."
"What...rollercoasters? That work is probably reserved for elitists engineers. They would never let me in the club."
Only to fain sorrow, like a sophist his words don't match his inner thoughts, "Well, one day I suppose I'll go back. I couldn't stand being out of the game for eternity."
And when he seized and gazed into her pupils, He left her wondering of his true intent. Formality between the two had long since left. They noticed to their adjacent a withering person so thin they wondered how his endoskeleton fit inside his body.
He walked weirdly to the two before coughing, hiding his disgust over his shoulder, not to encapsulate it within his hand he was about to extend to the cousins.
To block the sunlight, Emrick holds his arm over his forehead, actioning his vision to allow room to see the face of the man. The man stops a a yard away from him then takes a single step, looks up at the rollercoaster, back down to Emerick directly in his eyes and tells him," I have a message from your estranged father?," before he can continue he is interrupted by Emerick's shouting.
He looks at his cousin and tells her, "We have come home. The six of us will be together, finally. Finally," as he weeps his containment and drops to his knees serving his conscience.
He screams out on his knee as he looks to the sky, "Thank you. Thank you."
Charlotte's heart was made of compartments. Many of these places had become algae, mildewed and insect ridden. That first compartment that was built 42 years ago was rotting and everything inside was rotting alongside it, as if no man had been there since its birth. For the first time in decades she looked inside her soul and noticed its decaying. She was shocked at her negligence and told the man of her depravity.
"I've been a monster. I've been a wondering lonely monster."
Paradoxically, his prodigious aura began to compete with a maternal like sense of duty, and the man places his hand of Charlotte shoulder and tells her, "Your parents disagree."
She cups her hands to her face in an effectual stupor placing them in front of her mouth to perform a cowardice for the public's interrogation. Emrick, with his elation still in its embryonic stage, he hadn't occurred to himself to internally goad over his victory.
He would never extrinsically delude her pride except on this matter, but as the novelty of the situation wore, he grappled with her countenance. Emrick decided to evade karmic responsibility and enable a conciliatory measure between the two.
He took her by the hand and labeled her lucky as he said, "We have won. We have won something today. You and I have history. We were like a people blind of their past and now we know our artists, our scientists, our businessman, and our statesman."
She intrinsically smiles and a complicated look overthrew the situation, and she applied a slight pressure to the man whose smile was the most uncomplicated aspect. Vicariously, the thin man was the opposite of attenuated, controlling his emotions null and began to cry first as if a perverse finisher to a race. He beat the children to their father's loyalty. He knew, Emrick knew his father was a man of honor, and he now knew people followed him.
Their father's retainer squeezed Emma's shoulder even tighter, fixating his eyes upon hers in a chivalrous event he discloses to her before formally addressing Scarlett, "Your father is sick," he then looks at Emrick and tells him, "Yours died long ago. I'm sorry I was just going to tell you but you wouldn't stop. I'm so sorry." A superintendence of sorrow sprayed from the look of Emrick.
The man places formality upon their imagination of him,"Since I were a baby my mother called me Wilfred...or I think. I cant remember being a baby entirely, but I have read the great phenomena of memory begins variably but aggregately approximately three to four years after the day of birth. "He smiles and continues, "But I have memories as early as two, distinctly I know so because their place is a place I never saw after two years of age."
Like a volcano made of dark matter, she carried around a mass that lived inside of her undetectable but effecting all her categories.
As if circumstances caught up to her behavior, she epileptic like stuttered her hand displacing her anonymity cyclically, like she wore a strobe light for a mask, and it's paradox of ephemeral concealments stood comforting in the fact that it was aeratable but consistent, as she felt exposed and nurtured at the same time.
As if to curb her condition such as a parent soothing a hurting child he extends himself with his voice, and as if words were outlawed for a few moments he only says, "Shh, Shh, Shh."
The man continued, "Those memories are good memories. That's why I remember them, but you will remember this for the rest of your life."
Emrick's tears were unruly but running away down his shirt and beyond the land he owned like someone who stood up to a monarch and couldn't be free until they escaped his boarders. As the tears looked for there path on his face, they fell eventually at the constant speed of gravity, as liberated as a tear will ever become. They congregated into one puddle and were categorized together as someone looking through a grave sight but without a relative to conceive of everyone who once were meaning, individually were categorized together as just something dead and stagnant. It were the few remaining alive were what mattered to man, but as if in the afterlife something seemed to use the dead beyond our perception as they watered the weeds sticking between the inelegance of man's attempt, and as if an educated man knew of the life of the dead, an adroit observer could calculate the movements of the puddle.
The man arranged his gaze more openly as he widened his eyes to gesture his competence to Charlotte, as she breaths in and out matching her hands irrational structure, as if only the two could detect their elegance.
Like a giant came across a sand castle and it had no idea it existed, Emrick bend over to acknowledge its being and find meaning in the dead. He stood up because what he had gained from it were not empirical but supplanted in him, hear. And as the dead can be, the ignorant visit their graves, while the enlightened visit them in spirit, knowing of the true place their legacy lie.
He turns to Charlotte and tells of his happiness for her and then turns right, and he rented the moment because it's ownership was not his, but he ran as close to his father as he had ever come telling the man of his heart, "Tell me something about my father? What was he like?"
The man smiled as if he knew the dead and told him, "I've never known a greater man, and he only recently found you, but as with things that are, he wanted to leave you with his fortune Emrick. He was embarrassed of his neglect. "Emrick." He stops speaking to conceal his attempt, as if no one had heard the words he said previously, and like a stew, Emrick, the man and Emma cooked. And while they ripened, the man seemed to stare like he could stir with his eyes. Only the contents moved by its own law, as if one giant coincidence, controlled a sameness between the motive of Wilfred and the cousins pushing an easiness from him to them. As if time could cure all things, and dissidence always lived short; the two forgot of their incomprehension. Like there were an inevitable lag from words to meaning, they recognized the affluence of their circumstance and rearranged themselves to face each other as if their fortune were tied to look.
"Fortune, "replied Emrick, and as if Wilfred didn't understand, and he only now realized of his deafness, he spoke again but like he took a large print on a chalkboard and placed it before his eyes he spoke grandly like a man in laconic obstreperousness, that placed a dull book easy to read into one word,"Fortune."
As if there were no such thing as the questioning of pitch, Emrick waited until he had already spoken to say, "What fortune?"
Wilfred looked sternly and enunciated as Emrick had pronounced so well, "10 million dollars. Each. You and her. Your father he found you last year and he has been watching you, but aware of things and how they are. You know? he didn't want to upset you. He didn't think you would even like him, despite his status. He was thirteen and homeless when your mother had you. So was your mother. Your cousin?well a year later her parents, one of them your father's brother, came about a child, and they were destitute as well."
Emma hid her face and permanently felt her hand across her mouth, watching them.
Emrick spoke back, "The Forrest, have you ever been there, and you can't see the forest for one large tree. A sequoia, large but odd in its name; something that shouldn't be there, looming over everything, just to fall on you one day. That's how I feel. I've spent my life searching. I can't believe the money, but why couldn't he say anything, I'm not judgmental."
Wilfred laughed, looked up at the roller coaster and told him, "What if you rode that ride and just flew out. But it's the opposite of landing on the concrete. You fell into a giant pile of money. Look at it like the clouds, not the trees and if you only look up you will see all the possibilities!"
Emrick looked up to the sky and told him,"Those tree lines over there are a long way away. Maybe your right but the clouds just look further, but there bigger in the mind. Which is real?"
He told him, "Those trees are defined. Any man looking for change will be there until he dies. These clouds may not be able to be touched, but like words are malleable, and your father just couldn't find them. To many trees himself. You need to stop and after this go somewhere?Meet me at my office. Your mother, aunt, uncle and many others are there. Emrick, your father won the lottery and you have played and lost only to finally be that one in millions. I would take it."
Ch.4
"Maintenance, that's what it requires. You do want your children's and there children to have money don't you," the accounts said.
Scarlett looked dazed, but attentive as she eyed to every other in the room, loosing something from each one, them obsessed with her and her cousin.
Emrick spoke back, "I would never have even became an engineer. I mean what will they be like? Little monsters running around begging, until everyone begs of them."
The accountant sighs. Wilfred exhales even greater. Emrick smiles, proud of his eccentric dissidence.
He tells of a Yiddish parable he knows, "There were a king who laid around all day eating honey and didn't govern or give anything to his life."
He looks to his sister, telling her, "We mustn't become as epicures, eating everything we see, listening to no one, only to grow fat and ugly."
She smiles and looks around at the eruditeness, filled with law books and their pressure falls to her. His warning took room, and she hopes not to look as one of these law books, pretty but understood to almost no one. Only the other rich knowing what's inside.
She looked to a wristwatch and realized, she didn't have to wonder if it were fake, or maybe she did but she didn't.
Asking him she says, "How much did that cost?"
She saw a smile the man tried to hide and hoped she would never wear it, but if she did she hoped to try and hide it as eager as he was. But she knew he was full of pride.
He tells her, the expressions so small only nature could see, but his soul were working perfectly and she saw inside of him. A man with no suit. A young man from before he had money and thought maybe this expression was tasteful. She looked to the next man and he gracefully touched his to block it almost, as if he had caught something as with a life of the rich. A defense mechanism for him to be more than money.
As she notices, her previous gaze spoke, "About 5,000."
She knew what the next look was. It was that he had gotten a good deal, and in the moment this disgusted her. Forces pulled for a politeness that would say who was to speak next, and after looking to Emrick, the man asked Charlotte if she would do the honors and sign the papers.
She walked a couple steps and leaned forward, pressing her now commandeered pen to the pages giving her signature. Emrick then did the same.
"