Catherine Kelley
I’m waiting for you, George Orwell, on this splintered bench just outside of London, the smells of the livestock market invading my nose. I can hear the haggling of customers and the quaint old cars running along the road, but all I care about is seeing you. At any moment you’ll appear, on your way to the spike where you’ll sleep tonight next to a tramp with a dust-blackened face and the stench of urine on his trousers.
As I look for your black dungarees and secondhand brown coat, I have to keep in mind that you’ll be more than a decade younger than in the black and white photos I have studied in English textbooks. But, of course, I would know you in a crowd of thousands, your oblong face and thin mustache like poems I have memorized.
In my bag is the sandwich I’ve dreamed up for you: English cheddar on homemade brown bread spread with real butter. I’ve wrapped it in a white linen cloth as pristine as your sentences. On the bench beside me is a thermos of strong Ceylon tea, with milk and no sugar, loose tea leaves steeped in an earthenware pot . . . exactly as you like it.
These past several minutes I’ve found myself continually smoothing out the wrinkles and folds in my dress—an ankle-length sundress in lemon yellow that I hope you’ll like—and I can’t help but glance at my watch again and again, but not because this waiting weighs on me like a Monday afternoon at my office but because I’m counting the minutes until I can give you what you need—the sandwich and the tea but also words that will sustain you. I want to blurt it all out right now—that the plongeur hell in Paris and night after night of tea and two slices here in England will not be in vain. In only a few years Down and Out will be published, The Road to Wigan Pier soon after that. One day, you’ll be read by millions, Orwellian will enter the lexicon . . . Of course, I’ve decided to leave out a couple of details—that you will spend months in a sanitorium coughing up blood and leave us only six months after the publication of your masterpiece. . . Wait. Is that you turning the corner? Yes, there you are, lanky 6’ 2, halo in full glow, but with none of the lines around your mouth I’m used to. I reach in my bag and take out the sandwich. My hand is trembling.
“Excuse me, Mr. Blair,” I say, almost choking on anticipation. “Would you like a sandwich? You must be hungry.” But you continue walking with your gaze straight ahead. “Excuse me! I brought you a sandwich!” I say, projecting my voice into the street. Without a glance, you stride past me. “Stop, please!” With the sandwich in one hand, I run after you as though chasing God, stopping just short of stepping on your boots. My fingertips grace the arm of your coat, but you don’t register my touch. I run several feet ahead of you, unwrapping the sandwich as I go. Then I turn around and hold the sandwich up to your face, but you walk right through me.
I don’t understand. Is this the arrangement? I can look at him, speak to him, touch him, but without him knowing that I’m here? But didn’t you say . . . I squint away my tears, and now your figure is getting smaller in the distance as you walk away, taking my dreams with you. With my cold hands, I wrap the sandwich again, hold the linen cloth to my chest. I imagine Winston Smith gathering bluebells for Julia, his arm around her waist, their first kiss, Julia’s note to him that started everything . . .
Now the sandwich is floating out of my hand, it begins to break up into molecules, like tiny bubbles, that drift upwards towards the gray sky. A wave passes through me, and I feel myself dissolving into light. Soon, an ocean and decades will once again separate me from you.
CATHERINE KELLEY writes from Southern California and has had stories published in Everyday Fiction, The Frogmore Papers, 805, East of the Web, The Blood Pudding, and The Bookends Review. She practices Zen meditation, hoping it will someday help her forgive and the people who dump garbage on her street.