John was a weird friend,
I mean, he wasn’t worryingly weird: like, he was that endearing kind of mixture between extroverted and socially dissonant that you could pass off as just him being eccentric. He would kind of just move, you know? Internally and externally, he would always jut out in peculiar tangents, a gangling surge of a human being that moved not with a direct purpose or in the shadow of forethought, but instead he lurched forward with the intention of twenty marbles falling down a stairwell.
He was a good friend though.
Thinking back on his whims and ways it would be hard to pin down any singular type of curiosity that would summarise his weirdness, like, how he would always try a pair of shoes if they were left unattended. I always thought he did stuff like this with a plan, that it was just his own quiet way of saying, ‘nah mate, don’t worry about taking your shoes off, look I’ll put them on instead,’ but when compared to the usual garnish of oddity that he placed onto anything normal…It’s hard to put into words.
He was bemused, not by any direct things in particular, but instead by most things in general. More than once I had watched him stare pointedly at a brick wall for some time, silent as a man in an art gallery, and the he would suddenly exclaim a short burst of laughter, slap at a pattern in the bricks, and then wish the others the best of the season. I’d asked him about this routine some years ago while we walked in Main Park but he only muttered something about ‘the lines of a grain never being as straight as the ring,’ and I took the conversation to be not really be worth pursuing.
I say all this not to put John in a bad light though, it’s more that I’m trying to tack down his unpinable ways in a sense.
So on that end-
‘John, why are there grass clippings all over the floor?’ I asked despite my knowledge that the answer would be deluminating: A loose scattering of various grasses and crushed pine cones had been left abandoned over the slate tile of John’s living room and was causing his dog, Rodney, to suffer a personal crisis of outside now being inside.
‘Potpourri I think, I was trying to be bohemian this autumn,’ he replied, holding true to his life-work in raising further questions. I often thought that if a baker could make bread rise in the way my perplexed-ness would rise around John, his bakery would be quickly demolished by a viscera of expanding dough.
‘Oh,’ I could only bring myself to say as I admonished myself for expecting something coherent for a moment. Now noticing all of his many pot plants removed from their aforementioned pots and scattered across his bookshelves, I pointedly defocused my eyes and let the moment hang itself.
Some twenty minutes ago, John had called me in a panic of swearing and cries for a priest. So distressed were his ramblings that I imagined him to be either trapped under a cupboard of knives, or precariously balanced over some abyss he had somehow created, but no, as I bundled myself through his flyscreen and staggered into his kitchen, there he was, calmly whisking a bowl of eggs and flour.
‘Um…you rang?’ I asked, breathlessness now reaching my lungs and a haze of anger creeping up my spinal column.
‘I did,’ he said, as if only now remembering something important, halfway through pouring the egg mixture into an empty flour pot, ‘you are invited.’ He continued.
‘To?’
‘Oh yes, a time…to lunch. I have made you, us, a pleasant lunch.’
His inflection on the word lunch made it sound like a question and the countenance that had suddenly overcome my strange friend’s features looked as though he was trying to inflate a jumping castle with lungs and will-power alone.
‘I’m not sure if the flower pot is food grade, John.’ I offered, giving up on anger once again and mentally cancelling the plans I had that afternoon. To do something with the knife that had found its way from the bench to my hands, I made my way to the chopping board and began to dice some carrots.
‘That’s fine,’ he laughed, distributing the rest of his mixture into a second pot, ‘nothing I cook really is anyway.’
I stopped and looked at John, the glow of the afternoon lighting up the kitchen and making the moment peaceful in a sense. Despite his flaws, I was happy to call John a friend: I was happy to know a man who chose a reasonless existence over one filled with worry or panic.
‘You just said it was pleasant.’
‘No, I said it was pheasant, listen.’
J. McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 