Autumn

Listen (8 min) | Short Story | Magical Realism

Autumn is wind and ash. It decays and blows away.

To the branches of his heart, Martin pasted dead leaves, deficits that could never be repaid. A banker, he wrote the wrongs done against him on debt slips.

He began with one or two. Folded and tucked into his overcoat pockets, he carried them as a talisman against injury. Two became four, and four became a fistful.

When another employee got the promotion he hoped for, he wrote it down. The man tried to shake his hand. The crinkle of paper in Martin’s pocket stopped him returning the gesture.

Autumn breathed fire into the leaves and sent them raining down on the year’s mistakes.

Martin refused to forget. He kept his eyes at ground level. Nothing would be covered over. He saw the world as it was, and he remembered.

Fewer and fewer friends darkened his door. He held their missteps at hand, ready to drop the reminders in their palms like calling cards.

Alice was one of the few. She and Martin were ‘walking out together,’ as the old-timers put it. The couple’s strolls were an almost-daily occurrence.

Sauntering through the park to the pond, they spent dusk reclining under a blazing maple as the light of the setting sun shone through the leaves.

Alice talked to him of trees. Told him why some were ever green. Why some turned yellow and others red. That leaves must fall, or the tree would sicken.

He loved her face, turned up to the branches, illuminated by a rosy golden blush.

Leaping up, Martin threw off his coat. He opened his pocketknife and carved their initials, framed with a heart, into the trunk.

Finishing his work, he looked for the delight in her eyes and found her flattening crumpled debts fallen from his pocket. Reading.

He grabbed them back, but her opinion had formed. A rumbling argument grew to a storm between them. Alice didn’t understand his shield. To her, the debts were scraps of nothing, best thrown in the pond.

That was the last time they walked out together. Her letters were returned unopened until they stopped.

Martin’s only walks spanned to and from the office, and he never let his eyes turn to the park as he passed.

Autumn blustered, plucking at hat and hem, curling wisps of wind into his pockets, digging out the slips.

Martin snatched, chasing the gusts and every stolen debt. He gripped them all the way home.

A needle and thread were secured. Sewing halfway through the night, he fastened every slip to the inside of his outercoat, taking care to sew Alice’s debt over his heart.

Next day’s walk to work was pleasant, and, wrapped in his armor, he forgot the danger of the wind. Autumn could bellow all it liked.

Finished with subtleties, Autumn raised a downpour.

Raindrops, plump and stinging, soaked Martin as he sprinted home.

Rushing to his bedroom glass, he removed his outercoat. Ink dripped from the soggy slips. The papers neared illegibility. Letters whirled and smudged across his gray frock coat in a cobbled, bleeding version of his own hand, spelling grudging, unrelenting, proud.

Tearing it off, he filled the bathtub, scrubbing the fibers together until the words faded.

Through the night, Martin filled in the missing letters sewn inside his outercoat—writing, blotting, blowing them dry.

He’d wear his black suit until the other could be laundered, and he’d be sure to carry his umbrella.

In the morning, Martin strode past the park on his way to the bank, a thunder cloud from head to toe.

Autumn gathered leaves,—of ruby, amber, gold, and chestnut—puffed out its cheeks, and blew them into cyclones.

Martin swiped. Flailed. Shouted. He peeled them off, digging them out of his collar, straining not to tear the debts as he grabbed.

Heat swelled under his coat. Martin slapped at the searing sensation rolling down his abdomen. He was burning. He was on fire, and he had to get to water.

Racing to the pond, he ripped off the outercoat, splashing at the pain.

There was no smoke. No ember. Half his frock coat and the shirt beneath, red and dry in patches, decayed, crumbled, and blew away.

He felt his prickling chest. Leaning over the pond, he read the word scrawled across his skin in scabby, decomposing ink: desolate.

In the mirror of the water, the ruby maple and its heart-enclosed initials flamed.

Seizing a stone, Martin ran at the trunk, bringing the point down, again and again, into the letters as his fingers bled.

He fell back, gasping. The smell of earth and sapwood filled his nostrils. Under each gouged layer, the letters shone as though carved to the core of the wood.

Beneath the inscription’s eternity, his coat lay open. Debt slips curled at the edges; turned brown, yellow, orange, and red.

A hollow, punched-in feeling filled his stomach. His reasons for the debt slips, and the words thereon, dimmed. New words took their places: envious, hateful, arrogant, unforgiving, despairing.

Clutching the letters etched over his ribs, he laid his head on the maple’s trunk and breathed a wish: Let them all blow away.

Wind rose, disentangling the last of the freshly-sewn threads. The debts cracked, flaked, pulled free, and scattered. Joining the other leaves, they flipped and floated, swirling and whirling out of sight.

Martin’s shoulders rolled back and loosened. He closed his eyes and exhaled.

Laughter through tears interrupted the silence.

Memory of rosy golden blush, of upturned eyes, of concern spoken in love filled his heart.

Retrieving a handkerchief from his pocket, he dabbed at the wounds on his hands.

Alice would be in that time of day. Her house was only two blocks east, past the high street.

Smoothing his hair, he tidied himself. Scooping up his half-corroded coat, he shook it clean and swung it over his shoulders, soaring with the wind at his back towards the risen sun.

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Photo by Adrian “Rosco” Stef on Unsplash