CHAINS
by
Mickie;
05.01.29
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"You don't keep any secrets, Mr. Grissom? Not even from your wife?" the sheriff asked, puzzled by the notion.
Grissom
smiled, remembering. "I used to. I'm trying to change."
---
707 Jackpot
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It's a quiet night in the desert, as it always is, save for the rustling of insect legs across the chilled sand, but that is a comforting sound to Gil Grissom, bug connoisseur. They're all hurrying to get somewhere, to something, and have a definite certainty about how to accomplish their tasks. The man standing alone in the horizon wished he were as lucky.
He wished he had been as lucky then, before, instead of only realizing these things in passing, when it didn't seem to matter anymore.
Could it matter now? His heart screamed no, quickly and without examination.
In the bright lights of the city, with distractions and reasons to forget everywhere, especially at night, it is easy to dissuade such thoughts and to lock them away forever. The desert holds nothing else to think about, especially at night.
He's heard many people have places where they think, special places nobody knows about except the other two hundred people who call it theirs as well. He doesn't suppose he wants one, to think like this all the time, driving himself mad. That's why only crazy people have special places. (Then what is this place?)
His mind spread out on the backs of his eyes like a map, routes and highways, structure and reason depicted on a globe. His heart then, twists and exits, on empty space. And that's the way it was now in the void, drifting the same as the life before it.
But what could it matter now, here where time is slow and unimportant; where he was inconsequential.
Out here, isolated under the open sky, a human being is meaningless. If an animal attacked, no one would be there to notice. The body would be found by chance a few days later, maybe a few weeks, maybe not at all. The animal would drag part of the carcass back to its family, like most humans do with cows and pigs; the great chain of being, or something of that nature.
As far as Gil Grissom was concerned, the chain of being was made out of pretzels, the salted sort – the kind Catherine liked. "Lucky for me," he said aloud to the green, determined caterpillar crawling on his left shoe.
He sighed.
------------------end.