A Tale of the Ordinary

Wes has a gun.

I worked at a diner before I met Wes. I worked behind a long shiny counter and got to know the regulars pretty well. Shauna was one of the most memorable regulars, an energizer bunny of at least 75. She barely passed five feet and had striking red hair, swearing she never dyed it. She wore a weathered leather jacket that I was positive she had since the 1970s and never came in with anyone except herself. She was a bitter old woman. I read a quote one time, probably on an inspirational park bench somewhere, saying that you should never be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer – it eats at its host. Shauna taught me that this was true, her bitterness was eating away at her. And she wanted to eat away at everyone around her. She was always the bearer of bad news, yelling at the small Sony screen we had behind the counter playing channel 6 all day long. I remember the day the news broadcasted something about a shooting threat. No one was hurt and nothing bad happened besides a few shoppers in Barney’s having to wait a few extra hours to buy their Jimmy Choos. But it sent Shauna into a rage about guns. She told me that guns only existed because the ordinary were threatened by the extraordinary – they needed something that could keep themselves safe from the extraordinary, at a distance. She was always concerned with the ordinary and the extraordinary. I never caught any of Shauna’s bitterness, and I didn’t buy into many of her conspiracy theories. But, I did buy into her obsessions about where the ordinary and extraordinary stood in the world. I knew I was ordinary. I didn’t know if I could ever be extraordinary, or if I even wanted to be.

Wes has a gun. According to Shauna’s logic, that makes him ordinary.

It’s small and silver and looks like the kind of gun criminals hide in their waistbands in the movies. You might call the gun ordinary. It fits in his hand too comfortably, like his palm was designed to mold to its handle. The gun isn’t all shiny. There’s dark red in the creases around the handle. Wes says it’s rust – that the sleek metal ends up wearing from the oils on his hands. He says this matter of fact like he’s an expert on gunmetal and skin oils. He says it like I should believe him. He doesn’t want me to remember. So, I forget. I forget the time Wes stood stoically and shocked, seeming helpless for the first time I could remember. I forget how I made myself an accomplice for the first time by cleaning up the scene while Wes sat there helpless. I forget how the last thing I did was take the gun from Wes’s hands and rinse it off in the sink. I forget how I couldn’t get the dried blood out of the nooks and crannies of its handle. It’s the kind of moment that’s so out of the ordinary that you think you imagined it. You think that it’s something that would never happen to you. When you’re in the moment, time moves quickly and slowly at the same time. You don’t know how to make the world feel ordinary again. So, I believe Wes. There’s rust in the cracks of his gun.

I always know where Wes’s gun is. I’ve been aware of where Wes’s gun is the entire 7 years, 9 months, 3 weeks, and 14 days that we’ve been stuck in this extraordinary situation together. I am always wary of its existence because I know I am ordinary. I don’t want to fall into the trap of relying on the gun to keep the extraordinary at a distance. I want to let the extraordinary come to me if it’s meant to be. I want to know if I am meant for the life of the extraordinary.

Wes and I are staying in a shed. It’s an ordinary shed. It’s only temporary – we have something set up for us in Cincinnati. We just have to hide on our way there. It’s not that bad. We’ve stayed in places that disguised themselves as houses and apartments that were far worse than this shed. I just wish the shed had a lock. I’m nervous they’ll find us. At night, I pretend to sleep while Wes holds me in his arms in our cotton, navy sleeping bag. I don’t want him to worry that I lose sleep here. I want him to think that I’m tough – that I’m built for this seemingly extraordinary life just like he seems to be.

We’ve done what we can to make this place ours. The shed doesn’t belong to us, but the things inside of it do. We sleep on an old sleeping bag Wes grew up with. There’s an unrecognizable stain on the inside, near the top corner. I catch Wes tracing his finger around the edge of the stain when he thinks I’m sleeping. I wonder what the stain reminds him of. We have an old oak table that Wes found at a foreclosure sale a few blocks away from us. The wood had scars in it. It looks like it was used as some sort of work table in its past life, though it was clearly meant as a dining table. We eat at the table. We’ve used it as a scene for other, more devious activities at times when Wes was feeling spontaneous and loving me a little more than usual. We also have two old beach chairs we sit in throughout the day. We found those on the curb outside of a house –  a big one. I know they’re nice because they say “Tommy Bahama” on them and I always see rich people wearing clothes that say this on the beach. Our ragged, Walmart duffel bags stuffed with our belongings hold our clothes and toothbrushes. I have a few personal belongings with me that I don’t think are unique enough to share. Many parts of my life are painfully regular – you just wouldn’t expect it because I’ve been on the run with my boyfriend for 7 years, 9 months, 3 weeks, and 14 days. And that is certainly out of the ordinary.

For the first year of this never-ending, cruel game of tag, I kept track of the hours and minutes. When we hit the one-year mark, it didn’t feel necessary anymore. Wes had been on the run before I joined him. Except it wasn’t the same kind of run, he was running from a life that was set up for him – one that would’ve been too ordinary. I wonder if he wishes he stayed in that life. I guess it had to have been pretty bad for him to be content with the life we have now.

Wes has busy eyes – they’re always moving, nervous about what they might find. Every time we walk into a room, he scans the entire place. He notices things other people don’t notice – he has a knack for seeing the unseeable. It’s extraordinary, the way he pulls something out of nothing.  I like when his eyes land on me, because I know he’s seeing a part of me that others don’t see. I live this life with him because he seems to be the only person who would see something, anything, in me. I fear that I’m painfully, disappointingly ordinary. But he sees something extraordinary.

The world I lived in came off its axis when we met. I felt that it was the first extraordinary thing to find me. I wondered if it was the last. We met in an ordinary way – dumb kids being dumb kids. I had been reading Seventeen Magazine in the lobby of a Planned Parenthood (like an ordinary stupid teenager) and saw an advertisement for a new makeup brand that everyone swore by. It was beyond my price range, but I was angry at the world and wanted to take control of my life. When I left my appointment, I went to Macy’s and tried to steal a foundation and eyeshadow palette. I got caught. I was given community service at a food pantry – it could’ve been worse. Wes was also doing community service – also for some sort of robbery. We worked four straight shifts together before I was done with my stint there. He still had a ways to go. The day I left, he asked me for my number and proceeded to text me over the next few days about how it was so boring working there without me. Then he asked me to hang out. My world hasn’t been the same since. 

One night I drift off to sleep easier than normal. I’m lying in a nook that Wes created for me between his side and his arm. He’s drawing circles on my hand the same way he does around the stain on the sleeping bag. His hands are almost as busy as his eyes. I think they’re nervous, too. He’s telling me our plan to move on tomorrow – make the journey to our next halfway house. This one will be better – there’s a bed and a kitchen and a real bathroom. It sounds more like an ordinary home than what we’ve become used to lately. I drift off thinking of the ordinary life we are moving closer and closer to.

The extraordinary cannot exist without the ordinary. We exist in a world stuck in a cycle of painful relativity. The extraordinary would not stand out if there weren’t people like me to compare them to. Maybe I’m not meant for a life of the extraordinary to make me into an extraordinary person. Maybe I’m just a vessel to make the extraordinary standout.

I dream of a day when the game is over, and our enemies have finally tagged us “it”. Wes and I live in a house with a fence and a real address that we paint on the mailbox. Maybe I will work at another diner, or maybe I’ll work as a secretary to one of the extraordinary. I will wear khaki dress pants and shiny button-down blouses that blend in with the rest of working-class women who buy the same professional outfit to rotate every day for the rest of their working lives. Maybe Wes will get a job in construction where he can scan the construction scene looking for cracks in the foundation and using his hands to create something where there is nothing. We will come home at night, eat bland food I learned to cook from a recipe I found on the internet. We will watch television sitcoms every night for about two hours until we go to bed, where we will lay side by side on a mattress we will buy from a big box store during one of those crazy holiday weekend sales. Instead of always being at his side in case of an attack, Wes’s gun will sit in a lock box in his nightstand. We will be ordinary. Painfully, disappointingly ordinary. And to me, that will feel extraordinary.

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About the author
Emma Colby is an undergraduate student at Boston College, otherwise based in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Stylus, Next Page Ink, Orca, the Elysian Chronicles, The Massachusetts’s Review, and others. She works as an intern for Post Road Magazine and wants to publish novels in the future.