The Fiction of Owen Thomas

Precipitation Likely, Chance of Sun
(“The Might and the Will”)

A Novella

Excerpt B

Resigned, he stood up and walked out to the front window and turned on the video camera and uncapped the lens and then reached his finger up under the tripod mount and switched on the slewing servo.  He unhooked the remote control and walked back around the counter and turned on the remote monitor. The mall outside The Shutter Shack windows glowed to life in full digital, high-definition color.

Quinn mashed a button with his thumb and the camera slew right. On the monitor, the mostly empty food court slid into view. The sprinkler techs were busy repositioning their ladders. He panned a little further to the right over to the Hotdog Hut. Donna Cole was busy cleaning out the bun warmer. He zoomed in until her long, lean face filled the monitor, her brown over-starched hair pillowing off the screen on either side. She had a smudge of mustard on her cheek.

Quinn zoomed back out. He spotted a woman in a white halter and a pinkish skirt carrying a bag from Flouncy’s. He zoomed in again, tracking her out of the food court and into the hallway. For all of the feminine frivolity that she had just purchased and was carrying home with her, she wore a somber, scowling expression. Quinn imagined that maybe the pink tissue-wrapped enticement in the bag was a gift for someone she hated, her husband’s suspiciously attentive secretary, and that the woman’s only consolation was that she had deliberately purchased it, whatever it was, in a size that was a little too small.

He stopped slewing and let her walk out of the frame as she approached. He looked up as the woman passed by the windows. She looked in at him briefly and Quinn nodded a greeting, which she ignored.

It was an obnoxious way to pass the time. He knew this. His mother would have been ashamed. If it was true that the dead continued to monitor the living, then his mother is ashamed. Present tense. Full stop. Nothing conditional about it. She is ashamed to witness what she is witnessing. Although if the dead really did spend their afterlife time secretly monitoring the living, then Quinn felt something slightly hypocritical in the judgment.

Nevertheless, it was a slightly creepy and intrusive way to pass the time and Quinn did not need to imagine his mother’s reaction in order to feel bad about it. He was ashamed. He tried to wait until as late in the day as possible before resorting to such life-saving distractions. But now, after three months, he found himself turning to the meager sustenance of recreational surveillance as early as 10:30 in the morning. He was as ashamed as the starving beggar who steals another man’s bread.

Another woman stepped into the frame of the monitor, moving in a slow saunter. Quinn did a double take. He pushed the button and the camera kept pace.

He recognized her. It took him a second. He was not used to the casual clothes. Or the purse, like a black leather clam in a swing, hanging from her shoulder. And the background was certainly different. And she was in profile, which was probably the biggest difference. This time she was not actually looking at him.

Of course, she had never actually been looking at him, day after day, week after week, month after month. It had only felt that way. She had not actually had any idea that he was there watching her, just like she had no idea that he was watching her now.

But there was no doubt about it. It was her alright. 

The weather girl.

The impulse of recognition, freighted as it was with the irrational loathing that he held for her, brought Quinn’s thumb into contact with the record button. He pushed it. A red dot flashed three times on the monitor.

He zoomed in on her face, looking for that old self-satisfied sanctimony in her eyes. How many times had he wanted to smash those accusing eyes? To throw something heavy at those eyes? How many times had he tried to mute that piercing voice and its utterly irrelevant words?

The weather girl stopped and disappeared. Quinn had to zoom out and reverse the slew direction to find her again. She was bending over the glass display case in front of Glitterati’s looking at bangles. The owner of the store – a man named Fred Kunch whose swayback posture and near obsession with oversized earth-toned cardigans made him about as glittery as a shitake mushroom – was in the back corner of the store trying to open a box of something for a disheveled red-headed woman. She was attached at the wrist to a bouncing, writhing child. The right side of her body jerked rhythmically earthward.

The weather girl languidly spun a countertop jewelry carousel with the tip of a finger. She opened a plexiglass panel, slipped a finger inside a gold metal watchband and lifted it off the peg. She looked at the watch face, holding it in both hands and frowned, as if she were looking at her own reflection in a mirror and not particularly liking what she saw.

Her purse slipped off her shoulder and down into the crook of her elbow. She dropped the watch into the open maw of the purse and then pulled the bag back up onto her shoulder. With the other hand, she closed the panel and resumed turning the jewelry carousel, fingering the baubles. Then, with that insufferably pleasant expression with which she so often lied to him, the weather girl turned her back to Quinn’s disbelieving eyes and sauntered out of the frame.