Beautiful World Hap Burke
66
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ou know it’s spring when the breeze whispers. In the fall it rustles, in the winter it moans, but in the spring it whispers, dancing and tumbling over new buds. And underneath a spangling of stars you haven’t seen since last June when you had to let the dog out and happened to gaze into the heavens, there’s nothing better than slowing down and breathing in the lightened air and smelling the opening rosebuds fading across the doorstep of summer. Well, that’s what I was thinking as I stepped across the doorstep of Andrea Flynn’s tidy, unremarkable house. The backyard was pretty nice, though. It was one of those unbounded, new suburb-type yards where fences are as sparse as stone foundations and ceiling plaster. The grass faded into birches and oaks after a short spread. I could smell the forest drifting across the tamed lawn with forbidden yet tantalizing touch. The party had been something of a bust, but I guess I never was a partier-type guy. I preferred moonlight solace to loud music and unwelcome sweat—thus, I was outside. The moon skimmed through a cloud. I heard a bird of some sort off in the grove, breaking—no, completing—the symphony of springtime night. And I was sitting on the porch steps entirely alone.
I
t was five months earlier and I had to get a job. For whatever reason, my mom’s hours were getting cut a bit and things weren’t looking as sunny as they had when
we moved here two years earlier. Admittedly, there wasn’t too much pressure on me—I just had to come up with gas and phone money—but the sudden downturn in events still troubled me a bit. I figured that’s just the nature of life. You can never better life’s situations—one movement in any direction tends to unbalance the whole universe for the worst, or at least it had in my experience. I still had to get a job. In a small dose of luck, I managed to find that the art museum had an opening in the coat room, which seemed to be the perfect choice. Art always got to me, because art is the sad attempt humanity makes at perfection, an inadequate shadow of happiness that man delights in. It mostly amused me in a sense to drift among painted happiness and sculpted perfection because I knew that the actual world lacked such creation. I liked feeling aloof, and thus I applied. I got the job and managed to align weekend-only hours. I was all set. My first day came as gently as the snowfall that managed to close my school the week before, and I feared nothing. Fear, like all other emotions, is worthless—after all, what correspondence do hormones and impulses have with the real world? So I stepped in the Art Museum on a cold Saturday afternoon, feeling about as much as the marble statue right behind the welcome desk, and asked the receptionist where I needed to report. She obliged. The first thing to strike me as I passed through the peeling door stenciled “Employees Only” was the girl. I thought I would be working alone. I wasn’t. She looked about my age, and she was pretty in the gentlest sense of the word. But that didn’t matter. Life had no happy endings. I knew that first hand. I must have been staring. I wasn’t really sure why. So I looked around at my new confinement. A desk and register lay at the open front of the room, and rows of lockers and racks were stacked behind in a simple dou-