Joe Had A Good Day

“Congratulations, Joe,” he said over the phone, “you are officially a published novelist!” There was more to the conversation, but that was the only sentence that Joe truly heard.

Joe was ecstatic. It was a beautiful day. After he hung up the phone he decided to go for a walk. So much had changed for Joe over the past five years. He hit rock bottom — lost his apartment and his job and had nowhere to turn. The voices in his head grew so loud that he couldn’t even think anymore. But somehow, he had turned it around again.

He locked his front door behind him and set off quickly down the street. He may have turned his life around, but not enough to afford to live someplace where he’d feel safe walking leisurely. Maybe after the book sales start to come through... Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe a little, one-room cabin by a lake. Someplace secluded where he could be one of those reclusive authors who never gives interviews. He liked the idea of that. Then again, no one had ever wanted to interview him before — interrogate, yes, but never interview — maybe he’d like it. He decided not to think too much about his hypothetical cabin by a lake. Best to just take everything one day at a time. After all, that’s how he got here in the first place.

Joe knew exactly where he wanted to go to mark this momentous occasion. It was a long walk, but he was used to long walks. He never had a car, and he firmly believed that if he did have a car he never would have had the pure, uninterrupted thinking time that he credited with his newfound success. So he held his head high and he walked.

Soon he was out of his neighborhood and into the city’s industrial park where all the factories and warehouses were (for some reason) all clustered together. He figured it was smart to keep all the industry in one place so that fire would spread faster. If industries were going to collapse it would only be fair for them all to burn down at the same time. Level the playing field. There, up on the hill to his right, was his old job. A factory where he used to spend all his time taping boxes shut as they whizzed past on a conveyor belt. They fired him. He was terrible at that job. So monotonous and useless. That was before he ever knew he could write. Felt like a lifetime ago, and he was happy he couldn’t remember most of it.

He moved on. That big brick building was only one of the stops on his celebratory walk. All he had wanted was to see it for a second, and glare contemptuously at it. He took a left turn that would take him down the long hill to his next stop. He used to walk up and down this road day in and day out. He still knew every step like he knew how to breathe, despite it having been almost five years since his feet had carried him along it. 

Very little had changed in his absence, except for his outlook. When he left his house, Joe thought that his new neighborhood was a little sketchy, but this one had at least twice the amount of cars propped up on cinderblocks. There was even a legitimate trash can fire in one of the alleys he walked past.

What had once been his apartment building was now an empty lot. “Empty lot” doesn’t quite capture it though. It certainly wasn’t empty. In fact, technically the apartment building was still there — just not in one piece. Joe had wondered what became of it after it was demolished. He half hoped it had been turned into a park — or at least a Walgreens — but it seemed that no one ever came to haul away the rubble. 

He thought absently of digging through the debris to find his old stuff. He had so few things back then and it was a shame to know that they were probably right there for the taking. His milk crate full of clothes, a broken record player, the one book he owned (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants but with the last 20 pages torn out) — he could have those things back if he just hopped the fence and started digging. But he didn’t really want those things back. Why would he? There weren’t any positive memories attached. He just kept walking.

Joe turned down another side street, overgrown with trees that tangled above turning it into a tunnel. The canopy was so thick with gnarled branches and leaves that the mid morning sun was completely lost; it was like stepping into dusk. He faintly heard sirens from somewhere in the city, but he paid no mind to them. He was going the other way — the long way out of town. The houses and shops became fewer and farther between as he walked quickly past. The air slowly started to become crisper, easier to breathe. Soon the few buildings were replaced with fields and trees as he left the “Now Leaving” sign behind him. He just kept walking.

It was past noon when Joe turned off the road and onto a little dirt and mulch path that cut into the woods. If he weren’t so far away from the city, he’d have heard many more sirens, and a lot of commotion. But he was quite a ways off by that point, and plunging ever further into the dense forest well past the outskirts of town. It was a path that he knew by heart, despite only coming this way once before five years prior. He took the twists and turns of the forest like he did it every day.

Finally he came to a broken down old school bus half-buried in the dirt of a clearing. His first secluded cabin in the woods where a recluse could sit and write to their heart’s content. He pried the door open and stepped inside. The air was hot and stagnant, and it smelled exactly the way he remembered it: terrible. Still, he breathed in deeply. This bus had been his home for four long years. Joe sat down on one of the old seats. The back of the seat in front of him had been ripped off and laid down on top of the bottom of the seat. That stack of seat was once his desk — where he started writing the very book that was now officially published, on the way to stores even. He sat and reflected.

It was a dark day when he found this bus, but a bright one as he sat in it again. It was strange to think that what he had considered the worst day of his life, the absolute bottom below the rock bottom he had already hit, had turned into something that he was actually proud of. He kind of loved this bus in a way, despite its smell and general brokenness. He wondered how much money it would take to unearth it and make it drive again, make it actually live able. He wondered if he’d have that much money when the book sales came in.

It was also a bright day in that he had decided to leave his apartment, leave the city and walk all the way out to his old “office” in the woods. There had been a fire in one of the factories on the hill. It had spread to another factory, and then to a warehouse full of quite flammable things. The tightly packed industrial park became a powder keg that spread the fire through the city faster than the fire department could extinguish it. By the time Joe had reached the dirt path to the bus, his apartment was already ablaze.

But Joe didn’t know that as he sat in the bus, quietly reminiscing about his long years spent writing all alone in the woods eating berries and nuts he gathered himself. He had no idea what had become of his city as he sat there and dozed off after his long walk. Tomorrow he would learn of the destruction — of the pile of rubble covering his dresser full of nice clothes, his working (before the fire, that is) recording player, and his several towering bookshelves full of books that weren’t just used copies of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. But today he did not know that once again the city had taken everything out from under him. At least he was still a published author.

Joe had a good day.