Through The Glass(Simon G) Summer’s stifling wind sprinted through the park, forcing cauldrons of molten air down the throats of those brave enough to venture outdoors. It swept past the delicate blades of grass, leaving them shrivelled and brown. It sucked the water from the duck pond and wrung the moisture from the sand pit. It flung lifeless botanic matter at the hairstyles of young mothers. It tossed the hair of the toddlers making mud pies at the edge of the dehydrated pond. The white hot sun blazed on the iron bench seats, and the public barbeques didn't really need to be switched on. The solar heat was enough to scorch anything, dead or alive, that was exposed for too long. It was enough to turn the steering wheel of any car into a branding iron, and even to draw people from their technological addictions down to the beach. To be scorched. Silly people.

Such were the observations of Ron Peters. As he was riding this train of thought, a soft thud of heavy wood alerted him to a visitor’s presence in his office. Without warning, the scene he had been observing across the road became framed by the soft blue of the blinds of his 14th storey office. His mind slowly drew the attention from that scene to concentrate on what was happening in his office, and as it did, his view of the park became a blur of colours behind a dirty pane of glass. The position of his gaze, however, did not move to focus on the visitor. Instead, he focused on a small mark of fly dirt on the window blinds.

As the visitor stepped closer to a spacious oak desk, Ron recognised the bronchial gasping that had laid waste to his daydream. He tensed his shoulders, preparing for something he did not want to enter at the moment. A conversation.

“Ron, Sue got worried. She came to find me, saying that you’d been staring out that window for the last hour.”

Silence thundered through the luxurious office as Ron’s suspicions were confirmed. Josh was here to counsel him.

“Ron, neither of us like this particular time of year. I understand what’s happening here, but this isn’t the place. You need to get out of here.”

Silence once again blanketed the room. Ron’s mind rocketed through different reactions he could employ. Some were curt, some thankful, some clueless, and some just plain cruel. Josh had no idea what it was like. He had a family of five. Josh’s suit pants rustled while he changed position on the edge of the desk.

“Well?”

All Ron could manage was a slight nod and a swallow. Words escaped him.

“You know, since you closed that deal yesterday, I don’t really need you around here until Tuesday. How about you have a long weekend?”

After another swallow, Ron turned his head ever so slightly and caught Josh’s eyes. The sad expression changed, but only vaguely. One could interpret it as grateful.

Ron was grateful for Josh’s friendship. He was one of the only friends he hadn’t pushed away completely. All the others just wanted to get some drink into him to wash away the sadness and get their old buddy back, but that wasn’t how Ron was going to do life anymore. Josh recognised that and respected it. Many a long night was spent by the two of them out on a veranda somewhere making small talk, listening to the mozzie zapper hanging from a hook, and chatting about life.

“How do you suppose those mozzies feel when they realise it’s all a farce? That they’re just gonna die?” Ron had said one night.

“Dunno.”

“Well, I reckon they feel like life just kicked ‘em in the gut for laughs.”

“Maybe. Is that what you reckon it did to you?”

“If only it just felt like a kick in the gut.” Ron had said, hopelessness threatening to take over his face.

Ron blinked twice, and his mind returned to the conversation at hand.

“Well I guess I’ll see you next week then,” Ron managed to respond.

“Sure thing, Ron. Hope you get some rest and time to think. Give me a call one night if you feel like it.” Josh said it like he was the one who needed the companionship. Nice try. Ron wouldn’t be talking to many, if any people this weekend.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Ron replied.

Josh, with a heaving expulsion of air, stood up off the edge of Ron’s desk, straightened his pants, jacket, and tie, then made for the door. Ron’s thoughts were running away with him. Josh was a great friend, and Ron was just brushing off this huge favour Josh had just done for him. Just as Josh was laying his big hand on the door handle, Ron started.

“Josh,”

Josh turned his head. No expectation showed on his face. Ron suddenly felt his throat constrict, as the emotions of the day caught up with him. Ron blinked, trying to contain the floodwaters he felt rising through his ducts. The frail dams of soft skin barely held them in.

“Thanks. It means a lot.”

Josh pressed his lips together and nodded. Then he turned away to open the door, and step out. As he did, a droplet of highly concentrated emotion ran down Ron’s right cheek. It glistened in the light of the sun streaming through the window. He didn’t wipe it away.

***

After taking another quick peek out the window, Ron collected his wallet and keys from his drawer, and his jacket from the coat rack. He padded down the hallways, not wanting to attract any attention to himself, and carefully opened the large metal security door that led to the stairwell. Passing through the doorway, his eyes attempted to adjust to the mellow lighting. He could barely make out the first flight of stairs heading down to the car park. The dank humidity of the dilapidated stairwell shot to the top of his nose. He decided to breathe through his mouth. He started out down the stairs, slicing his way through the viscous dusk, determined to emerge at the bottom of the stairwell into light and fresh air. Reaching the bottom, he paused on the last landing. He could see the sun glaring through the exit door's window, casting a beam of intense white into the small chamber. Dust particles in the air diffused the light streaming in, giving Ron the feeling that he might be able to scoop up a part of the light beam in his hand and take it home. He was admiring this display of magnificence, when his eye caught a flash of light from beyond the glass. His pulse quickened. He turned his head to see what had caused the flash, but he saw nothing.

His eyes started to focus back inside the glass, and he found himself staring at the amazing solid before him. The pane of glass reflected his blank expression, as if asking him when he was going to stop staring, and go home. He grasped the door's handle and pulled. He needed to get out of there.

Making an observation that someone was having a cauldron of molten air forced down their throat was invariably easier than actually experiencing it, Ron decided. He jogged the distance from the door to his car, hearing the footsteps of heatstroke behind him all the way. Maybe heatstroke's knife had been the flash outside the window, he speculated.

Turning down the climate control in his 2011-model BMW, Ron hoped to get the car cool before he passed out from heat exhaustion. This action provoked the tendrils of a risky plan to curl around his mind. Maybe he could turn off the climate control and drive onto the highway, pass out in lane three from heat exhaustion, and veer off into oncoming traffic. At least then his shell of a consciousness would have a first-rate chance at ending quickly.

"And what, exactly, would that achieve for you?" Ron vented out loud.

Imagining the pain of death he might bring to yet another family that didn't want it, he decided against that idea. He knew the cost of a loved one's life. He could never inflict that on someone else.

Ron's house was only a fifteen minute drive from his office at Dennis & Clarke, but when electrons are firing around the brain with thousands of responses every second, a lot of thinking can get done. When Ron had sped out of the car park in the city, his body had conflicting emotions. His mind knew that leaving work would only allow him to dwell on the past instead of dismissing it, but his stomach had started to unknot itself from its web of nerves and nausea. His heart was still just confused. It had been confused for exactly 365 days. Today was the first anniversary of confusion, heartbreak, and hopelessness.

The car swerved onto the corrugated lines on the side of the road. The thunderous noise jerked Ron back into reality. The last five minutes of driving seemed to have been done by someone else. He had been probing his brain for answers instead of searching the road for hazards. The next light was red, so he applied pressure to the brake, pushing him forward in his seat and projecting some documents from the passenger seat into the footwell. As Ron's stomach was thrust against his abdominal muscles, the car lurched and the wheels stopped rolling.

He glanced around himself, taking in the details of this particular intersection in the city. After noticing a few personal landmarks, his eyes were lured to the glare of a billboard displaying the black and gold logo of a classy restaurant. Ron felt like he'd been rammed in the gut. A large volume of air rushed into his lungs involuntarily. Not today, of all days. Today had to be the worst to see that billboard. Ron had memories of that place. Memories that were once his favourites, but had now become his worst enemy. This particular restaurant was not a commonplace expensive restaurant. It was a crystal wineglass among dirty beer mugs. An exquisite piece of property suited only to the finest of custom. That's why Ron had taken her there one night.

The turning arrow flashed green. Ron planted his foot on the accelerator, trying desperately to contain the sobs that were tearing violently at his body. It felt as if strips of flesh were being torn from his core muscles. Two minutes later, he turned the wheel and coasted into his own neighbourhood.

***

The central feature of Ron's front lawn was a wooden wagon wheel, now decaying in the soil, which acted as a planter box for some very special bushes. Roses. They were by far her favourite flowers. Three years ago, she had begged Ron to buy the cuttings from the side of the road. They would give the wagon wheel a worthy occupation, she had decided. Reluctantly, he had pulled over and the bushes were purchased for a meagre twenty dollars. She had planted them that afternoon, and from then on, they thrived.

The first few weeks saw the cuttings adopting their new home with fervour. Their roots grew deep in the rich soil, and their leaves widened and multiplied. They eventually put out branches, and after the first year, they yielded their first crop of flowers. They were exquisite images of love, care, and beauty, and they only blossomed once a year. After spending a few minutes studying the first rose's beautiful fragility with her one day, Ron had decided that roses were now his favourite flower as well, and that this bush would be theirs.

But now the bush was dead. It seemed to have sensed her death, and followed suit. A few weeks after the tragedy Ron had noticed a few of the biggest leaves were curling up like a millipede under attack and falling to the ground. It was devastating. The most precious symbol of their love, aside from their rings, had failed before his eyes. He had stopped taking notice of its gradual regression after a few weeks, not wanting to unstitch the young wounds on his heart. He didn't want to even try to fathom how or why their rose bush had died.

Now, as his BMW coasted through the quiet street and spun into the driveway of his near-new house, he pried his mind away from the bush, hoping to get into the house without weeping loudly for all the neighbours to hear. So, as the click of the buckle released his seatbelt, he opened the door quickly and grabbed the papers from the footwell of the passenger seat. He stood up, pulled his coat straight, and made a bee-line for the front door. Striding across the corner of the lawn, the edge of the wagon wheel crept into his peripheral vision. That was soon fixed by studying the entirely uninteresting rendered wall of the house on his right. He made it to his front door.

Ron's jangling keys shot out of his pocket and into the keyhole. If he stayed out there too much longer, there was no guarantee that his tear ducts would behave, so he tossed the door open, hoping no picture frames would drop off the wall inside. Pacing down the hallway, he heard a clink. A miniscule frequency that rustled up the hairs on the back of his neck. There it was again. It was as if there was someone tapping the kitchen window with a rock. There it was again. But not only the clinking this time, but a creak in the floorboards. They house was warning him that someone was inside. Noise drained from the house like rats from a sinking ship. Silence.

A voice sliced through the bulky substance of nothingness that was hanging in the air.

"Is that you Ron?" a female voice called out from the kitchen.

For a split second, Ron's body refused to move, his brain processing the voice, ascertaining a friend or foe classification.

Friend.

The pent-up tension of the last few minutes forced Ron to expel a noise midway between a sigh and a moan. Almost as if he'd just been shot.

"Are you okay Ron?" she called out again.

"Yeah, Susie. You just gave me a decent scare, that's all," Ron replied, relief flowing with every word. "I didn't see your car in the driveway, so I was a bit surprised anyone was here."

Ron stepped into the kitchen and his diaphram refused to move. He was choking and crying at the same time. She had looked so much like her mother. Seeing Susie was like looking at a photograph of his wife, had she lived to be that old.

"Ron, I have no idea how we're ever going to get over this completely, and in a way, I don't really want to... but I think we need to start to move on. It's time to start healing."

Ron managed to quiet his guttural sobs and sniffles to listen. Half of him agreed, but the other half - mostly the crying half - wanted to grieve her forever.

"She was my daughter, Ron. I'm in as much pain as you today. I just think we should have dinner somewhere and celebrate the amazing life she did get to live, instead of mourning the days she never saw. What do you say?" She held Ron's eyes, communicating a common grief between the two of them.

Ron managed to form words in his throat, just as it was opening again.

"Will you help me pull out that rose bush first?" He whispered.

"Why? Have you even looked at it in the last month?"

"No, I avoid eye contact every day. I guess it reminds me of her too much."

"Maybe you should take a look out the window. Then you tell me why it needs pulling out."

"It's dead. It died months ago. After she died."

"Maybe you should double check."

Ron turned his head towards the radiant sun rays, and gazed out through yet another dirty pane of glass.

The Rose bush was covered in small green shoots.

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