Third Is The One In The Polka Dotted Dress

Things are looking up already, folks. I got third place in the firstlinefiction short story contest.
I won't lie; I was hoping for first. But you know what? The first place story is excellent. Really, really excellent. The second place story is very good as well. Both are better than mine, and both deserved first and second place.
You know what else? The August contest starts today. I'm shooting for first place again.

Here's the bronze story in case you want to read through it:

The Waiters

He brought in his shirt pocket the last photograph he’d taken of his son.

Poor guy. You should have seen the way he walked into the office that afternoon. He wore a yellow jacket that seemed inappropriate. Its brightness contrasted with the hollow expression on his face so drastically that it was almost shocking. I was relieved when he took the jacket off, carefully hanging it up on the rack in the corner of the waiting room.

And then the man began to slowly cross, crumpling a little with each step. I imagined that he’d be on his knees before he even reached the chair. I imagined myself putting my hand on the shrugged shoulder, shouting into a wrinkled ear. He made it though, sitting next to me as I knew he would. There was no other place, after all. The waiting room was full of people waiting, most of whom were buried in magazines or clicking on small phones.

He began talking as soon as he sat down. Talking to me, or so I figured after a few seconds.

I had a son once, he said.

A son? This was before I decided he was speaking to me and not to someone else.

Yes. He died, though. Car accident.

I’m sorry. Because that’s what you say, isn’t it? I’m sorry? I’m sorry I can’t know what you’re going through, and I’m sorry that I’m going to try my hardest to comfort you anyway. I’m sorry I don’t understand.

Thank you, he said simply. I thought that would be it, and I could go back to staring at the wall.

He continued, though. So many people die that way; it isn’t terribly original. But my son doesn’t die that way. My son doesn’t die.

He did, though. I spoke softly, hoping he would know that I wasn’t trying to hurt him with my bluntness. I wanted him to keep talking all of the sudden. I wanted to know how this man had come to be folded into himself. How his eyes got to be the way they were now. Drowning. He could see, but he wasn’t really looking out of them. I saw all of these things in that waiting room, and I wanted him to keep talking.

The man paused for a moment, fiddling with the pocket at the front of his shirt. Out of the pocket he plucked a folded bit of paper. A photograph; it said Kodak across the back. He unfolded the photograph and stared at it for a few seconds before folding it once more.

He took a deep breath before he spoke again. Afterwards, we all mourned. No one talked during meals anymore. My wife and I cried ourselves to sleep every night. We tried to comfort one another. I tried so hard. But it is so very difficult to dig yourself out of the well of your own grief and reach for someone else.

Suddenly the man looked up at me, as if just realizing that he was talking to an actual person who was listening.

He looked down again at the photo in his hands and continued. My wife stopped grieving after awhile. She got on with her life. She went back to work. She started running with the dog in the morning. She drove our daughters to lacrosse and modern jazz. She didn’t understand why I couldn’t get up too. She used to become angry with me. Why can’t you get over him? She would yell. Why can’t you see that he’s gone and that we’re left? You have two other children. You have a job. This needs to stop. The man looked at me again, warily this time. Do you have a job?

I nodded. I deliver packages. I drive a truck and I stop and I make people sign for brown boxes or tan envelopes.

The man took this in. Do you enjoy your work? He asked me.

I thought for a moment. Then I answered. I enjoy the people. I watch them. I guess what they’re like, what their names are.

Do you ever get them right?

I don’t know if I do or not.

The man frowned. I would like to know. He unfolded the photograph again and stared at it again. I would like to know.
I saw that he was on the verge of crying. His eyes squinted up and his knees shook a bit. People across the room were beginning to look at us. Not obviously looking, but peering at us every so often over their Newsweeks, as if to warn us that they didn’t want to overhear, but that they would if we spoke any louder. They didn’t want to overhear. They didn’t want a share in the anguish on the man’s face, the bewilderment on mine. They read their magazines.

The man shuddered three more times and was still.

He began to speak again after a few minutes. I realized soon that I could lose my wife as well. That she wouldn’t die, but that she would be just as permanently and irrevocably gone if I didn’t stop missing my son. So I stopped. I had to, you see. I knew if I lost anything else I would disappear completely myself. Everything tying me down would be gone. I would be gone too.

I stretched my legs out across the carpet and arched my back a little bit. I wasn’t bored; I was only sore from sitting so long. He knew I wasn’t bored. Even if I had been, I don’t think he would have stopped. We both knew now that he needed to say these things. We both knew I needed to hear.

He kept talking through my stretch; his gaze wandered down to my brown boots and anchored on to them.

I donated all of my son’s clothes, and cleaned his room. I even took down his posters and painted over his walls with the spring green color my wife picked. The paint erased my son’s smell until I couldn’t breathe in that room anymore. I was about to shut his door behind me for the last time when I spotted the edge of something white sticking out from under the bed.

It was the photograph, wasn’t it?

The man nodded gravely. I had taken it a few weeks before he died. We were driving in my old convertible going west. West like the pioneers, my son had shouted joyfully. While we were stopped at a red light, my son dug the camera out of his backpack and thrust it at me. We were laughing hard, like two teenagers instead of one. My son rested one arm on top of the rolled-down window and leaned back away from me. He grinned the same smile I had seen all his life. My son leaned back into the wind against the highway and grinned while I took the picture.

It was all too much for the man then. He dropped his head into the picture in his hands and sobbed soundlessly. His back rose and fell with each rolling breath, and as I deliberated patting him gingerly on the shoulderblade, I intercepted a few raised eyebrows from across the room. I shot those eyebrows straight back, sending most of the waiters diving back into their Popular Sciences. I wasn’t a big man. I wasn’t even a brave man. Not then. But I knew when things were private. This was between the man, the photograph of his son, and me.

When the man finally calmed down he looked relieved. Now he could finish.

Very slowly he opened the photograph in his hands. I couldn’t quite see it, but I didn’t fail to be amazed at its proximity. I only had to raise my eyes. I didn’t, though. I waited.

He spoke. The last photograph of my son, the one I clung to when my wife wasn’t around, the one that allowed me to keep him and to keep myself together…He trailed off. He wasn’t sure how to end, now that he had begun to end.

He tried again. The last photograph of my son is something I both love and hate. I can’t make myself throw it away, and yet it feels heavy in my pocket. He stopped.

A woman had walked into the waiting room, and was now looking around with a definite air of impatient authority. She called out a name. I didn’t hear, but I guess the man did because he slowly stood and walked towards her with that same worn down gait he had entered on.

I sat back in my chair and looked around the room. The other waiters stared boldly at me now. I dropped my head, all defiance gone. I sat and I thought. I knew this was a story I would remember, not just another observation to drop in my brain like a marble. I wondered if I would ever retell it. I wondered how I would do it. But mostly I wondered how it ended.


How did I know about the photograph in the man’s pocket? Because he told me about it while we waited.

On his way out, the he passed me with only a nod. Thank you, he said quietly, slipping either arm into that inappropriate yellow jacket. I stared, decided.

Yes I must. Sir! I bounded after him past the alarmed waiters. Sir can I please see the photograph of your son?

He looked at me in his watery way, and then seemed to surface. I imagined the last waves breaking around his eyes before receding like the tide. Yes, he replied. Yes of course you can see my son.

Slowly he reached towards his pocket and drew out the creased picture. He handed it to me without unfolding it. Perhaps he thought that by unfolding it himself it would only make it harder. Perhaps he needed me to take it from him, to hold his regret and his pain for a little while.

I unfolded the picture and stared at it for what felt like a long time. I wanted him to feel me take it in. But really it only took me a moment to understand.

As I handed the picture back to him and watched him refold it and set it gently into the same pocket, I listened to him speak the last words he ever said to me. I had a son once, he explained patiently, as if we were starting over, as if we were just meeting each other. I had a son once and he died. I had a son once, and the last photograph I ever took of him captured only his elbow.


I stood and saw the glass door swing shut behind him, watched it forget instantly that such a man had ever passed through.

You know, with people you meet when you’re delivering packages, you can guess. You can assume that a woman is snobbish, or that a man is out of sorts and late for work. You can guess about them, and it never has to bother you if you’re right or if you’re wrong. You can just let your imaginings hang in the air above your head.

Sons and photographs, I have come to realize, are a different matter altogether. With them, you have to wonder your whole life why you didn’t look through the lens before snapping the shutter. You have to wish that you had taken the time to aim, wish that you hadn’t been too captivated by the living, breathing boy to focus on capturing all of him forever.

Eventually, though, you have to know that when you tell the story of your son in a waiting room, when people listen, and when people look at the photograph of your son afterwards, that those waiters see all of him. You have to know that those waiters see all of you too.