Missing Marbles's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Missing Marbles kept his word and returned to the feast the next morning, one guest at a time, until the house emptied by dusk. Then he went home to his own room and lay on the floor with the Great Dane across his legs. He tried to picture a week of dinners like the last one, then a month, then a year. His chest went tight before he reached the year. He sat up. The dog lifted her head. He said the thing he had been afraid to say out loud. He did not fit here. He was not going to start fitting. He pulled a satchel from under the bed and began to pack. Two shirts. A comb. The ledger he used at the clerks' office. His savings, wrapped in cloth, from three years of copying deeds. He listed cities in his head the way he listed forks. He crossed off the ones his uncles praised. He stopped at the one his mother spat about at every holiday, the one where, she said, men wore what they liked and strangers shared bread with strangers and no one knew their proper place. She had meant it as a warning. He took it as a direction. He wrote his mother a short note. He did not apologize. He said he was going, that he was well, and that he would send an address once he had one He walked to the coach station before sunrise and paid for the long seat. He counted the fence posts on the way out of town until the fields swallowed them. He arrived two days later, stiff and hungry, in a street he did not know. The buildings leaned toward each other at odd angles. Painted signs hung over painted doors. At the corner stood a pub shaped like something from a child's book, its walls set with small panes of colored glass in every shade he could name. Lanterns burned on either side of the door though the sun was still up. A woman in trousers carried a crate past him without looking twice at his satchel. Two men argued in a language he did not speak, then laughed, then kissed. Missing Marbles stopped in the middle of the street. He waited for the tightness in his chest. It did not come. The noise here was loud, but it was not aimed at him. No one was waiting for him to be someone else. He walked to the pub with the colored windows, pushed the door open, and asked the keeper if there was a room to let.