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As he walked, he passed a newspaper stand. He paused to read some of the headlines. �Recent string of stabbings could be gang-related�, �Escaped mental patient still at large�, and �Man dies in jackhammer accident� were just some of the ones Francis noted. �Another great day,� he mumbled with a sigh.
He was tired of walking around. He dropped his indigestible $4.00 coffee into a nearby trashcan (�What a waste of money,� he said) and flagged over a cab.
Chapter 4
Traffic had been worse than usual, so Francis arrived home a little later than he normally did. He didn�t mind; if nothing else, it just reaffirmed his reasons for not driving to work himself. He simply did not have the patience or, as of late, the mental clarity to do so. In the cab, Francis had drifted off, trying to figure out the significance of his hallucinations.
The only way to stop it, he thought, was to get to the root of it. When in my childhood did I encounter a lost, crying woman? She needed help, and I didn�t help her, and now it�s come back to haunt me. Brought about by stress, no doubt. I must get to the root of this! He felt like a psychiatrist- a very bad psychiatrist.
The cab driver had had to shout at Francis a few times upon his arrival home in order to bring him back to the present. Upon his return, Francis quickly paid the driver, apologized for his lapse in consciousness, and got into his house as fast as humanly possible.
Francis had forgotten how it felt to come home to a clean house. It actually helped to steady his nerves. He set his keys down on the counter and then moved over to the paper with his misspelled, sloppy Spanish on it. Beneath his other writing, he wrote the word �lost� in all caps and underlined it four or five times. It made the word look significant, though Francis still had no idea what to make of it.
�At least I�m closer than I was before.� Closer to what? He didn�t know.
He walked over to the kitchen sink to scour the day off of his hands. He made the water as hot as possible and used much more soap than was necessary. It didn�t help. It just made a big, frothy mess.
�So, she�s lost,� Francis said, looking out the window over the sink. There was a tree right outside. It was a nice tree. There was a bird�s nest in one of the branches near the window. The mother bird was bringing food to her hatchlings. �I don�t even know who she is,� Francis continued, watching the bird. �How can I help her? But wait a minute. Nothing�s happened since Saturday. Maybe it was just a fluke. I was tired, I heard things, it�s over. No m�s hallucinating. Forget it.� Francis was aware that he was ranting, but it made sense. It had been two days. It�s stress, he thought again, it happens to people all the time. So then why can�t I forget about it?
Once again, he retrieved the pad of paper and pen from by the telephone and sat down on the sofa. He tore off the top paper, and then he began to write.
�Monday, August 21, 2003, 6:54 pm,� he wrote. �I, Francis S. Parker, am going insane. I am also quite hungry, but I do not want to make anything. I am too tired right now. I wish I could order a pizza with extra cheese and onion, but I do not feel like waiting for it to arrive delivery-style, nor do I feel like leaving the house to pick it up. As a matter of fact, I do not even feel like calling in the order. What shall I do?� Francis sighed. What a way with words I have, he thought. He went on to write, �My life is a joke. Nothing good ever happens. I have nothing to look forward to. And now, to top it all off, I�m hallucinating, and I can�t stop thinking about it!� Now he was just annoyed. He ripped the paper off of the pad, crumpled it up, threw it away, and put the paper and pen back in their place.
Francis took a deep breath. �This ends now,� he said. He was seriously angry with himself. He returned to the couch with a bag of cheddar-flavored potato chips and put the TV on. There was another baseball game on, and this time his favorite team was playing. He didn�t even care, though. He just stared blankly at the screen, his eyes out of focus. Without even realizing, he ate almost the entire bag of chips. There were just crumbs left. It�s like my brain, Francis thought. It feels like there�s just crumbs left. And they�re rotten crumbs, too.
Francis threw the bag away and sat back down. He looked at the score on the game. It was 2-0, in the top of the third inning. His team was losing. He began to drift in and out of sleep. The next time he looked at the scoreboard, it was 7-0 in the bottom of the third.
�This is not my day,� Francis said. He was bored and tired, but he refused to go to bed at 7:48. Somehow he managed to stay awake through the whole baseball game, which ended at about 11:00 (the final score was 12-1).
Francis turned off the TV and stood up, yawning. The house became quiet and dark instantly. Francis felt uncomfortable. Something was off, it seemed. He felt strangely, like he wasn�t alone.
Francis yawned again, trying to ignore the thoughts he was having. �I�m going to sleep,� he muttered, and walked to his bedroom.
It had been an unseasonably cool day, so, to save electricity, Francis hadn�t put on the air conditioner. That had been a mistake, as his room was now sweltering. He looked out the window. The trees were swaying.
�There�s a nice breeze,� he said. �I�ll just open the windows.�
Francis opened the window nearest his bed, and then the window to the left of his dresser. As he opened that window, a huge burst of cool air rushed in.
�Hey,� Francis said, confused, �This window�s got no screen.� The frame of the window was rotting on the outside (well, this house is 200 years old, he thought), and the screen had fallen off months ago. It made him somewhat happy, actually. He could replace the screen- it would (at least temporarily) give him a purpose in life.
�Replace screen,� he muttered as he walked out of his room, toward the kitchen. �Measure window, get new screen, put it in window-�
