The Patch by JD Guse

A man receives a package with no return address.  It contains a pirate-style eye patch and a note.  There was no postage on the box, but the package clearly had his apartment number on it.  It must have been brought by someone he knew.  The note, on the other hand, was gibberish.  After looking a little longer, he knew he had seen this pattern before.  It was a series of pictures of objects that could only be deciphered using The Pat Metheny Group’s “Imaginary Day” compact disk.

There were over 40 symbols on the note.  Eleven lines of symbols.  The first line read:

Railroad Crossing Sign, Bee, Earth, Fish, Sun, Record

While he was digging through the 4 drawer file cabinet searching for the CD, he thought about the eye patch.  A costume party perhaps?  Pirate dress-up day at work maybe?  It was much too difficult to comprehend by just looking at the symbols.  The Railroad Crossing Sign picture appeared seven times on the note.  That meant it must be a common letter like S or T or N maybe.  He didn’t see another Sun glyph anywhere else in the note, so he figured it was an odd letter like Q or X possibly.  He was out of a lot of things in his apartment, but time was not one of them.  And with time comes thoughts.  With thoughts come ideas.  With ideas comes trouble.  It just followed him around like the blind dog he had as a kid.

He thought about all the homeless people who now partnered with dogs to get handouts from animal lovers.  The sign might read, “The dog hasn’t eaten in 3 days.”  Money just poured in to those people.  Was there a course in the community college you could take called Creative Panhandling?  Is that a Business course he wondered?  Maybe the eye patch was to cover the dog’s eye while panhandling to solicit more money.  Nothing more pathetic on a street corner than a hungry dog with only one good eye and a guy with a sign made from a paper bag telling you when the dog ate last.  Maybe the dog was doing just fine on his own.  Maybe the guy showed up to take advantage of the dog’s situation.  Maybe the guy worked at the local dog pound and was required to walk the dogs on a daily basis.  The sign was his idea.  Yes, there was a lot of time to think.

“Gotcha!” he said as he pulled out the CD.

He quickened his step to the kitchen table, grabbed the box with the patch and the note, held the CD in his right hand, and made his way to the New Jersey room in his apartment.  The apartment manager referred to it as a Florida Room because it faced due east and caught the morning sun streaming through the windows.  He had turned the room into an enormous closet of all the crap he still had after the divorce.  It was hard to explain kid’s toys and no kids to the infrequent visitors.  He had no pictures on the walls that declared his fatherhood.  He had named the room the New Jersey Room because he imagined New Jersey was filled with a lot of useless things that served no purpose anymore.  Years later he would visit the state and learn the truth.

“Thanks?” he said as he wrote each letter down on the paper.  Well the good news was that he now knew that the Railroad Crossing Sign represented the letter “T.”  The bad news was that someone was thanking him for something – with an eye patch?

The second line read Flower, Pyramid, Snake.  He probably could have guessed it was the word “for,” but going through the long process of decoding was apparently one of the reasons he was divorced now.  “Obsessive my ass,” he said out loud.

Egg, Earth, Record, and Railroad Crossing spelled out the word “last.”

“Thanks for last …Oh boy,” he said.

He realized the box and patch and note were not for him as he simultaneously counted the five pictures in the next word and heard the knock on the door.  The next word had a Fish in the first spot and the Railroad Crossing sign in the last spot.  “Night,” he said under his breath.

Opening the door with the note in his hand, he saw the stripper who lived upstairs in his doorway.

“Did you get my outfit by mistake?”