Arlene TRIBBIA
Arlene Tribbia grew up in Chicago and has written for The Chicago Tribune for a number of years. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in literary journals in the United States and Canada. Two of her stories have been nominated for this year’s Pushcart Prize. She’s currently writing a novel, Silent Light.
HOUSE OF LIARS
Who is that old blind man, playing a game of nights with himself, knowing he has lost before the ghosts shuffle the cards one last time? He perches on the concrete bench endlessly playing, shuffling his hands through the air as if jacks, kings and queens were skimming an imaginary tabletop. There are no cards, no players. Only emptiness.
Mornings, we peer down at him from our office window.
When we leave for lunch, he’s still there. He’s carefully laid a New York Yankees baseball cap, a plaid shirt and a pair of frayed khaki pants on the sidewalk. He points at the empty clothes, yells, “You stop cheating. I won’t put up with it. I won’t. Cheating ruins men, countries, nations. Do you not understand the gravity? Cheating begins small and leads to ruination.”
Evenings, after work, we wonder: Is it an old friend, a card player he’s talking to? A long ago colleague? Did he once lose in a game of cards or was there some kind of accusation from his past that haunts him to this day and now he recreates his winning hand over and over again all day long? And yet, the ghost of voices never let him win. Joseph, my boss, says the man is a casualty of the city. “A damn shame. I heard he went to Princeton.”
David, a programmer who works along side me, says, “He’s the blind prophet of burning cities. A human omen. Watch.”
Who was that boy once playing in a schoolyard, not seeing that years later he will be old, blind, shuffling around inside his memories and living in a house of liars with kings, queens and cheaters who leave him alone to wrestle with the dark?