Moving Day, Moving Night

by Evan Fleischer

The non-fiction anecdote I’m set to turn into a brief fiction anecdote hinges on the time my friend Dan and I decided to move Dan’s mattress across Boston at nearly two in the morning on a warm Friday night. He was moving from one apartment to another — from somewhere just on the cusp of Chinatown to a place just on the cusp of the South End called Cortes Street — and he didn’t have the time, inclination, or situational wherewithal to find someone with a car to help assist him in the move, so, one night — almost as an afterthought, my angel wings flexing and stretching at their lack of use — he said to me as he was pinky-hooking up beer bottles from tiny coffee tables from a night or two before, “Oh, hey — want to help me move my mattress?” “Sure,” I said. “When?” “Now,” he said, and, after a quick check of the watch, I agreed, hoisting the square marshmallow of a thing up into each of our cupped hands and hanging arms, moving from one hand supporting the base to one hand propping up the mattresses’s breadth, and we made our way out of the building and into the street.

The street was filled with summer: the clothes, the chatter, the skipping, sliding, dancing and jumping feet that were all attendant upon that. Our four feet joined it in the middle of a conversation that had begun in the stairwell on the way down. “And the previous priest was an exorcist who had tried to practice his craft on deviled eggs and only succeeded in making spiritually confused eggs.” “I — I mean — what is it about your parish?” “I don’t kn — mind the curb,” and the bed jiggled as my feet stumbled off the sidewalk for a moment and one of my wings accidentally clotheslined a passing pedestrian.

“Sorry!” I said to the woman. “Sorry, sorry!” but the woman had moved on and Dan, the bed, and I were walking by a club with a line of people waiting to get in. Every city deserves a buried metronome built upon a perpetual sort of monkey wrenching — think of how a terrible metal band blocked traffic on the 405 in Los Angeles, for instance — and, that night, by the club, we were that monkey wrench. We were it. A man turned and observed the bed. “Aw, yeah,” he said. “Nice.” “Why go through all the effort of bringing them home?” Dan said. “Nice,” the man in line said again.

I dropped the mattress and rose into the air, spreading my wings wide and dropping my voice low. “Man was not built on this alone. Corinthians. Deuteronomy. Isaiah. These are names.”

“Nice,” the man in line said, looking up.