New content every morning!

Lost Watch
By Eric Kong Angal

‘Help me find it,’ Graham says. ‘I think it’s back here.’ He’s crying but he won’t admit it or acknowledge it even though he’s not particularly trying to hide it.

We’re looking for a cheap digital watch his wife got him, an off-brand Casio. He’d thrown it somewhere into the freshwater piping’s tangled skein of crisscrossed brass, a million verdigris’d gaugelines obscuring a dark and oil-slick recess between the floorgrates and the drain sumps. When something gets lost down there it’s generally gone for good. But then there we are, cutting holes through the darkness with dying flashlights, half-assed cones of luminescence darting in circles to catch a glint of this dumbass fucking watch he’d thrown in anger, our foreheads pressed up against the wall to peer down into the dim, all of us silent save for the occasional grunt of exertion as we rearrange our unprotected knees against the grating. We’d been hydrolancing a shell-and-tube heat exchanger and the punch tube got stuck somewhere in the heat exchanger’s opposite endbell and no amount of pulling was getting it out, and Graham had gotten pissed and had taken his watch off and thrown it and said he didn’t need that shit anyway. He’d been bitching on and off about his soon-to-be ex-wife and he kept telling us he knew this was gonna happen, that he’d known it from the moment he’d laid eyes on that whore. And we told him it’s okay, it’ll be fine, and we kept working for fifteen or so minutes and eventually freed the nozzle from the tubes with some molylube and were readying up to start hydrolancing again until we heard (and tentatively ignored) the slight sobs coming from beneath us as Graham managed the jet pump on the processing floor. And eventually we heard him undoing the deckplates with a screwdriver, and he called for us to help, and so we got down from the heat exchanger mezzanine and accompanied him in his search.

And now look at him. A grown man with Grizzly-flecked lips (no spitter in sight—he prides himself on being able to gut it), tears running down his face, his wracked breathing occasionally punctuated by a quiet sob or sniffle as he jerks his head back and forth in desperate search of this stupid watch. This stupid plastic watch that couldn’t have been worth more than twenty bucks. The same man that taught me my trade. The same guy who one time bored a straight hole through his thumbnail with a step bit and got oil in the wound and kept working through it like he hadn’t even noticed. A tough guy, a man’s man. A guy who could weld stick, mig, and tig. The big, lumbering guy who could unseat two-hundred-fifty foot-pounds of torque with his bare hands on a twelve-inch hammer-handwheel gate valve like it was nothing. The wise old guy that all of us looked up to. The guy who was always good to be around, made you feel like you knew what you were doing. Now reduced to this. This ugly weakness made known before his peers, a face that shouldn’t be shown. You can never really know someone, he says.

‘What?’

‘You can never really know someone.’

‘Hey, man, you’re alright. It’s okay.’

‘I can’t—’

He doesn’t speak anymore. He sits there on his knees on the upturned deckplate sobbing into his own chin. The chaw bulges from his distended mouth and is visible against his yellowed teeth and his oblong frown drips brown mucilage onto his undershirt and he cries openly now, wails. We stop looking for the watch and go over to him but all of us are too afraid to touch him and so we just encircle him like this and speak empty reassurances down at him. We tell him it’ll be just fine, that there’s plenty more fish in the sea, that he’s still pretty young, that he’s a good guy, that he’s tall, women love that, and that he doesn’t need her anyway, and that he’s better off now that he’s free, and that we’re here for him, that we’ll go and buy him some drinks after this. Fernandez offers him his own watch as if that might soothe what ails him. He ignores us. What he sees now is his own thing to confront. We’ve all been there, I mean, this isn’t exactly an uncommon thing. He’s thinking about the rest of his life and of how her absence will shape it. The house emptied of her belongings and shorn of any trace of her. The avoidance of certain places due to her association. The time they shared together now irrevocably scarred and unable to be recalled without experiencing pain as a sort of tithe. Mostly, though, the feeling of her simply no longer being physically near him anymore. All sorts of possibilities reeling through his enfeebled mind’s eye as he strains to imagine a world where he hadn’t fucked up whatever it was he’d fucked up. Victim to the fickle vagaries of blame and blame-assignment and probably bouncing back and forth between thinking it was actually her fault and not his and vice versa. I put my hand on his shoulder. The other guys put their hands on his shoulders too. We all just stand there like this and no one says shit. After a minute or two he stands up and shrugs us off and walks back over to the jet pump and ratchets up the pressure with a footpedal and he turns to us.

‘What are you guys doing,’ he says.

That night when I come home you’re already asleep. You’d fallen asleep on the couch and the TV is asking if you’re still there. You’re on your side with the remote in your hand and you snore softly and you don’t even stir when I shut the door, and I don’t want to wake you so I’m as quiet as I can be. I microwave my dinner and open the microwave’s door before the alarm can sound. I perforate and vent the can of Diet Coke with the pull-tab before I truly crack it open. I stand at the counter and eat Philly Cheesesteak Hot Pockets and drink my Coke in as close to silence as I can muster. When I burp I do so into the back of my hand and when I set down my plate on the counter my movements are slow and controlled.

I watch you as I eat. I watch the rim of your seraphic face aglow in the blue light of the television’s screensaver. The blanket askew across your splayed figure. A scrunchie on your lilied wrist and your one palm fettered to your cheek’s underside. The other hand bearing the outstretched remote, made wandlike, pointing nowhere. When I’m finished eating I come over to the couch and stand over you and I think about that old flick Paranormal Activity, where the nighttime footage is timelapsed to reveal that Katie had been standing over Micah in the dead of night, possessed by some demonic influence, and had remained motionless over him for hours. I get it. I don’t want to change you. You’re perfect just like this.

You open your eyes.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Sorry.’

‘When did you get home?’

‘Maybe thirty minutes ago.’

‘Did you eat? I can make you something.’

‘I ate. Come on. Get up. Let’s get you to bed.’

You obey silently, wordlessly. I watch you walk away from me. I turn off the TV. I listen to the muffled report of the running faucet as you brush your teeth and I stare at my reflection in the dull slate of the television’s glossed black. He had opted to stay behind and clean up after we’d all signed out the equipment to the next shift. He’d clipped a taclight to his ballcap and was working studiously on screwing the removed deckplates back into the floorgrid when I’d last seen him. But he had been looking past the grating and down under it for the watch. I wonder if he’d found it. I wonder if he’s still there.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Eric Angal was born and raised in Seattle, and he still lives there and works there. His work is published or forthcoming by Nut Hole Publishing, Don’t Submit!, and The Argyle Literary Magazine. His short story collection Defiler is available for purchase through Nut Hole Publishing. He can be found on Twitter: @MrZoris, and on Substack: @erickangal