On Page Ninety-Six

I sat here tonight in my chair with a biography propped on my legs, reading and talking with my wife. The recent mild days have finally surrendered to an icy rain, a penetrating chill, an intrusive January git wearing his gray slouch hat. The whisper of warmed air flowing up through the vents as the rain snicked against the panes, the cup of cooling coffee at my hand, the faint snores of Dixee the dog in her bed at my feet, the mellow glow of Mrs. Orr’s hair in the lamplight a few feet away. I sat here tonight with the life story of another person propped on my legs, open to page 96, and I noticed the movement.

Too small to be a gnat, it must have been a fruit fly, and if not that, I don’t know what it was. The little winged one was on my page, and I waved my hand at it. It flew away but returned right away and landed on the page again, near the bottom. I watched it, thinking that had I not seen it move earlier, I might not have noticed it. It was almost as small as the period at the end of the sentence where it sat. And then it moved again.

The insect skittered across the page, up at a diagonal slant, and stopped again. On another period. I kept my eyes on it, and the little thing moved again, and again it went to a period, this time at the end of the first sentence at the top of the page. I spoke in a soft voice to my wife and told her what I was seeing. Right after I finished speaking, a sneeze ambushed me, exploding out with no warning. The insect flew away and did not return, though I sat quite still with the book open on my lap for a while after the sneeze, watching the page.

I don’t believe in coincidences, and so the mystery of the little insect is flitting about inside my head even now. Why did he go only to the periods? Why not another symbol or character or letter? Why not on the white portions of the page? Why the restless, searching pattern to its movements, always ending on a period?

Could it be that the small dot of printer’s ink on the creamy page resembled one of its kind? Could it be that it was attempting to communicate with the periods? Was there a visual attraction? Did my sneeze frighten it? And are there others of its kind in the house now? What would they make of a spill of black pepper across a white saucer?

Was the little creature convinced that it had found a companion on page 96? Again, I cannot believe that its movements and the jerky termination of them every time on a period were just happenstance? I cannot believe this.

So where does this leave me? As an increasingly eccentric man, I suppose. A man with a book on his lap, staring at the page but not seeing the words. Watching for a living creature who seems to be searching for something.

~ S.K. Orr