The Equinox

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.  Without limiting the author’s exclusive rights, any use or reproduction of this work to “train” generative AI technologies is strictly prohibited.  The author reserves all rights to license this work for AI training and development.
“They don’t see themselves as they are,” Jhzarie said.  “They think they are smarter than we are.  They think they can walk around and say how Trump is a wannabe dictator, and that we’ll be distracted, and we won’t see how they feather their own nests.  What good is their democracy if it lets some people sit at home on zoom, while the rest of us is hustling two and three jobs to keep body and soul together?  What good is their democracy if they use it to stack the deck against us?  Five dollars for a dozen eggs!  Six bucks for an ice cream cone! Ten bucks every time you walk into McDonald’s!  Or twenty!  All them loans they try to get us to take out.  For college  and whatnot.  You can’t even buy a house -- and rent is triple what it used to be. They give you credit cards so you is always in debt.  Then there is the  health insurance copays and deductibles.  They think we will vote for them, just ‘cause they got a Black woman on the ticket? Who is the real dictator?  How dumb do I look?”
“Pretty dumb,” Ethan said, as he shook his head and winked .  “Pretty damned smart, to tell the truth.”
“The fix is in,” Jhzarie said.  “You ain’t gonna get me to do what you say just because you is sayin it.  Not no more.  Enough is enough.”
“So are you actually going to vote for that man?” Ethan said.
“I don’t know what I am going to do,” Jhzarie said. “I’ll do what I want. When I want to do it.  And with who.  I won’t decide until the day of.  If then.  If I go to vote.  But all you people ain’t going to change my mind just by coming here and knocking on my door, over and over again.
“Are you registered to vote?”  Ethan said.
“What business is that of yours?” Jhzarie said.
“Just trying to help,” Ethan said.
“Help who?’ Jhzarie said.  “Help yourself?  Again?  How many helpings do you need?
Seems like it is long past time to share them helpings around.”
“I’m a volunteer,” Ethan said.
“A volunteer for who?  For what?  A volunteer to keep things the way they is?  Who wins that way?  I don’t, that’s for sure.  My community don’t.  We never have and never will.  Where are you from, boy?”
Ethan looked at his watch.
“I’m only supposed to spend ninety seconds on each door.  But I’m from Providence, Rhode Island.  Know where that is?”
“Of course I know where that is.  What do you take me for?  Rhode Island, that tiny little state?  Up there above New York someplace.  Between New York and Boston, ain’t it? It ain’t even a real city, let alone any state.  What do you got, twelve people there? Everything about you is tiny.”
The summer had almost stumbled into fall.  The days were short and the air was cool. There were brilliant sunsets with the sky enflamed in red and purple.  The first leaves were turning yellow and starting to fall, drifting slowly to the ground.  The light was slanted now, and the shadows were longer than in summer.  You could taste the cold that was coming, and the short dark days that came with the cold.  The message was clear – life doesn’t go on forever.  The race had been run.  It was time to take stock and to think about what mattered.
“Give me a break, will you?” Ethan said.  “I’m just a dumb white guy, trying to help.”
“Trying my patience is what you are doing,” Jhzarie said.
“Sorry.  Sorry,” Ethan said, and he backed away from the screen door which Jhzarie stood behind but hadn’t opened yet. “They had you down as a likely, and I was only
supposed to remind you to vote and offer you a ride to the…”
Ethan backed away further.
 Then there was a shout, more like a cry than a scream.
 “Ahhhgh” he cried. He disappeared as he fell down the seven broken-up brick steps that led to the street.
 There was a crash.  Ethan tumbled into a child’s bicycle with training wheels that was on the sidewalk and into a Big Wheeler that was next to it.  Then he landed in the overgrown, scraggly shrubbery that lined the few inches of front yard that lay between the rowhouse and the street.  He hit his head when he hit the ground.  And went out for a few seconds.
“Whatch you doin?” Jhzarie said. She burst out from behind the screen door and rushed down the stairs.  “Don’t you have one ounce of sense in that head?”
“The equinox is when there is as much daylight as there is darkness,” Ethan said about half-hour later.  He lay on a lime green recliner in Jhzarie’s tiny living room, with his feet up and a blue icebag inside a pink towel on the side of his head, the side that was red and oozing blood.  There was a seven-foot-wide TV on with the sound turned down in front of him next to the picture window which had tan curtains closed in front of it. The brilliant greens, blues, and reds of a football game on TV danced across the room, making everything else seem pale by comparison.
“So that?” Jhzarie said.  She was working on a computer at the kitchen table and talked to Ethan as she worked.
“So it’s a really cool moment,” Ethan said.  “It happens once in the spring and once in the fall.  It’s the only time when everyone on earth experiences the same thing at the same time, when we are really all the same, even just for an instant.”
“Not,” Jhzarie said. “We were never all the same.  Never were and never will be.”
“All I mean is, everyone around the world, every human being, shares this one thing, this one moment, even if it only happens twice a year and for just one day. Everyone has a day and a night of the same length. We’re connected.  Even if we don’t see ourselves that way, even if we don’t want to be.”
“Not even a little,” Jhzarie said.  “What you’re saying ain’t even a little true. We don’t share nothin.  There’s time zones, ain’t there?  The earth spins and whatnot.  So it’s light here when it is dark in Cleveland.  And so forth. Everybody’s different.  Which is a good thing, if you ast me, looking at you laying there like that. Not one ounce of brains in your head.”
Ethan fell silent for a moment. He pushed the recliner to its sitting position and took the icebag off his forehead. Then he stood up, but he wavered on his feet and reached out to one wall for support, and then stumbled, falling toward the TV.
“Whoa! “ Jhzarie said, seeing the movement out of the corner of her eye.  She was a big woman, broad and tall with beaded braids wrapped and bundled behind her head.  But she was also quick and sure, and she dove into the living room as she saw Ethan list and begin to fall.
“Do not….” she said as she scooped Ethan out of his fall path by wrapping his chest with one hand and arm, and pulled him backward, seconds before he tumbled into the TV set and smashed it to bits as he stumbled forward.
Jhzarie tossed Ethan into the recliner with the same precision that a great basketball player uses to make a perfect jump shot, so perfectly timed and executed that there was almost a whoosh as Ethan fell into the chair.
“Whatch you doin?” Jhzarie said. “Did I tell you to get up?”
“I thought…” Ethan said.
“Did anyone ask you to think?” Jhzarie said. “You just lay there and recover.  When it’s time to get up, I’ll tell you to get up.  And that’s all there is to it.”
Ethan closed his eyes.  He drifted in and out of sleep.  The warm house smelled of toast and Lysol, as Jhzarie went about her life, cleaning. cooking, talking on her phone, and then rushing off, while a number of people, many of them children and teenagers, came in and out and stopped to watch the Eagles and the Dolphins play.
Six weeks later, Ethan headed home.  He got an Uber to the Thirtieth Street Station, and then he took a night train home to Rhode Island, using a ticket that cost only fifteen dollars.
The election had come and gone.  The world had not ended.  Yet.  But Ethan was still pretty sure it might.
His head had healed.
And maybe he was just a little smarter than he had been, and certainly no worse for wear.

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