The Suit

the suit was seated in his office, looking directly out the window at the vast barren wasteland of snow. not long ago, his wife had given him a pair of binoculars. they were in his bottom right hand drawer with the whiskey and the vodka.

no, these weren't expensive snooty bottles of libation. they were cheap booze to be drunk out of those cone-shaped water cooler cups. these weren't the affectations of a robot posing as bogart. this was working booze, for a working drunk. they called his name.

but as he opened the drawer, he saw the binoculars. there was a snowy owl on a distant fencepost a few days ago. he wondered if it would be back.

the snowy owl, silent witness to so many events in this frozen land, stared back at the man with the binoculars.

as the suit stood there before the window, peering through his binoculars, a strange sensation overcame him. he could almost feel the cold, and the frigid wind blowing down across the flat expanse of land.

he thought he heard a car engine. loud and strong and confident, a very big V8 with the pedal down.

he imagined himself that owl. standing in the middle of the windswept field, he watched a small red dot on the horizon growing as the growl of the engine increased.

the dot grew and grew until it became a red muscle car, roaring across the frozen plain. behind it, he began to see, were all manner of vehicles in hot pursuit.

a cold wind swept through his feathers, jerking him back to the warm office.

he lowered the binoculars. "what the hell was that?"

in the bottom left hand drawer of the suit's desk was a pile of papers. each one had been torn from a yellow legal pad. at the top of each page, written in black felt pen, was a date. the rest of each page comprised of a list.

sometimes there were two dozen things on the list. sometimes there was only one. next to some of the items was a checkmark.

on top of the desk lay a legal pad. at the top of the first page was the date. only one other thing was written on the pad:

"floater in tank 12"