The Arrow

The arrow struck Arlin in the chest somewhere between Tobermory Rd. and Fleetwood Cr. He staggered a bit at first but eventually caught his breath and his bearings. Surprisingly, it didn't hurt, and the bleeding stopped after a couple blocks. Since he was already on his way home, he decided to hit the sack and worry about it in the morning.

When he woke up at first he couldn't even remember anything happening the night before. He'd gone out to the bar with some friends, and afterwords had wandered home by himself, as he usually did. Then his hand found the wooden shaft sticking out of his chest, and the hard, smooth fletching at the end. He toyed with the idea of pulling the arrow out, but he didn't have the strength to.

Putting on a dress shirt, so the end could stick through the buttons, he went off to his job at the chocolate packing plant. Normally lifting boxes was no problem, but with the arrow in his chest he found the work quite difficult. The boxes kept bumping up against the wood, and he couldn't get a good hold of them.

“You should get that checked out, man,” said his manager, who usually didn't give a shit.

Arlin shrugged. “I think I'm ok, really. It doesn't hurt.”

“Yeah, but how can you ever expect to impregnate a woman with that sticking out of your chest? I mean, look at the angle on that thing. Looks like it was shot from below you! Perfectly positioned to make intimate congress just impossible.” His manager was also the kind of person who enjoyed using expressions like “intimate congress” and “woebegone affiliations”. “All your affiliations will be woebegone, I'm sure of it,” he added.

With some reluctance, Arlin went to the doctor later that day. The doctor checked his pupils, his ears, and the reflexes in his knees. “You seem to be healthy,” he said.

“But what about the arrow?” Arlin asked.

The doctor turned back around from where he had been carving a totem of the Greek ithyphallic god Priapus, and scratched his chin. “Oh,” he said, putting on his glasses.

“Is it serious?”

“No, I don't think so. There is only mild gangrene. It looks quite old, infact, and was probably there long before the arrow struck you.”

Arlin nodded, “I got it from my childhood, from the tiny ocular rivers that signified my place of yearning for the inexpressible, and the subterranean channels of my early pubescence, which languished a bit too long in the secret interim before my emotional chrysalis could properly unfold.”

The doctor wasn't listening. “Here, take a few of these, all at once, or many of them spread out over some indeterminate period of time, depending on the intensity of your placebo. I've also given you a referral to a good psychotherapist I know. And don't scratch at it.”

The psychotherapist was busy riding a wooden horse, wearing a Pippi Longstocking wig, when Arlin peered in for his appointment. “Come in, come in!” said the therapist, who did not dismount. Arlin sat on the only seat in the room: a child's potty. “It's to expose you to acute feelings of infantilization, thereby causing your id to enter into a state of directionless imbalance, making you more malleable to the will of the presiding authority. It's also amusing to me, and I always indulge in my amusements. Now tell me why you're here so we that we can entirely ignore your words and delve into the suggestive reality I will provide for you.”

“There's an arrow in my chest. It's made some things difficult, like lifting boxes at the chocolate factory, and forgetting my mortality.”

The therapist had come close to Arlin as he spoke, and placed his lips around the end of the arrow. He was sucking on it, and flicking his tongue against its wooden surface. “Tell me abut yuh muher,” he said, running his fingers up and down the arrow, delicately caressing it, as beads of saliva began to dribble down his chin.

Arlin tried to recoil, but the arrow tip protruding from his back connected to the wall behind him.“She was an uncontrollable gossip, and spent most of her young adulthood riding on the lapels of rich businessmen. She used to tell me it was the fastest way to get across town. For six months she lived in the washing machine of a French diplomat, and was only discovered when the Italian maid overheard her making love to a German repairman whose metallic hammer kept banging up against the side of the washing machine's gaping hole. I mean opening. She was thrown on her ass, where she stayed for a year accepting the generosity of parliamentarians who threw money at her, and plane tickets, and their weddings rings. She had the power to make men forget their problems. This was all before I knew her.”

The therapist was smelling the wood deeply, his eyes rolling back into their sockets a bit with each whiff. “Yes, oh yes. I see it very clearly now.” He stood up abruptly and slapped Arlin across the face. “You disgust me. How long have you pretended not to notice that your father is a homosexual?”

Arlin shrugged, “He was always a homosexual. He only married my mother to temporarily escape the attention of the pink mafia, from whom he had stolen a priceless artifact. It was an ornamental carving of the moment when a man loses his youth irrecoverably, captured in terracota like those soldiers in China. It was being preserved in bile, which of course was doing nothing for its complexion.”

“Your only hope is to subject yourself to the iniquities of love. I know a beautiful woman you must marry. Here is her number. Her name is Melinda. The winks I am giving you now are merely a facial tic and have no suggestive meaning.”

“Alright.”

Arlin met her at a drive in movie. She had a quiver embedded in between her breasts. Whenever she quivered, it quivered. “You're very pretty,” he said.

“You're not the first person to have assumed that the remarkable appearance of coincidence is likewise an unavoidable promise from God.”

“Of course not. But by the same token, I could be the first person for whom this is in fact the case.”

“What makes you so special?”

“A love of probabilities only masks a deeper fear of fate. I don't give a rat's ass about fate or chance. In fact, I never think about either. I didn't choose for this arrow to stick through my chest, and I didn't choose for you to have a beautifully proportioned quiver. I don't think I've ever seen one quite like it.”

“The odds are really outstanding.”

“Sure. But then again, so what? It's not like there's an ideal formula for happiness floating out there, waiting for us to shoot it down. All arrows arrive at their destinations with perfect randomness. Even the most masterful shot is still at the mercy of the wind.”

“I acquired my quiver in a terrible accident. I was racing through an amusement park looking for the exit, when I happened upon an exhibit describing the exploits of Robin Hood. Only, this wasn't the conventional version in which Robin Hood substitutes himself for regulatory economic mechanisms and as a metaphor for Stalinism; instead, the Hood persona was being played by a retired philosophy professor who was busy attempting to reduce all the world to a great theory of receptacles. He called me up on stage to demonstrate his point through a complicated system of gestures, diagrams, and phallic knives.”

Arlin leaned in close, “And he impaled you with the quiver?”

She shook her head, “Oh no. Years later I had it surgically implanted in my chest, as a symbolic gesture of affinity with the substance of his argument. The accident was listening to him in the first place.”

Arlin nodded. “Yes, I often think it's entirely possible that I fired the arrow at myself, that night.”

“Do you want to make love?”

“I think it's the only reasonable thing left for us to do.”