Tutor Writing Challenge! [June]

Olive Garden

"Serenity" (indigo)

His first meeting, Olive had stayed because of the rain.

Whole buckets fell from the sky, filling up the potholes in the street and sending gushing sprays out of gutters onto the cracked sidewalk. The prospect of a dry space for an hour or two felt like a pretty good deal in exchange for having to listen to some kook go on about some great immortal being looking down on him.

Olive half feared he’d missed it all at first. The old man at the front door had let out a chuckle when he’d knocked and pointed to the flyer. He was a little square nosed man with a paunch lilting walk to the back door with Olive left them both drenched from the storm. He’d grumbled at having to unlock the door and motioned to the stairs to shoo Olive inside. He gave Olive the same pitiful glance he’d given Blackston some weeks back when he’d seen him preaching in the market.

The chairs had been arranged in a circle of ten at the center of the room across the faded linoleum tile. Olive caught wind of what he could only describe's smell as burning tar, and turned to see a silver coffee canister bubbling atop a wobbly folding table. He started for the crackers atop paper plates, not bothering to contain himself by shoving one after another into his mouth. He ground away at the stale saltines and shoved even more into the pockets of his jeans.

“Excuse me?” A slight, curly haired wisp of a boy spoke. He pushed back from his chair, and Olive grimaced as the metal legs ground across the linoleum. “Have you come for the discussion?”

Olive kept chewing the saltines, suddenly quite aware that he couldn’t swallow the mound of hard tac that sat on his tongue. He grabbed a styrofoam cup and pulled at the tab for coffee. He regret his choice for several reasons as soon as he pressed the cup to his lips. The first of which was the taste, which could only be described as cat piss meets dirt. The second?

“Fuck that’s hot!” Olive said after a swallow. He was pretty sure he’d burned every last taste bud off of his tongue, which seemed an equal punishment for having taken without bothering to ask.

“You can have a seat, if you want. There’s always space for anyone who wants to join!” The boy tapped the folding chair next to him. Olive stood and took another sip of the coffee and stuck out his tongue and coughed – not at the boy, though he realized this error and quickly shook his head. He idled along the wall before dragging his feet to the chair opposite the young man. “I’m Blackston Hope. It’s a blessed day to have you with us.”

“It sure is,” Olive shot back with his best smile. “Olive.”

Sitting in a rusted folding chair and sipping a styrofoam cup of insta-coffee, he thought that all of it could be worse. The boy could’ve been less handsome, with snarled teeth. He hated boys with bad teeth, it was too distracting not to notice and too unfortunate to miss. That part made him shallow, along with so many other senseless things teenage boys clung to, but he figured he was allowed to be shallow for at least a few more years.

“Have you ever thought about where you’ll be after you die?” Blackston’s voice was an octave too high, and he leaned a little too far out of his seat toward Olive.

“Probably in a ditch. I hear they got one for the unclaimed bodies at the edge of the district.” Olive didn’t dwell in the metaphysical.

“Oh. Oh my I mean. Well.” Blackston’s eyes fluttered and he blanched. He went over the index cards scribbled in chicken scratch on the empty seat next to him and glanced up at Olive again. “I meant life after death.”

“Hmmm.” Olive took another drink of the sludge and pinched his nose.

Blackston started to ramble about the different screeds he’d gotten his hands on, all of them pointing to a world that came after their deaths. Whether a physical space like heaven, a binding of energy, or reincarnation, they all pointed to a life beyond the mortal realm.

But Olive didn’t pay attention to any of it.

For as Blackston spoke with such conviction to a parish of one, Olive listened as the words came tumbling out the boy’s mouth. The dusty little basement filled up with conviction; a boy that wanted so badly for Olive to listen to him, even if it meant nothing. Tremulous words on how goodness was for the sake of a better society. That he saw weakness all around him, but had to keep his heart open, hard as that was.

The rain had let up for a good half hour, but Olive sat listening, sipping at the last of his coffee while Blackston finished on why he’d once judged his aunt a sinner but knew her own flaws had made her life a teetering mess.

He was back again the next week, banging at the front door and ready for the old man to let him down into the dank basement. More terrible coffee, more stories on what he could do to save his immortal soul.

“I like how you’re always here.” Olive said, four weeks into his stint as a god-fearing man.

Blackston had been in the middle of a rant about the dangers of envy. Such was Olive’s reply he froze up with a little snort, choking on the air at the back of his throat.

“You don’t give up, do you?” Olive asked, then aware of how quiet the whole room was.

“Well. I don’t know. It feels important.” Blackston looked at the ground and took a hand to his opposite elbow to tug at his shirt sleeve. “It got lonely to talk about it with myself. I guess I just wanted to have a space where someone else might want to hear it, too.”

“Not a lot of people stick with what they love.” Olive stared down into the black of his coffee. “Makes you a bigger man, to care about things like that.”

“You think so?” Blackston had never been called a man his whole life. Other than in the diminutive, little man, by Aunt Birdie’s on-again-off-again lover Leland. And somehow it felt as though it was to make him even smaller.

Olive stood from his chair and stepped across the space of the circle to the seat beside Blackston.

“Lot of people don’t give a shit about anything.” Olive knew well enough from his own hard luck stories. A father who ran around town without claiming his only son. A mother that’d spent the two of them into the poorhouse until they didn’t have enough for a roof over their heads. Stories that were a dime a dozen across panem, and still – he hated thinking that there was so little space for love. “You care about people.”

“I was going to quit. I mean, after that first week you came here. I thought, oh god, I was an idiot. And then you’d never come back and it’d just be me and I’d just have to think about how no one ever wanted to listen.” Blackston couldn’t look him in the eyes then. “I feel really stupid admitting that to you.”

Olive reached a hand between their chairs and grasped his in Blackston’s.

“You said, there’s a space for us, didn’t you?” Olive gripped Blackston’s hand tighter. “Made a space for me to be. Could’ve made me kick rocks when you saw me.”

“It wouldn’t be right. People deserve to be a part of things. No matter who they are.” Blackston Hope held Olive’s hand forward, but couldn’t let go. Didn’t want to, anyway.

“I believe you. More than I believe half the stuff you talk about,” Olive gave a sidelong grin and twisted his fingers over Blackston’s hand. “Guess that just means I got more to learn.”

They stayed quiet for a good while.

The silence had never felt so holy.