Opre wasn’t exactly one of those people who wallowed in self-pity. But, not because he didn’t see the point. He didn’t wallow in self-pity because he believed he always got what he deserved. Good or bad, one always got exactly what they deserved. He couldn’t always determine what a person had done to earn what happened to them, but then he didn’t know everything. And that was okay. He knew a man— well, Opre didn’t exactly know him, but he worked at the little grocery store on the corner across from Opre—who had committed a heinous act that no one else knew about. Technically Opre didn’t know about it either, but it obviously had been committed based on how the man’s life turned out. The man used to have a wife and little girl, but they didn’t live above the grocery store with him anymore. The wife, because she had died. Opre had seen the white mortuary van take her covered body away. In a nonsensical way that reminded him of when his father used to put towels over the bushes in the front yard during cold snaps. Opre didn’t know what happened to the man’s little girl. She just wasn’t there anymore. Opre sometimes wondered where she was, and how her life was turning out. He knew the man deserved to have lost his family, but what had she done? It was sad, but shikata ga nai. C’est la vie. Que sera sera.

            Opre shifted uncomfortably. The subsequent clanking, rattle his movements caused reminded him of the bangle bracelets his wife and daughter used to wear. On his wife it was a gentle tinkling every time she moved, but his eleven-year-old daughter didn’t understand the subtle musicality of the bracelets. She wore about a dozen clunky bracelets on each arm and shook each arm with glee each time she reached for some unnecessary object. The resulting clatter was endearingly annoying and inspired a desire in him to violently snatch the bracelets off her slender wrists. She would be so old now. What did she look like? Did she still have her father’s thin dark hair that waved when he brushed it? Even though she hadn’t been a daddy’s girl per se, they had looked exactly alike. He knew when she got older she would want to be gracefully slender like her mother, but what she would likely get instead was short and stocky like him. Everywhere he went people assumed he played football. He wondered how that would translate into a young woman. When she was younger, he used to stand behind her in the mirror, as she dissected their looks, her eyes rapidly moving from her reflection to his, comparing. It was that psychology not limited to just children, finding the part of our identity that lie in looks, so he indulged her. She described his nose as belonging to the Disney villain, Jafar. After sitting through Aladdin with her dozens of times, he couldn’t disagree with her assessment. He knew his light brown eyes framed by thick black lashes made people uncomfortable, because when he looked into the exact same eyes on his baby girl’s face, he too felt their unsettling effect. When she looked right at you, she saw too much, too deeply. He and his daughter weren’t a beautiful pair, but their eyes could be mistaken for beauty. That hard kind of beauty that matched his villainous nose.

            What would she be like having spent the first four years of her teens without her father, Opre wondered. That was the root of problems in society. It probably always had been, from the beginning of time and it just became more prevalent with each successive generation. Absentee fathers. Opre had had plenty of time the past four years and 8 months, and seventeen days away from his girl to develop this philosophy on life and he thought he had it as figured out at a man like him was capable of figuring. His football build had wasted away over the sedentary years, months, weeks, but his mind had developed in its place. The mental gymnastics he did daily to keep his sanity meant he thought about topics like the degeneration of society a lot.

            He felt a strange kinship with the grocery store man over their daughter’s apparent abandonment.  She certainly didn’t deserve to not have anyone to call Daddy. No one to cry to when her crushes treated her cruelly. When she was scared and needed protecting, whom did she think of to come save her? Was five years a long enough time to forget the significance of person in your life? Had eleven years been enough to make him permanence in her mind. Opre felt a strange flutter in his chest and found himself out of breath. He felt panicked, but there was no reason for it. He was alone in the room for once. What was this feeling then? He felt… hopeless. He had never had a need for hope. In his compassionless world, he had only a need for survival. He wanted out of his situation perhaps, but only because he wanted to cheat fate, didn’t want this life. Not because he felt it was unwarranted.

            Opre looked out his window, but he didn’t see the people outside it. He suddenly felt like he was in a desert alone. Man wasn’t built for the desert. There was nothing in the desert. He thought. His mind supplied him with: And no man need nothing. Where did that come from? Where had Opre heard that before? His heart rate slowed and his breathing quieted as he considered. Who had said that? His eyebrows almost met and he frowned, thinking.  He had a vague idea it had been said in insult. What did that even mean? No man need nothing? Grammar lessons from seventh grade long ignored supplied Opre with the thought that the sentence might be a double negative. Did it mean man needed nothing? That somewhat existential meaning was nonsensical and false. Or was it saying there was no man who didn’t need something. He liked that better. Opre spent the better part of the next hour debating what the phrase meant and where it had come from. The etymology of a thing or its context usually helped determine its intended meaning.

            Etymology. Origin. Beginning. Derivation. Foundation. Root. Basis. This was an old game Opre played with himself, alone in the apartment all day. Or not alone. It didn’t matter. He thought of as many synonyms as he could before moving onto the next word.  Matter. Substance. Material. Stuff. This was a hard one. Thing. Noun. Person, place or thing? A smile cracked his lips. When was the last time he’d had something to drink? To eat? When had he stopped caring about his health? Probably around the time the scars on his wrists became permanent.

            One his friends—actually they had never met, but he overheard a lot of her conversations because she talked loudly in the hallway to other tenants—said that she had read a research study that men either neglected their health for one of two reasons. One, they were basically cowards who thought ignorance was bliss. Or two, they subconsciously wanted to die because they were commitment-phobes and wanted out of situations they had gotten themselves into but now wanted out of. About two years ago she was a dating-machine. He remembered that it seemed like every other week she was dating a new man. One week it was a blind date, the next week it would be an old acquaintance, the next a man she had met at the grocery store, and interspersed between dates would be men she brought back from parts unknown.  Then was the incident. Sometimes Opre caught a look at her upturned face when she was out on the street. She was still beautiful. To him. There was a shiny line that appeared from out of her hairline near her left temple and traversed her prominent cheekbone, bisected her left dimple that was there whether she smiled or not, and continued in a surprisingly straight line that crossed over her collar bone and disappeared into the neckline of her shirt. She didn’t think of it as a scar. He heard her laugh to the neighbor a few doors down that she’d been called Amazon all her life and now she actually looked like a warrior complete with authentic battle damage. She didn’t date anymore, though. 

            Opre remembered the Xena Warrior Princess reruns that they had watched every Saturday a few years back. Xena never had any scars. He never found out what the incident was, since he obviously was not in any position to ask, but he liked that she didn’t pity herself. So many women pitied themselves. People deserved what they got. Eve ate the apple first, so of course women’s punishment would be harsher. Opre figured that Adam probably talked to the serpent, too, but he was loyal enough to his Creator to resist it. Probably. He’d had this discussion before. Many times. A loud bang, likely from a car backfiring, came from outside his window. Opre didn’t flinch. He almost never jumped anymore. It was very hard to startle him after almost five years. He just looked out the glass down to the street below. His view of the street was limited. The farthest he could see to the right was the green street-name sign on the corner, but it was too far to read what it said. That’s where the grocery store was. To the left he could see several apartment buildings, the tenants cars parked along the street, and just barely the field of grass like you would see at a park. If his chair were closer to the window he would be able to see further, but then people would see him, too. Always watching them.

            For likely the million and first time in the last four years and eight months and seventeen days, he pondered—that was a nice word to save for the synonym game—what he had done to deserve his lot in life. Not in the pitying womanly way. Never that. But just to think.  To wonder. He played this game more often than even Synonyms, Would You Rather, or what he had creatively termed Decimals of Division (where he would pick large odd numbers and divide them to as many decimal places as he accurately could remember) put together. He went over all the bad things he had ever done.

            He had terrorized the semi-blind man who lived down the block from him with his friends growing up. He’d forgotten the man’s name now. He and his friend had been doing something stupid in his yard. He couldn’t even remember the prank now after these long years. He did remember the old man’s reaction though. He had roared out of the front door with a shotgun aiming in their general direction. He’d been in a righteous fury, spouting curses and promises alike at the two boys. He and his friend took off. He was so scared he had taken off running as fast as his skinny, pre-teen legs would carry him. The adrenaline making it hard to breathe or move his limbs in a coordinate, effective way. His friend though had had the fortune of still being on his bike. As he worked the pedals to speed away, Opre had screamed hoarsely for him to wait and jumped on the back with his feet on the footholds that came out of the center of the back wheel for that specific purpose. His friend frantically picking up speed had caused Opre to fall off. He gave a strangled yell as he hit the pavement and watched the bike and his “ride or die” boy zoom off, despite Opre’s unmanly cries to wait. Years later they had laughed until they cried about it, but being chased on foot for three block by a half-blind man with a shotgun who wanted revenge was the second scariest moment of his life. The first scariest moment was four years, eight months, and seventeen days ago. When he had woken up handcuffed to a chair, in a room he had never seen before, warm blood dripping from his right ear, staring at his wide-eyed reflection in the window.