Somewhere Not Here

 

It had taken me eight days to pencil the border lines for the inscription, outline the letters in pencil, and begin chipping the letters into the concrete. I’d never done any kind of stonecarving, and here I was trying to inscribe more than half a hundred words of text into a vertical concrete wall. My arms and my back ached by the end of every day, and I considered a dozen times a day cutting the project short, scratching the remaining letters shallowly and penciling over them and leaving it at that. I had to keep sternly commanding myself to return to my task. I had decided to do this, and I was going to do it, period (no pun intended).

I let my aching arms drop and stepped back to look at the wall, where my memorial to Leslie was partly inscribed, partly penciled.

LESLIE CAME HERE FROM SOMEWHERE NOT HERE

I CALLED THEM LESLIE BECAUSE THEY COULDN’T TELL ME THEIR NAME

I THOUGHT IT WAS DISRESPECTFUL TO NOT CALL THEM ANYTHING

LESLIE COULDN’T EAT MOST OF THE FOOD I BROUGHT THEM,

AND WAS ALWAYS COLD,

BUT I DID WHAT I COULD TO MAKE THEM COMFORTABLE

LESLIE DIED BUT I DID WHAT I COULD FOR THEM

Leslie had wanted to avoid having anything to do with the authorities, and I had respected that for as long as they had remained alive. Once I was sure Leslie was dead, I had walked up to the University and found a biologist who would come down to the underpasses to look at “an odd specimen” I thought was worth examining. I mean, once Leslie was dead, there was no sense in just burying them, was there? Probably the worms wouldn’t even be able to get a meal off of them.

But I was going to leave a memorial to Leslie here. That seemed like a good thing to do.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "You do what you can."