Tippecanoe: Flash Fiction Short Story

The guy standing in the middle of the intersection on the concrete island between lanes was a balanced mixture of beggar and bandit, and as I was in the pole position awaiting the green arrow, my face and his were only about five feet removed. Unlike most guys in his profession, he met and held my gaze.

I fished out the sole five-dollar bill in my wallet and proffered it. We did an inadvertent fist bump. He tore the offering from my hand and mumbled something, still meeting me eye to eye. It sounded like he said Tippecanoe.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Excuse you? What’d you do…fart?” he snapped.

I thought about it for a second, and decided his reply was somewhat more honest and appropriate than the standard God bless you, which always made it sound like this was some kind of business transaction.

“Did you say Tippecanoe?” I asked. Our eyes had never flickered away from each other, we refused to back down.

“What, you can’t read?” he said, shaking his cardboard sign at arm’s length, practically slapping me in the face.

I expected it to say: “Ran out of gas. Can you help? God bless you!”

I blinked. The sign read: “There is no such thing as coincidence. Obviously, there is such a thing as coincidence, but it ain’t random, and it ain’t an accident. You are not awake.”

The green traffic arrow appeared and I finally broke eye contact with him and rumbled forward out into the intersection, but I glanced back. The beggar nodded, and winked.

Five minutes later picking up my wife and kids from the parent-teacher conference I considered mentioning the surly beggar. We were paused at yet another stoplight and my wife suddenly issued a half laugh and said: “Tippecanoe.”

“What!” I shot.

“You don’t have to yell,” she said, and then indicated the car stopped at the light, one up from us on the right. The license plate letters: “T-P-C-A-N-U.”

“Tippecanoe,” I said, and felt a thrill run through me, a little ripple of excitement racing simultaneously up my spine and doing pirouettes around my heart. What were the odds of my wife noticing those letters, or actually voicing them? I hadn’t even told her about the beggar, or the strange word he said.

Briefly, I told her, sketching my encounter with the beggar. I mentioned the five bucks and the word Tippecanoe.

“You don’t give them money,” she snapped. “He’s just going to buy booze.”

Deja vu, and I feel sick, floating, all the world weird, reality seems to flash and seethe, turning. A flower unfurls its petals in the air.

My wife says: “It’s just a coincidence.”

I blink at her. I do not know what is happening. I am dreaming.

My wife says: “Of course, there isn’t really such a thing as coincidence.”

Waking, I hear honking horns behind me and realize the cars in front of me are already gone, and my car idles here, and it seems I am having a heart attack. The kids jump in the back and yell at me to go, it is a green light, go Papa, but my wife keeps talking, as if we aren’t causing a traffic jam.

My wife says: “You know, of course there is such a thing as coincidence, but I mean it isn’t random, or an accident. It is like a message from God, to get our attention. You know what I mean?”

The cars go around us, honking as they swerve.

“You can pull up to the intersection, it’s a red light,” my wife says.

I notice we are several car lengths back. I drive to toe the line at the intersection, but I remember the beggar’s words, or not his words, exactly, but the last bizarre words on the cardboard sign: “You are not awake.”

I remember sitting here at this intersection, right now, getting rear-ended by the car behind us. I remember another now, right now, without any kids in the car, my wife and I sit here sullenly, not speaking, but in another version I look and it is a different woman beside me, and another now I am alone, I remember all of these nows, right now, I experience them now, all simultaneously, and I sense an infinite perspective of reflecting mirrors, and I see and am them all, all at the same time. Now.

As the light changes and I start driving forward automatically, I retain it all, it is all inside me, and I know the world is open, and I realize I am not quite not awake any longer.

“Tippecanoe,” I whisper. Tippecanoe.


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