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Dr. L’ling
By Thomas Shaggy

Looking up at the crown molding there wasn’t much the man could think of other than his wife.  The couch was a dark green, recently reupholstered, with that “20 year old” smell.  The doctor sat behind him.  He couldn’t see him from his current angle, but could hear his pencil scratch the paper as he jotted down his notes.

“I don’t want ‘hand-me-down’ love. It’s just doesn’t fit the same.  I want her to love me like I deserve to be loved.”

The man lay covered in snowflakes face down in the snow.  The sun reached high and the sky and warmed his back.  He stirred for a moment and opened his eyes slowly.  His eyes adjusted slowly to the light.  He stood up in the middle of an intersection, the world still frozen around him.

The man’s face began to blister from the cold winds.  He knew that if he didn’t find his answers soon that this place would be the death of him.

“Do you know why you are here?”  A mid-sized Asian man seemingly steps out from nowhere from behind a small lamppost.

“Dr….Dr. L’ling?” The man turns in disbelief.  “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to help you through your next challenge.  Something we haven’t visited in a while.  Now do you know why you are here?”

“Each passing moment brings me closer to an answer, but if I were to guess, I’m being tested.” The man replies.  “I haven’t always been true to my family or myself…this is my punishment.”

“You are here to learn what it is to truly be a family, and to be awakened to the reality that you have shut out for so many years.”  The doctor points to the middle of the street.  In the middle of the street a taxicab appears, and people begin to move about the street.  A man and a woman approach the taxicab.

“Sarah?” The man looks at the woman with familiarity.  “What is my wife doing with that man?”  They ease into the back of the cab, the strange man’s hand on Sarah’s back.  He runs for the cab as it speeds off down the street and leaves him in a swirling dust of debris

The doctor snaps his fingers, and the buildings and scenery fly past them in different directions.

“What is it that you want from this?” The doctor asks.

“I’m gonna kill that guy.” The man’s face is red with hate.  The scenery comes to a stop.  They both stand in front of an old hotel.  The building, covered in ice, stands thirty stories above the two men.  The door at the front begins to melt away; the man approaches the revolving door and enters.

“What you find, you will not like.  Only when you understand why you are here can you find resolve.”  The doctor says.

The man doesn’t flinch as he enters the hotel.  He runs up the stairs to the second floor.  The different undergarments left behind lead him along a dark hallway.  A sports coat, woman’s sports coat, two white shirts, a tie, and a bra light his path.  At the end of the hall light shows through under the door.  Shadows pass from side to side.  The man backs up a few steps lifts his leg and braces himself.  To his left he hears movement; he sees them run into a room nearby.  Quickly, he turns and follows with haste.  He crashes through a nearby door, nothing.  The next few doors that link the rooms are opened.  He can see a woman’s leg disappear to the right a few rooms ahead.  He races through the doorways and slides to a stop just in time to see doorway at end of the adjacent hallway click shut.

“So this is your escape route.”

He peaks off the railing to see the two racing down the steps.  They laugh as if it were a friendly came of cat and mouse.  As he nears the bottom he can hear them exit onto the alley.  There is nowhere left to go, he thinks to himself.  As he busts open the door he steps onto a lonely piece of ice and slips and falls on his back.  His head cracks against the ground.

“This is our path, should we ever be discovered.  We walk to the street, hail different cabs, and off we go. Understood?”

“Yes.” Sarah replies.  He kisses her on the cheek and leaves her in alleyway. “Oh Jake, Why can’t you just love me like you did.  All I want is you.”

“I’m coming….” Jake says softly as he blacks out.

Jake comes to standing in the hallway looking down at the shadow dancing back and forth with his hands on either side of the door frame.

His foot crashes through the door, shattering the wood frame.  The two inside are un-phased by ruckus that has ensued.  Sarah glides gently across the top of the man’s body.  He holds her tight by the waist.  She moans uncontrollably to the feeling of him inside her.

“SARAH!” The man screams.

The doctor steps in behind him.  “We can not see past choices we don’t understand.  Why are you here?”

The man lay on the floor crying as his wife makes love to another man.

Back in the doctors office the man still lay on his back.  He opened his eyes.

“I want to be everything for my wife.  I have done so many awful things to her and I have never truly been a husband for her.  She loves me.  I saw it in the alleyway.  Her hooks are dug deep in my chest and mine in hers.  We can finally love each other for who we really are.”

The doctor looks up from his pad and at the man lying on the couch in front of him.

“We will continue our session next time.”

Back in the hotel room a breeze has picked up through the hallways.  The images of Sarah and the strange man are swept away in snowflakes and out the window.  Jake’s world returns to cold and darkness.