Coming Together - John Fetto

Taylor waited by the phone at the bureau office in San Francisco, watching the clock and staring at the phone. It all had to come together in the next hour or it never will. It was a simple as that and it was ridiculous to think that he could control it or anyone could control. Wanting to control is what made it happy and sad. Happy when it works out; sad when it doesn’t as if watching made it happen or didn’t and that there wasn’t some other force pulling things together and pulling things apart. There had to be. There had to be something else, and Taylor sat waiting for that great invisible hand to gather things up and deliver it to him. His friends would call, they would tell him they found what they were looking for, right where he told him to look, any minute now. A boy, no a man, nearly chased into the ground because Taylor thought he was someone else. Somehow, someway it would be fixed, and Taylor kept thinking that, because he was sure that thinking that would make it so. A girl, the woman he was chasing, found safe and sound, and happy. It would all work out, he told himself, and he pushed out all the other times he’d wished as hard for it to be so and instead the hand pulled it away, tossing it aside like so much trash. He wouldn’t think about that. He would only think of it working and waiting, confident it would be so. Still when the phone finally rang, he let it ring four times, before he finally picked it up.