Shards Of Weird

The other day while setting off for a walk early morning, I came across something unexplained – though not unexplainable. On the sidewalk, near an apartment building, were a jacket and a tie.

Now, this might be understandable, since we live in one of those urban neighborhoods that’s fine during the day but you really wouldn’t want to go traipsing around at night unaccompanied. Probably still safe at night, but a bit seedy. (Think Tom and Kyrie’s neighborhood in the Shifter series.)

It would make perfect sense if the jacket looked dirty and worn and the tie were in a position where someone might have discarded it in, say, an ardent fit of sidewalk love.

BUT the jacket was new and good quality and it lay exactly as if someone had shrugged it off while facing the building. Only there was nowhere for anyone to stand while doing so, much less to walk away from after shrugging it off. It lay maybe three inches from a low brick wall with an iron fence embedded on top. The tie was even odder, because it was on a hanger – not as if it had just come from the cleaners, but as my younger son keeps his. He’s not very good at tying ties, yet, and so he keeps one or two loosened and wrapped around the stem of the hanger. The hanger in turn was hooked into the top of the cast iron fence at about my knee level. And it too was good quality, silk, and I suspect expensive.

Now, is it possible someone was carrying a basket of laundry and these things slipped off the top? Of course it is. Only, they’d have to be walking on top of the brick wall, with feet on either side of the iron fence. Possible. There are a lot of college students around here… just not likely.

Being who I am, I tried to take a picture of it, but my phone is new and I didn’t manage to. When I came back the jacket and tie were gone, either reclaimed by their owner or possibly picked up by some transient whose sartorial stock just went up markedly.

Oh the other hand, I can’t rid my mind of the image and the idea that what those clothes looked like was someone not particularly neat – say a young man – undressed in his own bedroom, and sort of threw the jacket over and hung the tie on his bedroom door.

Needless to say scenarios for that sort of thing range from the one in Simak’s Out of Their Minds where the character, under the illusion of being in a house, undresses and lies down in a rattler-infested cave; to some sort of very small time/space portal in someone’s bedroom, in another universe. (In which case the owner had one of those mornings that happen to all of us sometimes “but where could it have gone?”) Either of these would also serve as explanation for the strangely high incidence of shoes by the side of the railroad tracks in Portugal or the highway in the US. (The alternative is sudden footwear phobia syndrome so widespread and prevalent it appears in every culture. Or that shoes choose to commit suicide when faced with more efficient modes of transport than feet – that latter might explain why often it’s only left or right shoes. If you posit shoes as a dual entity perhaps it’s not so much bipolar as bilateral and one shoe is always more depressed than the other. [Oh, all right, I’ll behave].)

Is the mundane explanation likely right? Well, yes, I’m not completely insane yet. On the other hand there are events (some much crazier than this) where the mundane explanation is likely right, but it’s not the EASIEST one. And anyway, I imagine this little shard of weird will surface sometime in a story.

I wonder if everyone else is afflicted with this type of mind and only writers give vent to it, or if other people don’t even wonder about the surreal intrusions in their lives.

Mine is the mind that will now go through life thinking “It’s seven am. Do you know where your clothes are?”