Puzzles and Pastimes By Jake Deluca

In the age before the world was known, we’d raced through the day with some gross ambition to see the other side. Evening, we’d let the length of the shadows determine our fate. Retired and went to rest, we’d wake once more in the labyrinth of our lives, a puzzle that we were happy to be a part of — passed in and out of the day without so much as an asking why — the labyrinth that we were happy to be lost in.

“Go left,” said the boy, resting his idle head against the glass of the moving car.

“No,” said the other, signaling right.

In the dark they drove, between them each an unlit phone, buzzing softly with the story of another world. They saw the world, these boys, forever as they’d always had, forever as they now did, never knowing of the world but for the skyline of the distant, untouched city, but for the image in the glow of a screen. They and the world sat on either end of that screen, preserved and unknown of the other.

“No?” The idle boy raised his head. “They’re opposites, right and left. Left will lead us wrong.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said the other boy. “They’re just thoughts. Ideas. They can change at any time. At any turn of the head. Right can become left, left can become right, and left, right again.” He made one left, then another, then another until — though by the uniformity of the neighboring houses you could never tell — they began in circuitous form to trace clockwise around their small, suburban town. “You have to look past those things,” he said as he glanced off the road and for a second at the screen of his phone, his face awash with platinum light. “They’re just distractions. Things to keep you reeling.”

The idle boy shook his head. “I don’t want to be late.”

“Late?” exclaimed the other boy, and the car veered slightly in suit. “Late for what?”

The idle boy did not respond.

“You and I, we could never be late for anything. We’ve got too much time to our names. That’s why we’ve got to turn right, then left, then right again to get where we want to go.” He bit down on the brake and, out of doubt that his words were not being received, did too on his tongue. “All we have is time to waste.”

Silence still.

“Tell me,” he continued. “What better place must you be then right here, killing time with me?”

“One day life won’t have to be such a maze,” said the idle boy as he was looking down into his phone, thinking of a time when men first walked, then rode, then drove the earth. Now they’d simply hold it in their hands.

© 2014 Jake Deluca

Jake Deluca is currently a senior in high school, living in a digitally revolutionized world. These things affect both his writing and his daily life. Over time, he’s acquired a taste for minimalism, and this reflects in both his written work and in his eye for art and architecture, something he aims to pursue in college.

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