Kyle Beachy’s What Blessing Is This series, in which he experiments with the relationship between words and photos featuring images authored by friends / collaborators, is back with installment five,. This particular edition features photos from Ben Colen.

He came limping and a little bloody through the front door, stood a moment to listen, then moved down the hallway and into the shower. He’d lost his wallet and gotten into a fight, and probably not in that order. She would be disappointed. But disappointment had always been her specialty, a practice she’d elevated into something of an art. He toweled off and got back into his clothes. In the kitchen, he found three crumpled five-dollar bills and a few coins in a ceramic dish under the window. He filled a glass from the tap, chugged it, refilled it, then joined her in the front room.

He sat on the couch and gazed achingly into her presence here in the morning light, not a single of her details yet forgotten. He watched her reach for the rolled mat leaning against the shelf. It was her apartment, her shelves and rug and succulents. She slipped free the two loops of the strap and then, with a practiced flourish, unspooled the mat and guided it expertly to the floor.

“Once you’re on your back, pull your knees into your chest. Good. Now, you might let gravity work here and think about shifting your weight from side to side. Let your arms fall open. Good. Now we’re going to roll forward onto your knees. You might stack your shoulders over your wrists and start to bend your elbows backward. Next, sit back and slowly peel the fingers up, one joint at a time.”

It was late afternoon when he stepped back outside. He moved along the sidewalk beneath skeleton towers that stretched into the distance, the buzz of wires something he felt vibrating under his skin. An extremely dumb giant pickup with no driver sat idling in an alleyway leaking a fat, heaving worm of dark exhaust. Standing still, he counted eight empty plastic bottles in his field of vision. Nine. All of it was killing us and everyone knew it, there just wasn’t any reward for saying so.

And meanwhile the sun was up there searing away another day. His only strategy in all this was treating each arriving second as a kind of passageway to get through, knowing that eventually the suffering had to end. He just had to get out ahead enough that the throbbing faded into something he could manage without breaking down and weeping every eight minutes.

He waited at a corner while a car rolled through the sign, the driver’s head lowered to the phone in his lap. He thought about how in ancient Greece people would speak of the soul easily, using common everyday language without any hesitation or apology. But it wasn’t her soul that had gone missing. It was her knees and chest, the weight of her body, her arms and shoulders and wrists and elbows and each perfect finger, one joint at a time.

Once, years ago, he had saved a friend’s life by jumping into a cold and inkblack lake and hauling the (drunk) friend to shore and then wailing away on his chest until he coughed and puked a tiny fraction of the lake back onto the muddy beach. The whole thing took about six minutes and was definitely, absolutely not an indication of bravery.

Still, it changed the way that people in his hometown saw him. He began to sense a kind of slowing down whenever he’d enter a room. He was treated to free pizza and beers and endless other rewards, including an unbelievable discount on a used Toyota Camry. The whole thing unnerved him. Because it wasn’t generosity and wasn’t gratitude these people were offering. It was closer to a kind of payment.

His hometown was a place of angular brick walls and painted wrought iron fences and dense, richly green plantlife that could not be contained by sidewalks or retaining walls. The longer the special treatment went on, the more it saddened him how desperately everyone needed to believe in a savior.

When he heard a few years later that the friend who he’d saved had died of a brain aneurysm, he decided that he understood everything he needed to understand about the universe.

He walked and walked and eventually made it to the bar he’d discovered recently between his place and hers. He appreciated its darkness even in daylight, and also its weirdly small tables and long, uncomfortable benches. So far he was the only customer, and he stood there as if confused for a minute, concentrating on his feet.

“You come to settle your tab? Or maybe to apologize for that scuffle you started at closing last night.”

The bartender was covered in enough tattoos to hold water. He dug the three five-dollar bills and few coins from his pocket and set them on the bar.

“That does not come anywhere close to your tab.”

“So, this is a gesture. It’s not much, like, numerically. But they’re the most meaningful bills I could possibly give you.”

She did not respond, facially, whatsoever. He said he had a plan going to make some extra cash and that it wouldn’t take long.

“I’m going to climb into this insane asshole truck that I keep seeing around. After that it’s just cruising alleyways and finding things to fix up or flip.”

“Please don’t say flip.” She stepped to the washing station, reached for the switch, and began plunging the dirties one at a time. “All night long I stand back here and listen to the money guys bragging about flipping old neighborhood houses, talking like they’ve accomplished something heroic.”

He stepped outside into the little sidewalk patio space marked by belly-high planters. And on the ground nearby, okay, yes, that was definitely blood. He sank to a crouch and pinched a shard of glass between his fingers, holding it up to the sunset.

The central problem, the blazing core of prevailing disappointment, was that the people who kept dying were predominantly and by great measure the wrong people. Every single day the world’s worst human beings woke, lived cruelly and selfishly, and then basked in the unearned reward of falling back asleep. Meanwhile the good and dancing and caring people died in droves, one after the next, and there weren’t even forms to fill out about it, no chance for review.

Last night, a fella had bet him five hundred dollars that he couldn’t jump over one of the planters. But he had cleared the planter easily, he’d inhaled his knees into his chest with the flexibility of a man in love with a yoga instructor, even here in the immediate wake of her unbelievable death. And when the fella wouldn’t pay, when he and his pals started laughing and tried to climb into a silent car with no steering wheel, only a giant screen, he’d lost it a little.

Several years from now, he will discover her apartment keys inside of a forgotten shoebox labeled, Proof You’re Alive Even In The Face Of Staggering Death And Dismay. He’ll smile. Nothing will be better, but he will smile.

What Blessing Is This #5: Ben Colen