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“The Life and Death of August Corcoran” by Ari Yena (part 2 of 2)
Lance never thought it possible to care too much– before he found the note that changed everything he thought he knew about August Corcoran.
Today’s story is the second and final part of “The Life and Death of August Corcoran” by Ari Yena, who is making their debut on The Voice of Dog. You can find more of their work on their Patreon, or follow them on Twitter for more updates.
Last time, Lance Dyer searched for answers in the apartment of August Corcoran, learning what he could about what the ermine might have been like in his life. An old letter may just be the most promising clue so far…
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Transcript
You’re listening to The Voice of Dog. I’m Khaki, your faithful fireside companion,
Speaker:and Today’s story is the second and final part of
Speaker:“The Life and Death of August Corcoran”
Speaker:by Ari Yena, who is making their debut
Speaker:on The Voice of
Speaker:Dog. You can find more of their work on their Patreon,
Speaker:or follow them on Twitter
Speaker:for more updates.
Speaker:Last time, Lance Dyer searched for answers
Speaker:in the apartment of August Corcoran,
Speaker:learning what he could about what the ermine might have been like in his life.
Speaker:An old letter may just be the most promising clue so far…
Speaker:Please enjoy “The Life and Death
Speaker:of August Corcoran”
Speaker:by Ari Yena, Part 2
Speaker:of 2 My Dear August,
Speaker:My apologies for reaching out to you.
Speaker:On my way to work every day,
Speaker:(as a bartender if you can believe),
Speaker:I pass this adorable little queer bookstore, and I can’t help but think of you.
Speaker:I’ve had to keep myself from walking in, though,
Speaker:because I knew this would happen if I did, but,
Speaker:you can probably tell,
Speaker:I couldn’t help myself this time.
Speaker:I found this in the New Releases section,
Speaker:and the lady working there,
Speaker:(an ermine, I think, which absolutely did not help in the moment),
Speaker:saw me looking and began to describe it to me.
Speaker:I know you’re usually about the novels, but it sounded very interesting
Speaker:and I thought I’d try one last time
Speaker:to get you to branch out
Speaker:into my zone a little.
Speaker:I’m realizing now that sending this is a little stupid, but,
Speaker:if this makes it to you,
Speaker:I also decided that I care more about getting in touch with you again
Speaker:than feeling like an idiot.
Speaker:The book can be your birthday gift,
Speaker:to give this all an excuse.
Speaker:You can throw the book away, or donate it, or whatever,
Speaker:but I also bought a copy
Speaker:and if you decide to read it and decide you want to talk about it,
Speaker:emailing me is faster than sending letters,
Speaker:so my email is ntlyon@servmail.
Speaker:ntlyon@servmail.com.
Speaker:I’d love to talk to you about Auburn some time.
Speaker:All the best, Nathaniel P.S. Drafts 1 through 3 were, in fact, even more awkward than this one.
Speaker:I decided it probably wasn’t going to get much better.
Speaker:The script was rigid,
Speaker:certainly as stiff as the postscript implied the writer might have been upon its writing,
Speaker:but it was unmistakably
Speaker:the very same writer as whom Lance had dubbed the first in the other book, underneath that nervous twinge.
Speaker:Lance thumbed through the book for any other signs,
Speaker:but learned that,
Speaker:apart from that it had been read over and over,
Speaker:there was nothing extra to learn about August, or even about this
Speaker:Nathaniel, within its pages.
Speaker:He folded the page,
Speaker:again treating it as though it could break apart with just the slightest tug in just the wrong way,
Speaker:and tucked it safely back where he had found it.
Speaker:He had his first
Speaker:lead. A Nathaniel, presumably Lyon,
Speaker:who had lived in Auburn.
Speaker:That lead gave him a task, too.
Speaker:If he had emailed Nathaniel back,
Speaker:August Corcoran must have been hiding a computer
Speaker:with which to do so somewhere. Lance Dyer, expert that he was, knew just where to look,
Speaker:and was rewarded right away when the drawer to the bedside table revealed
Speaker:a small brick of a laptop
Speaker:and the charger to go with it.
Speaker:Unfortunately, trying to turn on the device left him feeling far less accomplished than he’d felt moments before,
Speaker:because everything he had learned about August Corcoran so far
Speaker:should have told Lance that the ermine was not the sort to need to ensure
Speaker:his laptop was ready at a moment’s notice.
Speaker:Even plugging it in and trying to turn it on proved fruitless,
Speaker:as the ancient, blocky thing only got as far as a screen with a red,
Speaker:empty battery flashing across it before shutting back off again.
Speaker:The light on the side indicated to him that it was, in fact, trying to charge, though,
Speaker:so Lance set it down in the hopes that he might be able to return to it later.
Speaker:As he was ready to walk away,
Speaker:something appeared to Lance out of the corner of his eye,
Speaker:peeking out from under the piled blankets,
Speaker:at an angle he’d never have seen before.
Speaker:When he moved the soft, heavy fabric,
Speaker:he discovered not one,
Speaker:but two treasures.
Speaker:If the laptop didn’t work out, he thought,
Speaker:at least he’d discovered something important.
Speaker:A cell phone, and an ereader, the latter far more up-to-date than the former,
Speaker:and both certainly moreso than the laptop.
Speaker:And, to Lance’s surprise,
Speaker:both came to life
Speaker:with no outside aid.
Speaker:He tried the cellphone first. If you could guess a person’s pin, the most important information you could gather in Lance’s line of work,
Speaker:the most contacted persons of the deceased and the best avenue to contact them,
Speaker:was right in your grasp.
Speaker:Yet, it required such an intimate understanding of them,
Speaker:of what was important to them,
Speaker:because, in Lance’s experience,
Speaker:it was incredibly rare for someone to choose a number that meant
Speaker:very little. And, again,
Speaker:Lance realized that he should have thought about August Corcoran
Speaker:just a little more, because,
Speaker:before he could even decide what to input first,
Speaker:the phone unlocked for him.
Speaker:What would a man who hardly ever left his home need in the way of privacy?
Speaker:And, what would a man who hardly ever left his home
Speaker:need in the way of privacy
Speaker:when he had less than 10 contacts?
Speaker:A quick scan through them yielded none of the usual suspects one might find in a contact list.
Speaker:No contact labeled Mom, or Dad. No Aunts, no Uncles, nothing that could even, as far as Lance could tell, be a sibling or a cousin.
Speaker:Seven of the contacts were labeled
Speaker:Doctor, and one a bank.
Speaker:One, to Lance’s relief,
Speaker:was labeled Nathaniel. And, the last, ‘Emergency.
Speaker:‘Emergency.’ That, he assumed, was an old man’s archaic way of giving himself a speed dial for the emergency services if needed,
Speaker:but that wasn’t it at
Speaker:all. It was a real phone number.
Speaker:Lance thought he knew much of area codes, particularly local ones, but this phone number rang no bells.
Speaker:And, indeed, upon looking it up, Lance felt no surprise at all in learning that belonged
Speaker:to a suburb of Auburn.
Speaker:Lance had had to search the internet for phone numbers many times,
Speaker:and learned all of the terrible and private things you might be able to find with just that little.
Speaker:A name, an address, employment history, whatever you’d like.
Speaker:It restored Lance Dyer’s faith in the world when he found
Speaker:nothing, and yet, in this particular instance,
Speaker:it arose a deep frustration.
Speaker:He suspected what the number might be,
Speaker:and the only way to receive any sort of confirmation would be to call it himself.
Speaker:He made a policy of not doing such a thing before leaving a house, though.
Speaker:Returning with anything less than the full picture would be an insult to August Corcoran’s memory,
Speaker:and Lance Dyer held the same deep-seated hope that someone else wanted that memory so badly.
Speaker:Yet he knew that, sometimes,
Speaker:he walked away from a scene
Speaker:the only one who cared.
Speaker:But he always cared.
Speaker:A return to August Corcoran’s phone
Speaker:showed he was not a texter, as Lance would have predicted.
Speaker:His inbox was incredibly similar to the physical one held outside in the living room–
Speaker:notifications of bills, advertisements or spam, and the like,
Speaker:with no personal messages at all.
Speaker:The call history
Speaker:told a different story, though.
Speaker:August Corcoran almost never answered a single phone call,
Speaker:at least not for the past few years, and he made them even more rarely.
Speaker:Scrolling back that far took very little effort, too,
Speaker:as communication was fairly rare.
Speaker:Doctors, he’d occasionally call, and pick up their calls, though,
Speaker:again, more rarely in recent years,
Speaker:and he never once answered a call from a number not already in his contacts.
Speaker:But every week, without fail,
Speaker:there would be a call from Nathaniel,
Speaker:and, every week, without fail,
Speaker:August Corcoran would pick up.
Speaker:The earliest call on the phone was one such, in 2013.
Speaker:Abruptly, though, the pattern changed in early 2020.
Speaker:One week, there was no call from Nathaniel, and, instead, August Corcoran
Speaker:had made the phone call,
Speaker:once, twice, three times
Speaker:with no answer. Then,
Speaker:one call to ‘Emergency.’ ‘Emergency’
Speaker:called back the next day,
Speaker:and there was no more communication after that between
Speaker:‘Emergency’ and August Corcoran, nor was there between August Corcoran
Speaker:and Nathaniel Lyon.
Speaker:For over a year, until his death,
Speaker:August Corcoran did not answer a single phone call.
Speaker:A completed picture was beginning to take place in Lance Dyer’s mind,
Speaker:though it wasn’t one he was very happy with, so he quickly replaced the phone in his paws with the ereader.
Speaker:August Corcoran liked stories of all sorts.
Speaker:It seemed there wasn’t a story he would not try.
Speaker:The worn down sides of the device
Speaker:where August might have kept it close in his paws and the small dents where he would tap his claws to turn a page allowed Lance to easily imagine the ermine,
Speaker:laid comfortably in the very bed he stood aside,
Speaker:as rapt as he could be
Speaker:and in a world
Speaker:of his own. August Corcoran had a favorite genre, too;
Speaker:at least, as far as Lance Dyer could see by numbers alone.
Speaker:It was romance that kept him,
Speaker:and not just any.
Speaker:It was the sort that brought Lance
Speaker:as close as possible to confirmation of what he had been suspecting about the ermine.
Speaker:Assumptions were a part of his job, of course, but he didn’t want to make such a leap
Speaker:knowing that his own experience might have
Speaker:been clouding his judgment.
Speaker:But, lo and behold,
Speaker:it seemed August Corcoran had just finished one such romance story,
Speaker:one between a young writer fox
Speaker:and a musician wolf,
Speaker:and the beautiful thing they found in being able to help and inspire each other.
Speaker:At least, that was what Lance could gather from the synopsis.
Speaker:That, and that it foreshadowed a rather unhappy
Speaker:ending for the two men.
Speaker:Further searching revealed to Lance
Speaker:that his interests within the wider genre were about as varied as those outside of it.
Speaker:Historical, science fiction,
Speaker:fantasy, coming of age,
Speaker:even those shameless stories that were nearly pure smut, each and every one indicated as 100% complete.
Speaker:Lance found himself drawn to the period of time
Speaker:in which August Corcoran had been absorbed into biographies,
Speaker:finishing one after another
Speaker:those on Freddie Mercury, Liberace, Harvey Milk, and Michel Foucault.
Speaker:Lance found himself smiling in spite of himself,
Speaker:seeing those names together on the page in front of him.
Speaker:He felt the respect
Speaker:that August Corcoran had for those who paved the way,
Speaker:and he knew that the ermine had lived through much of that time himself.
Speaker:Before finding himself inevitably absorbed in one of those books, though,
Speaker:Lance moved on once more,
Speaker:finding the final piece of the puzzle,
Speaker:the bathroom. It was a rather simple room,
Speaker:small, with a bathtub on one end,
Speaker:shower curtains drawn open, and a toilet and sink sitting across from each other just in front of it.
Speaker:It couldn’t have been much of a mess if August Corcoran had tried,
Speaker:but he certainly might have.
Speaker:That is to say, it was clear that its cleanliness was not the ermine’s top priority,
Speaker:but it was certainly not
Speaker:a hazard of any sort.
Speaker:Just, as much of the rest of his house was,
Speaker:lived in. He had just one task in mind in the room,
Speaker:and a quick look around gave Lance Dyer no new ideas, and, so, he set right to the mirror above the sink.
Speaker:Prying it open revealed the medicine cabinet,
Speaker:just as expected.
Speaker:This, he thought, was always his least favorite part of any investigation.
Speaker:Everything he was doing felt personal, perhaps too invasive.
Speaker:However, in knowing just how many doctors August Corcoran had contact with,
Speaker:and in understanding that they were some of the very few he had ever spoken with,
Speaker:Lance knew that this was one of the most important steps.
Speaker:A bright yellow paper taped to the inside of the door
Speaker:caught Lance’s eyes first.
Speaker:On it, the handwriting
Speaker:of the second writer from August’s
Speaker:‘The Threat to Our Lives’ copy.
Speaker:The ink ran bold, due to the slow, deliberate stroke writing out doses,
Speaker:and medicine names,
Speaker:yet there were notes scrawled so hastily below that even Lance,
Speaker:practiced now in reading August Corcoran’s handwriting,
Speaker:couldn’t read. Lance didn’t recognize any of the names of the medicine therein.
Speaker:There seemed to be a common thread amongst those who he was needed for,
Speaker:so Lance grew to recognize the names of depression, anxiety,
Speaker:and even ADHD medication,
Speaker:but those small orange bottles were entirely foreign to him,
Speaker:the labels nonsense, just like his first time ever entering
Speaker:one of those medicine cabinets.
Speaker:He didn’t want to diagnose a dead man he had never met,
Speaker:but Lance certainly believed some of those meds that he was familiar with
Speaker:might have done August Corcoran some good.
Speaker:But, Lance learned that it might not have changed a thing;
Speaker:the end dates of each prescription
Speaker:had long since passed,
Speaker:and each bottle was far from empty.
Speaker:Yet, the paper on the mirror had been taped up, taped over, torn off, many,
Speaker:many times. Lance,
Speaker:wanting to think through it all,
Speaker:had closed the mirror, and, as it happens,
Speaker:was met with his own muzzle, surprising himself, just a little,
Speaker:without thinking about what was in front of him.
Speaker:He saw himself as other people saw him for the first time,
Speaker:how he might have seen himself
Speaker:if this were his own apartment he was rummaging around.
Speaker:Tan fur, ear tufts,
Speaker:dark eyes, and all.
Speaker:Large, perhaps too large, rounded glasses.
Speaker:Teeth so nearly perfect,
Speaker:white and straight; all but one, one sharp looking tooth on his bottom row
Speaker:just poking up above the top row,
Speaker:asymmetrical, but not important enough to get fixed.
Speaker:Collared shirt, buttoned straight,
Speaker:neat, and tight. It was a boring,
Speaker:drab white. For a moment, that’s all he was.
Speaker:An amalgamation of the features that made up the man
Speaker:that was named Lance Dyer.
Speaker:Soon, though, he was more.
Speaker:He was the teasing from his older siblings.
Speaker:He was the mystery novels he read alone in his room
Speaker:when he was meant to be doing homework.
Speaker:He was the first time
Speaker:he branched out from that hole,
Speaker:where he found the one person who he could trust.
Speaker:He was the first kiss that they shared,
Speaker:and the last. He was his work,
Speaker:and the love and care he put into it, against
Speaker:what everyone else told him to do.
Speaker:While these things weren’t in his apartment, his own medication,
Speaker:what he decided he might need after seeing the aftermath of others going off of theirs,
Speaker:was. And he didn’t have much room for a library of his own,
Speaker:but he still had textbooks stashed away somewhere from his short stint in thinking he wanted to be involved in criminal justice.
Speaker:And he still had pictures,
Speaker:hidden away in a box,
Speaker:probably right next to those textbooks,
Speaker:from the photo booth he visited on his first real date,
Speaker:and that same first kiss documented,
Speaker:and the surprise in his eyes when it came.
Speaker:And he had his files,
Speaker:on most every surface in his home,
Speaker:because he brought his work home with him.
Speaker:One last long, contemplative look at himself
Speaker:told Lance that he was almost done.
Speaker:He needed to be done, even—
Speaker:he’d never had an experience so jarring
Speaker:as to see his whole life behind him.
Speaker:Yet, even more, he needed to finish his work,
Speaker:because that story
Speaker:for August Corcoran existed somewhere, and he needed to know it.
Speaker:Perhaps it was because he could see himself in the ermine,
Speaker:if only because of his sexuality, or perhaps it was
Speaker:because he’d, at one point,
Speaker:also had a tendency to self isolate, or perhaps
Speaker:it was just because Lance had been trying harder to get into August’s mind
Speaker:than anyone before,
Speaker:because he still had unanswered questions,
Speaker:and still only had a vague idea
Speaker:as to what and who had shaped the ermine,
Speaker:and about who might want to— or need to— know of his passing.
Speaker:There was only one more place for him to look,
Speaker:and, so, Lance left the bathroom, as determined as he ever had been to find the truth.
Speaker:Lance thought he knew the end, and,
Speaker:while he didn’t know it all,
Speaker:he thought he understood enough of the beginning, too.
Speaker:But August Corcoran
Speaker:was not defined by his destination,
Speaker:the same fate which we all hold,
Speaker:and the beginning was just that, and,
Speaker:so, Lance was compelled,
Speaker:dragged in front of that computer by his own two legs, and he sat down,
Speaker:praying to whatever entity might listen,
Speaker:and even August Corcoran himself,
Speaker:that it might come to life.
Speaker:It did. It was slow,
Speaker:and the keys stuck,
Speaker:and the screen was scratched and smudged in every way imaginable, but it turned on.
Speaker:No password, just as his phone had been.
Speaker:August Corcoran had no programs on his desktop,
Speaker:no folders or files.
Speaker:All he had was the generic,
Speaker:preinstalled internet browser,
Speaker:which brought him right to his email,
Speaker:the very same service Nathaniel had used,
Speaker:one Lance hadn’t been sure was still in service,
Speaker:and a quick look told the caracal
Speaker:that August Corcoran had only ever used the laptop, going back years and years,
Speaker:to access that email.
Speaker:The mailbox was full,
Speaker:going months back, of, once again,
Speaker:the same sort of messages August Corcoran had been receiving in the mail.
Speaker:And, abruptly, nothing,
Speaker:as though August Corcoran
Speaker:only created the email a year ago.
Speaker:Knowing that that certainly couldn’t be true,
Speaker:Lance found several years worth of much the same quickly
Speaker:and easily in the junk folder.
Speaker:August might not have known that sending them to the trash rather than junk permanently deleted the emails after some time,
Speaker:and, surely, cut down on the time it took to load.
Speaker:Or, maybe, August Corcoran wasn’t particularly concerned about time.
Speaker:Seeing that Junk folder, though,
Speaker:gave Lance Dyer the answer he’d been looking for—
Speaker:a folder underneath it
Speaker:just labeled ‘Important.’
Speaker:Every message inside it was from the same sender,
Speaker:going well over a decade back.
Speaker:The first, and, I’m sure, the earliest message in the inbox at all,
Speaker:a response. Lance wanted to read every word they sent, but settled for starting
Speaker:in the outbox, and the message that started it all. [No
Speaker:Subject] Nathaniel,
Speaker:Thank you for the letter.
Speaker:It is good to hear from you again.
Speaker:I’ve already finished the book.
Speaker:The woman at the bookstore has very good taste.
Speaker:Graphic novels might not be so bad after all. You just
Speaker:always chose to read the bad ones.
Speaker:I’d love to talk about the story in more depth,
Speaker:but I won’t say anything yet, until I’ve heard back from you and know that you’ve finished it, too.
Speaker:I won’t make the same mistake Brandon made, with that one superhero movie.
Speaker:I don’t remember anything that happened in the movie,
Speaker:and I don’t even remember the name, but I could probably still remember your part of the argument word for word.
Speaker:(To call it an argument feels wrong,
Speaker:but any other words feel too cruel for something I remember
Speaker:very fondly). Congratulations on the job.
Speaker:I can believe you’d be good at it.
Speaker:You’ve always been great with people.
Speaker:I’d love to hear about Auburn some time.
Speaker:I hope Angelina and Rebecca are well.
Speaker:August And the response.
re:[No Subject] Glad to hear you liked the book.
re:I shouldn’t be surprised you finished it so quickly, but you were right to assume I haven’t.
re:It’s very difficult to find the time,
re:with family and work,
re:but I’ve been slowly making a dent in it. The father reminds me of Brandon, actually, so it’s nice to hear you mention him,
re:even if the context isn’t flattering for me.
re:Though, if he’s as gay as he seems,
re:maybe the father is more like me than Brandon.
re:I hope you didn’t think very hard about that as you read.
re:The job is wonderful,
re:and I get to hear all sorts of stories.
re:Every night, someone comes in wanting a drink I’ve never heard of, so I get to learn how to make something new.
re:It’s far away from Haventon,
re:but I’m not sure Angie would have liked me working there very much.
re:I have gotten out there a few times, though,
re:and it’s as interesting as they say.
re:I know we always wanted to visit, but we’d have either destroyed the place or ourselves if we came here in our twenties.
re:I guess we did just fine at destroying ourselves, though, didn’t we?
re:We’re both still here, though.
re:I was really, really relieved to hear from you, after all this time.
re:With Boris passing a few years ago,
re:I guess we’re the last ones left.
re:But I always had a feeling you’d be alright.
re:You’re the strongest person I know.
re:I’m glad I decided to get back in touch with you, August.
re:I’ll send you some pictures of Auburn soon,
re:if you promise to learn how to send me some
re:of back home. Lance wanted to give every word the same attention,
re:the same respect,
re:that he had given their first three pieces of correspondence,
re:but he knew that it would take far,
re:far more time than he had.
re:But he couldn’t stop himself from clicking and skimming the next email in the chain,
re:and the next, and the next.
re:Lance Dyer saw pictures of a family home in Auburn,
re:of a young otter girl,
re:of the very apartment he was in
re:and the town as he remembered it in his youth.
re:He read about books he never read,
re:about times long before he lived
re:and the people, all gone even then,
re:who had lived in them.
re:Sometimes it took a few days for one of them to reply,
re:but they would always return.
re:Sometimes, it was with news
re:of something great,
re:or terrible, or perhaps just interesting that had happened,
re:and sometimes one had read a book
re:the other had recommended,
re:or remembered a time long past
re:that they could reminisce on.
re:They exchanged phone numbers
re:and scheduled a weekly phone call,
re:at a time where Angie was always at work.
re:August got a new job.
re:Rebecca started high school,
re:and then college, with pictures to match,
re:and August was proud as if she were his own,
re:even though he had never met her.
re:Any rigidity in those first few letters
re:melted away, slowly but surely, to reveal the comfort
re:and familiarity of those who had spent so much of their youth together.
re:Lance’s reading just got faster as he approached the end,
re:as August Corcoran
re:grew into just the man
re:Lance had profiled him to be in his aging,
re:and as the end grew nearer.
re:He needed to know what happened.
re:But where he wanted,
re:expected, needed a bang,
re:there came only a whimper.
re:The final message exchanged between the two came abruptly,
re:and it was far from the usual exchange of hundreds of words at a time.
re:If I’m strong, it’s only because of the strength you give me.
re:Lance Dyer had never felt so powerful a whimper,
re:and had never felt the world around him crash down so suddenly with his realization.
re:He had forgotten where he was, what he was doing.
re:August Corcoran was dead, and that was that.
re:No amount of caring for him or understanding his story could bring him back.
re:Lance didn’t regret it for a moment, though.
re:Hours had passed since he’d entered the apartment,
re:but Lance felt that he’d lived a whole new life.
re:August Corcoran and Nathaniel Lyon
re:had a way of transporting you into their world, and anyone who could have experienced it
re:would have been grateful.
re:Wiping a tear from his eye,
re:the caracal carefully closed the laptop,
re:respectful of all it represented,
re:and left the bedroom.
re:That brought him face to face
re:with August Corcoran again. Ermine. 62.
re:Died alone in his apartment.
re:No living relatives or known associates.
re:Proud gay man. Lover of books.
re:Incredibly strong-willed.
re:Might have been a menace, in his younger days.
re:Lance Dyer was experiencing a loss of his own at that moment.
re:He had seen the world through August Corcoran’s eyes,
re:and had almost forgotten that the ermine was gone.
re:Now, face to face with that reality,
re:the tears he had wiped away moments before returned.
re:He wished he could have gotten to know the real August Corcoran, always in the small apartment
re:just on the other side of town.
re:He’d have had so many wonderful stories, and,
re:Lance thought, maybe he could have used a friend over the past few years.
re:Maybe he’d still be here.
re:Lance Dyer took a moment to compose himself,
re:dipped his head in respect for the ermine,
re:and walked out of the home.
re:He had ignored a text from Rousseau in his reading,
re:but didn’t feel the need to bother checking.
re:Instead, he pulled out his phone,
re:and made the call he needed to make,
re:still with some glimmer of hope inside of him.
re:A simple dial tone
re:and a notification that he number had been disconnected
re:dashed some of that hope, but Lance had anticipated that.
re:He quickly tapped away at his phone
re:the number of a small family home
re:out in the suburbs of Auburn.
re:After the right amount of rings,
re:he was sent to voicemail.
re:This, he thought, still feeling that slight glimmer,
re:and the warmth that came with it,
re:could very well qualify as an emergency.
re:“Hello,” a woman’s voice said.
re:“You’ve reached the residence of Angelina Lyon. I’m not in right now, so—”
re:Lance hung up, walked as steadily as he could to his car,
re:and drove off. He didn’t have much to report to Rousseau,
re:so the later he was the worse it would be for him, he knew.
re:He would tell the squirrel that August Corcoran was just who they thought he was,
re:in the clinical way that they wanted.
re:Single, no living relatives or known associates,
re:and that he could be laid to rest in whatever way they saw fit.
re:There were things
re:that were never meant to be understood.
re:Lance knew when and where August Corcoran had died,
re:and he knew what had killed him.
re:What he never understood
re:was why we all are doomed to the same fate.
re:Lance Dyer knew that not every story was happy in the end.
re:But he knew that this one
re:must once have been.
re:It must have been
re:beautiful. It must have been,
re:he thought, because he could see it
re:right in front of him,
re:some of those visions as clear as his own memories.
re:August Corcoran had a story
re:of love. A pure love, spanning
re:decades and half a continent.
re:A love spanning years of lost time.
re:That is how August Corcoran would be remembered.
re:That is how August Corcoran would be defined.
re:If nobody else would, or could, remember him,
re:Lance Dyer would. August Corcoran
re:was the beautiful story he lived,
re:in spite of his flaws,
re:and in spite of the story’s unhappy ending.
re:When his work was done,
re:Rousseau notified and August Corcoran buried,
re:all the paperwork filed,
re:Lance decided that he wouldn’t be taking any cases for a while.
re:He knew that if Rousseau knew how he felt,
re:he’d have been ordered time off, anyway.
re:Getting attached,
re:making things personal, was never good in Lance’s profession.
re:But he also had a new appreciation for the life
re:he was living, and he wanted to go out and live it.
re:Perhaps he’d take a vacation.
re:He’d heard Auburn was beautiful
re:this time of year.
re:This was the second
re:and final part of
re:“The Life and Death of August Corcoran”
re:by Ari Yena, read for you by Khaki,
re:your faithful fireside companion.
re:As always, you can find more stories on the web at thevoice.dog,
re:or find the show wherever you get your podcasts.
re:Thank you for listening to The Voice
