154. String of Strings
August 31, 2008
Tina and Allen met in a Costco. She was there with a friend, thinking about buying huge bulk cases of toilet paper. He was working there.
Tina and Katie walked past the books and the cupcakes and the patio furniture and the craft supplies (she’d been clutching a scrap of yellow yarn that morning when she awoke).
“Can I help you with any yarn today?”
“No, thanks. I was just thinking.”
“That’s fine. I don’t work here. You just looked like you needed help.”
She looked at the man in the Costco uniform and smiled.
He would bring something over every night, and she would bring it back. They eventually settled on a little statue of a monkey.
They even got a cat.
image: kymineko on flickr
153. String of Bits
August 30, 2008
Allen Trail also died every night and returned to the world of the living every morning.
Every night, Allen brought something with him to bed: a dinner plate, a receipt for green beans, an address book. When he died at night, he brought the objects with him to the world of the dead. Each morning, the object he had brought to bed would be gone.
Needless to say, Allen was a little wary about having lovers. He even had to think very hard about getting a cat. What if the animal jumped onto his bed and was taken to the world of the dead?
Allen lived alone.
When he brought the address book across, he was distraught the next day. Would something happen to his friends and family? Would they get calls or letters from dead people?
“Mom,” he said, “Did you get any strange phone calls today?”
“No, Allen. Why? Have you been doing something illegal?”
He had to think about that question for a second.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
image: Rafa from Brazil on flickr
152. Bits of String
August 29, 2008
Tina Travers died every night when she went to bed. She came back to life every morning.
Every morning, she brought something back with her. Sometimes it was a paperclip, or a bit of string or yarn. Once it was a baby bottle. She held the baby bottle close to her eyes, looking through it. She wondered if she’d taken it from a dead baby, and what a dead baby would be drinking.
She never had any memory of being given the things, or of happening upon them, but she always had something in her hand when she woke up.
She kept the things from the world of the dead in a shoebox. There soon got to be too many of them. She started using a curio cabinet that had been sitting empty in her sitting room.
The dead things all had some unexplainable flatness to them. They weren’t dirty, just somehow colorless, like if you looked away they would disappear.
She started giving them away as gifts to her friends. That worked all right with the dartboards and scarves, but no one wanted the bits of string.
She didn’t feel right giving the baby bottle to anyone.
image: Maproom Systems on flickr
151. Courtesy
August 28, 2008
“Is that a job application?”
“I don’t think I can live on minimum wage anymore.”
“You should be a shift leader. Or work at the fancy grocery store. They have benefits.”
“Holy crap.”
“What.”
“The fancy grocery store opens at eight, but the bakers have to be there at two.”
“Wow. You’d have to go to bed at five.”
“Or just not go to bed. I could sleep when I got home from work. Here’s a courtesy clerk position. I’m going to apply for that.”
“What’s a courtesy clerk?”
“It’s like a bagboy…. They want to know how much I want to make. What should I put?”
“Would you be OK making nine?”
“Um.”
“Ten?”
“I’ll put ten.”
“I think if you put twelve they would not call you because of it, but I don’t think they’d do that for ten.”
*
“O-kay. I’ve brought you both here at once so you can tell me, and each other, why you’re right to be our courtesy clerk. O-kay?”
“Sure.”
“Yeah.”
“O-kay. So, Megan, you put on your application that you’d like to make ten dollars an hour. And Ashley, you said seven. Could you each tell me a little more about that?”
“I said ten because I’d like to make ten. Isn’t seven below minimum wage?”
“Oh, it is? Well minimum wage would be fine then. Hee hee.”
“O-kay. Why don’t you each tell me about a time when you provided or received excellent customer service?”
“Hee hee. Well, once a customer wasn’t happy with the price of something, so I gave it to her for free.”
“I, uh… wow, really? I once remade a man’s beverage four times. In the end, he was satisfied, and he gave a big tip.”
*
At the grocery store, there is free expired food. And health insurance.
image: homemadeoriginals on flickr
150. Couch
August 27, 2008
“Actually, I think it’s easier to buy a couch and get it set up in your home than it is to rent an apartment.”
149. Tommy
August 26, 2008
Tommy Nook slept with Melissa Merritt for a year before he heard her speak more than one word at a time.
“I don’t think it’s working out,” she told him. “I’m sorry.”
The biggest shock was hearing all those words tumble out of her mouth.
*
They met in a radish patch. Their college had organized an optional trip to pick and pickle radishes. Actually, Tommy had organized it. A decades-dead trustee named Mrs. Witherspoon had left an endowment just for feeding students in odd ways. “No pizza parties,” she had specified. “No restaurants. No stockpiles of dried noodles. Fruit-picking, hunting, and food-sculpture outings are appropriate.” Tommy was on the committee whose job it was to interpret Mrs. Witherspoon’s instructions. He organized butter churnings, bean peelings, hot chocolate brew-offs.
A dozen students had elected to go to the farm. Tommy worked next to a freshman with a kerchief on her head. She chattered incessantly. Unsure whether she was speaking to him, Tommy just worked. Occasionally he muttered confirmations or nodded. He dug into the soft earth with his trowel and threw the messy, wet radishes in their communal bucket.
When the talkative freshman paused for air, Tommy took the excuse to stand and stroll around. He wanted to make sure that all the students were participating and having a good time. That’s when he noticed Melissa walking next to him.
He looked over at her. Her eyes were huge and round, even in profile. Bulging, spherical eyes that were almost too big for her head. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and there were smudges of dirt on her temples.
“I’m Tommy,” he said.
“Melissa.”
“Are you, um, having a good time?”
“Sure.”
She stopped walking then, and he turned to look at her. She had a smile on her small mouth, and she raised an eyebrow. Then she walked off, beyond the radishes and cucumbers, into the corn.
*
It made sense that it didn’t work out between them. She was a figment of his imagination.
“How is it even possible that I can see you?” he asked her once.
“Calcification.”
“What does that even mean?” he asked. She only shrugged.
image: T.SC on flickr
tomorrow: plot!
148. Stevie
August 25, 2008
“Come on, you’re going to be late,” Wendy said to Stevie.
“Just a minute, I’m looking for my comb.” Stevie dug through his backpack, pushing aside toys and books.
“The train leaves in three minutes!”
“Okay, got it.” Comb in tiny hand, he zipped his bag.
Hand in hand they ran to the platform, Wendy puling her rolling suitcase behind her. She let go of Stevie’s tiny hand as she headed back to her seat. By the time she had shoved her suitcase in the overhead bin and sat down, she realized he was nowhere to be seen.
“Stevie?”
“Wendy!”
There he was, out the window, still standing on the platform.
“Get in here.”
“The doors are closed.”
As the train pulled away, she watched her brother wave goodbye. She was scared. What could she do? Would he know to catch the next train? If he didn’t, what would she tell Eddie? Sorry, I left my little brother in Chicago? If only Eddie and their mom had let them have cell phones.
Stevie watched the train with his sister on it pull away. Maybe now he would live with the pigeons. They could carry him around the city. He wondered how many pigeons it would take to pick him up.
Stevie knew the way to Mom and Eddie’s. It was no big deal. When the next train pulled into the station, he climbed on. It was only a few hours, and even though it was night, he didn’t fall asleep.
When he got off the train, there were Mom and Eddie and Wendy, all sitting on a bench.
“Stevie!”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
image: wishymom on flickr
tomorrow: real plot.
147. Wine Bar
August 24, 2008
I dropped my daughter at preschool. Across the street was a wine bar in the middle of a strip mall, between a pet shop and a thrift store. I pushed open the glass door and went inside.
The floor was covered in Astroturf. Bottles of red and white lined the brushed steel walls. There were no other customers.
I don’t like wine. I just didn’t want to go home yet. Too much vacuuming to be done.
“A glass of, uh, red,” I said. The bartender raised an eyebrow and chose a bottle for me.
“Four dollars,” he said.
I passed him a five.
image: blackbirdboy on flickr
146. Gin and Tonic
August 23, 2008
The storm woke them up. It was just a little Pacific Northwest storm. It was no hurricane. The rain didn’t even blow into the open windows. But the thunder caused all four of them to jump out of their beds, running in robes to the living room, where the best window was. A cool breeze and the smell of wet pavement met their faces.
The lightning would slice the sky, and then the thunder would follow on its heels. Someone made gin-and-tonics, and they stood by the window drinking the pungent concoction, watching.
When the power went out it was morning. Too awake now for bed, but unable to turn on the TV, they made groggy, casual conversation.
“Ever make crank calls as a kid?”
“Yes, but they weren’t that inspired.”
“I tried the classic jokes. ‘Is your refrigerator running? Better go catch it.’ But people already knew the punchlines. I think the fun part used to be fooling them.”
“Like, you’d call someone, and they’d think you were actually the refrigerator company.”
“Yeah.”
“Those were the days.”
“What time is it? Eight?”
“Mm.”
“I guess I should be getting off to work.”
image: Nostromoo on flickr
145. Chocolate Unicorns
August 22, 2008
I couldn’t sleep anymore. Every time I slipped into a doze, I dreamed about the chocolate unicorns. You wouldn’t think it, but they got as bad as Freddy Krueger.
Drinking coffee helped at first. I drank coffee constantly, all day long. The stained mug next to my keyboard became an office joke. I also took up smoking. A cigarette at ten PM, another at midnight, another at two in the morning: that’s how I kept myself from going to bed. I squatted shivering on the front stoop, dragging on a cigarette to stay awake, watching black cats strut from one shiny pool of streetlight to another on the black asphalt.
In between visits to the frosty, butt-covered stoop, I watched cable and kept up on my email. Around three, I would drag my red eyes to bed and flop onto the mattress.
Sometimes I was able to stay awake until almost four. You might wonder how that was possible; after all, I was only getting three hours a night. Wouldn’t I slip away as soon as my head hit the pillow? But fear kept me awake. I had several hypnic jerks a night. But every night, I lost.
Chocolate unicorns. These weren’t cute little die-cut advent-calendar candies. They weren’t sculpted wedding cake toppers, front legs reared, manes billowing behind them, petal-pink details painted on in glittery watercolor with a three-bristle brush. They weren’t candy.
The unicorns were seven feet tall. Chocolate dripped warmly from their sides. Nostrils flaring, they stampeded through my apartment. Every night I ended up underfoot, trampled by a hundred chocolate hooves.
Maybe something was wrong in my personal life.
image: Vaguely Artistic on flickr
