169. Strawberry and the Window
September 15, 2008
He never would have agreed to it if it hadn’t been Strawberry’s last night in town.
“I don’t know, Straw.”
“Come on, Bruce. I’ve done it tons of times. High school kids do it all the time. Are you more scared than a high school kid? Are you going to finish that banana?”
“No, you can have it. Yes, I’m more afraid than a teenager, because I am older and more knowledgeable.”
“Fine. We don’t have to do it.” She took a bite of his banana and chewed.
“In high school,” he said, watching her, “I once ate a centipede.”
“Dude! Awesome!” Strawberry wadded up the peel and held on to it. She wiped starchy banana from her fingers onto the side of one Chuck Taylor.
“It was horrible. And five minutes later everyone had forgotten about it but me.”
“I only wish you could see the swimming pool.” Strawberry looked at Bruce and sighed. “Maybe I’ll ask Horse.”
“I want to see you tonight! It’s your last night in town!” He shouldn’t have said it, but he did.
Strawberry and Horse came to pick up Bruce in Horse’s hearse. Strawberry was riding shotgun. Bruce climbed in back and lay in the huge space, looking at the velvet painting of Elvis that Horse stapled to the ceiling. Elvis was crying. Bruce turned off his headlamp and Elvis mostly disappeared, turned into a ghost.
“Where’d you get a hearse, horse?” asked Bruce.
“Police auction, actually.” Then Horse turned on the radio.
Bruce could still see the white outline of the King. He wondered what kind of crime the hearse had been used for, that would necessitate police action. Only certain kinds of crimes sprung to mind: murder, smuggling, grave-robbing.
He should have included breaking and entering on that list, but he didn’t.
They parked alongside the curb in a residential neighborhood, next to the school. Nighttime sprinklers scattered water across people’s lawns.
“Huh,” Strawberry muttered as they pulled up to the school. “Usually the lights aren’t on.”
“What does that mean? Should we leave?”
“Not sure, Bruce. Let’s check it out, come on.”
Horse and Bruce followed Strawberry through a parking lot. She stepped on a concrete ashtray and hoisted herself over a brick wall. Horse went next. Bruce weighed the most. As Bruce stepped off the ashtray, it came unrooted and toppled into a shrubbery. When they left, they would need to jump down from the seven-foot brick wall with no footholds.
Strawberry climbed into a dark window. She turned on her headlamp. Bruce and Horse could see her light moving around in the room. The lights were on in the east half of the building, where she wasn’t, but the west half was totally dark. The east half looked clean and orderly. Students’ crafts hung on the walls, construction paper and yarn.
“Come on in,” Strawberry stage-whispered. Bruce and Horse climbed into the window, looking over their shoulders. Bruce wished he hadn’t worn a yellow shirt.
Continued tomorrow?
image: Auntie P on flickr
166. Amanda
September 12, 2008
Before Amanda started volunteering at the elementary school, she was insecure and paranoid. But slowly, as she interacted every day with the other volunteers, she became more self-confident and trusting. Before, she had thought everyone liked to destroy one other. She would think people were picking her apart as soon as she left a room, but soon she came to believe that people actually wanted to hold one another together, like glue or compression.
In short, doing good in her community made her feel better about herself. She knew she was a cliché.
She worked all day long on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The reading room smelled like construction paper and glue. It was next to the cafeteria. Around 11:30, the smells of lunch would invade the reading room: canned corn, gravy, pizza. The children would become inattentive and squirmy. During that shift, she would have to do the reading for them.
Amanda forgot her lunch one day, and she went into the cafeteria between tutees. There was chicken soup. She bought a bowl.
“I’d be careful eating that, if I were you,” said the pretty, sharp-nosed woman who took Amanda’s money. Read the rest of this entry »
164. Top Hat
September 10, 2008
They gave her a one-minute head start. Heart beating quickly, she ran down the unfinished, splintering stairs, onto the city street. She spent too long deciding whether to turn left or right, and in that frozen moment she felt a cakey, dry shower cover her head and shoulders. She spluttered.
They had gone to the streetside window and opened a bag of flour above her head. Brushing off most of it, she chose left.
The city was a small one. No crowds to get lost in, no bustling marketplace where a small, flour-covered girl would go unnoticed. Her only hope was to duck into a building before her pursuers reached the street, and hope they would pass her by.
Thin, Disney-princess sandals slapping the pavement, she opened the first door that looked like a business and ducked inside. There was a tiny square foyer, with a staircase to her left, doors ahead and to the right, and three women standing anxiously tapping their feet. Piano music filtered into the foyer from other roms.
The women were staring at her. She muttered, “I’m waiting for my sister.”
“She’ll be out soon enough,” one of the tense mothers replied, and all three of them promptly ceased paying attention to the flour-covered girl.
Quietly, she sat on the stairs. A large window was between her and the street. The wood of the door behind her was vibrating with the notes of a Beethoven sonata. She peered out the large window into the street. A smarter girl might have ducked into a movie theater, bought a bus ticket, dyed her hair, dressed as a boy. But she watched the window instead. Sure enough, there were her captors, running gleefully down the street. They had everything but butterfly nets. She scrunched up against the stairwell wall, hoping there was enough shadow to hide her. The window was huge.
They stopped. One of them pointed at the ground, stooped to touch the sidewalk. He showed his finger to his partner, who nodded. The two of them looked slowly at the ground all around them. Then, horrified, she realized the flour trail went right up to the door of the piano conservatory. Creeping up the stairs, she went unnoticed, but when she opened the door, the dampened piano music became clear and sharp.
“Don’t go in there,” snapped one of the mothers. “Heidi’s playing in there.”
The girl went in anyway, hoping the small room would have other doors. Instead, she saw a girl about her age, in an expensive silk dress, playing a grand piano. A small man in Reeboks and a gray suit sat at a card table, adjudicating Heidi. There were no other exits: only two windows, one facing the street she had left and one on the opposite wall.
The judge and the pianist watched silently as her enemies entered the room, stately and otherworldly in their top hats. They watched silently as the child opened a window and climbed outside. They let her take her time, only getting close enough to see which way she ran when she landed on the pavement. Their faces were slightly green. The judge and little Heidi saw the men’s excitement grow and then taper into disappointment and disgust as they saw the girl hit the concrete, blood and flour and dust forming a cakey abstract painting beneath the tangled hair and rags.
“I just hate it,” the taller one said, as they exited the piano school and strolled back to headquarters, “when they do the job before we get a chance.”
“Yes,” agreed the shorter one. “It takes all the sport out of it.” Into a Nokia cell phone, he spoke their address and gave a few short instructions. “Let’s have a drink,” he said to his partner.
“Marvelous.”
The ghost of the little girl decided to make sport out of the two of them. It was only fair. She found them in the bar, drinking brandy and discussing deer season. Quickly she hid in one of their hats. It was a comfortable place to hide. She thought she might make this last for a while.
image: rattyfied on flickr
137. Courtship Story
August 14, 2008
An old high school friend of mine once had a boyfriend who gave her a gift every day for a year. All of the gifts were wearable: scarves, sweaters, chokers, and so on.
My friend has always had an impeccable wardrobe. In fact, she’s actually sort of superficial. But she’s good-natured about it. She’s just one of those people who really likes to look good. Which is to say I’m not at all surprised she attracted a man who would give her clothes every single day.
“At first, I was angry,” my friend told me. “But after a few months, I relented. We moved in together. Still, even then, every day he would present me with a gift. The daily gifts became like a joke.”
My friend told me about the gifts at our tenth high school reunion. We hadn’t seen each other since high school. The party was in the gym of our high school, where we had spent many hours playing basketball and jogging in circles. We found each other early in the evening, and we sat on the bleachers for hours, sipping white wine and remembering old times. Read the rest of this entry »
135. Scrabble
August 12, 2008
If she hadn’t gotten so drunk, Julie never would have bet her child on the outcome of a Scrabble game. But Julie had an excellent hand and a 50-point lead when she and Tara made the bet. She didn’t think she could lose.
The stakes were Julie and Mark’s daughter Alison for the Sweets’s boat. The atmosphere around the table was tense, to say the least. There they sat, the four of them: the Thompsons, Julie and Mark, and the Sweets, Ty and Tara.
Mark had been in the bathroom when Julie and Tara bet on his daughter, and now he was sulking. But he had to admit, the Sweets had poor vocabularies and never seemed to use the colored squares. He and Julie had a very solid lead. He fingered the smooth grain of his blonde X, waiting for Tara Sweet to play. He watched his wife pour herself a fourth glass of cabernet.
Tara made a lousy play, TOTS, netting her five points. Across the table, her husband made the notation with a pencil-stub.
“You know,” Ty said, “Ha ha, this is really weird. Let’s call it quits, guys.” Read the rest of this entry »
130. Carly
August 7, 2008
Carly was six when her aunt died. That meant Carly’s aunt was her first dead person.
The wake was well-attended, about a hundred people in a church. Carly and her parents walked in, and all they saw were the backs of heads, gray and black and blonde, black-hatted and bare and bald. Carly didn’t know most of the heads, or the faces in front of them.
Carly’s dead aunt was her father’s brother’s wife. Carly and her parents barely knew her, but it was obvious that they had to attend. Read the rest of this entry »
124. Allergies
August 1, 2008
“Good morning, young lady,” he growled. His breath was vaguely fish-and-oniony. She shifted her grocery bag to her elbow and replied, “You know, you shouldn’t spit like that in public.”
“Like what?”
“Loud. From the back of your throat.”
“I’m sorry, miss.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it.” She looked up the street, wondering when the bus would arrive. A car, assuming she wanted to cross, stopped for her. Irritated, she waved it onward.
“Hey,” he said, “Would you like to see something?”
Was she about to be flashed, and in broad daylight? “What is it?” she wanted to know.
“It’s here in the bushes. Just come look.”
So yes. He was a flasher. But the bushes were only shin-high. So, crabby and malicious, she thought, Sure, old man, bring out your chancre-covered shame. Give me something to call the police about. It would be a pleasure.
But no. He knelt and pulled the low juniper foliage away, a childish grin spreading across his face. There, on the barkdust, was a litter of orange kittens in a shoebox, their eyes unfocused, their faces fluffy and soft.
“Oh!” she said, in spite of herself. “They’re adorable.”
“Ain’t they the sweetest?” He poked one behind its orange ear with a tobacco-stained finger. “I found em on Fifth and Main.” Read the rest of this entry »
123. Thirty-Three Dead
July 31, 2008
The almost-dead went to the acupuncture clinic, as though being almost dead were a condition Jesse’s needles could solve. Maybe the feeling of release helped them cross over, or helped them come back. They never chose to come back, though. They always died. It was as if Jesse finally gave them the relaxation they needed to really pick up momentum and die.
Jesse would have complained sooner about all the corpses in his clinic, but the almost-dead were good paying customers. Besides, the county coroner was Jesse’s brother. After one of them died, Al would come over and make sure Jesse was all right, and he would take away the body discreetly. Then the brothers would sit in the park late at night, drinking beer and staring at the sleeping ducks near the pond. Read the rest of this entry »
117. The American Soprano Competition
July 25, 2008
There is almost no point in writing about this, since by tonight she will have won by default. Winning was to be my ticket out of this town, my passport to fame and fortune and world-famous conservatories. Now all I have is the private knowledge that I was the best. She will get all the glory and prize money, the world tour.
And I would have won, too. I know because I got the letter saying so.
That day I stayed home from work, because I had the flu. I had spent all night and most of the morning puking up celery and egg noodles from last night’s chicken soup, and then dry-heaving. I couldn’t even keep water down until noon. But it was uphill from there: after a glass of water stayed down for an hour, I tried grape juice and soda crackers. By afternoon, I was crunching down toast with peanut butter and feeling fine. I was still a little shaky, but the fever and the nausea had subsided. I was sure I could go to work the next day.
Around four in the afternoon, I could hear the mailman opening the squeaky mailboxes to my apartment complex. After the usual series of squeaks, I heard his shoes tromp away down the gravel path. I stepped into my slippers, which were soft fabric loafers with plastic, treaded soles. I went up to my mailbox, wondering if my letter would finally come. At this point, it was late.
I opened the mailbox for my apartment. It was completely filled by a large bundle of letters, rubber-banded, with a laser-printed receipt on the top.
HELD MAIL, it said. ANGELA LAMBIC. JULY 15TH, 2008 THROUGH AUGUST 1ST, 2008.
Held mail? I hadn’t requested a mail hold. Read the rest of this entry »
116. While Kids Played Kickball
July 24, 2008
It was a cloudy summer day. The world outside Barney’s window was washed in grays. Some kids were playing with a kickball in the street, but they seemed unreal, a projection from the clouds.
Smells from pollenating plants, ripe fruit, and garbage cans wafted up to his apartment. It was a simple apartment: cot in the corner, desk by the window, bookcase full of magazines, toilet, shower, kitchen.
Barney sat at the desk, staring at a tall stack of notes. He opened a word processing program. He was supposed to write the article by tomorrow. So far, the words weren’t coming. He needed to think of a way to start.
He started going through the neat pile of notes, organizing them into piles. He had a pile of notes on his subject’s mother, a pile on the father, a pile on short films made in adolescence, a pile on later work. The piece would be biography mixed with criticism, of course. But chronological order was so boring. Couldn’t he think of a more interesting format? Read the rest of this entry »
