168. Amy
September 14, 2008
Amy never bought adult’s clothes. She still wore her childhood shirts and nightgowns, cut apart and sewn into new garments.
But it wasn’t about saving money. When she needed a new dress or pair of socks, she went to the mall and bought children’s clothes. Then she made Amy-sized patchworks from them.
162. Lisa’s Job
September 8, 2008
They hire very exacting people for Lisa’s job. Nothing requires more precision than handling people’s money for them, unless maybe it’s performing surgery. They need exacting people to work at Lisa’s branch, people who can count the same stack of bills five thousand times and get the same total. Maybe at your small-town bank branch they’ve got a couple of sketchy, college-age tellers filling out the ranks—a little purple eyeshadow here, a clandestine dreadlock there. But at your bank’s national headquarters, they only have people like Lisa. Sleek, sharp, corporate people without a single hair out of place.
Of course, Lisa is still a bank teller, and she still has to deal with problematic customers. Once a guy came in with a gallon milk jug full of loose change, dust, ashes, and ancient dairy residue; she took the heavy jug with a smile and poured the stinking mess into the counting machine. But those days are the exception.
image: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ on flickr
161. Night Off
September 7, 2008
“I just can’t do it today,” she said, indicating with an elegant gesture all of it: the baby grand, the empty fishbowl on top of the piano, the dimly lit lounge with its dark leather seats, the bar where hungry customers would soon perch, chomping at the bit to be served sashimi and spider rolls, even the white sand and blue waves outside.
“I just can’t,” she repeated. She took her purse off the piano bench and stripped off her pearl earrings and her gold necklace. She jumbled the jewelry in a tiny pocket and clasped the purse shut.
“Sure you can,” said Hal. Paternally he put a hand on her arm and looked in her eyes. “It’ll seem hard at first, and then you’ll get in the swing of it.”
That wasn’t the way to win her over, acting like he knew best. He only steeled her resolve to go.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. And then she walked out the door.
159. What They Got
September 5, 2008
Eric got framed for murder. All Josie got was six dollars from a class action lawsuit, a check in a window envelope that had been dropped in the mailbox on the twenty-third but which she had only found that morning.
It was the worst Christmas they’d ever had. And also the most judicial.
“Well, Eric, I guess this is goodbye,” Josie said, still clutching the six-dollar check as she hugged her brother. The policeman waited by his car with waning patience.
“I didn’t do it, you know.”
Josie smiled and hesitated for a moment. “Goodbye Eric,” she said again. She nodded subtly at the officer.
Understanding dawned on Eric’s face. He could be so slow sometimes.
“I’ll come visit you,” Josie said, with a sarcastic smile, “don’t worry.”
The officer put one hand on Eric’s head and guided him into the back seat. Eric looked out the back window at his sister—who waved her marshmallow-jacketed arm elbow elbow wrist wrist, smiling—until her image disappeared in the snow.
image: m_m_mnemonic on flickr
158. Hypochondria
September 4, 2008
Given occasionally to hypochondria, Mrs. Thompson didn’t tell anyone for months about the bumps on her arms. It would be the lung cancer that was really a simple cold all over again, the doctor telling her straight-faced not to worry and then laughing, obviously at her expense, outside her door, which was really only a curtain anyway. She probably only had mosquito bites on her arms, she thought, or maybe the rash was only psychosomatic. So she went to work as usual, getting the odd question about her sweaters in the summertime, when she was walking between the air-conditioned office and Daniel’s equally frosty car. She went to work as though her arms weren’t a maddening, itchy conflagration that flared up at inconvenient moments, during a routine cleaning, for example, or while she was providing support during a root canal.
One time, she had scratched her arms while Dr. Feldman was performing an extraction. “Heidi,” he had said, through the little paper mask, without looking up from the patient’s mouth, “Your scrubs aren’t sterile. Wash those hands and get new gloves, please.”
After that, she would count to a hundred when the itching began, holding her hands aloft where they belonged. When she needed to make it two hundred, she realized that maybe, yes, there was really something wrong, something besides mosquito bites.
image: Omar Omar on flickr
157. Mail Terrorism
September 3, 2008
“So did you take it to the post office?”
“Sure did.”
“Oh. So now what?”
“Now we sit back and wait.”
“Oh. Is that what we’re waiting for, over there?”
“No. That’s an ice cream truck.”
“Oh. Is that–”
“That’s a squirrel.”
“Oh. What are we waiting for?”
“Let’s just go inside and wait a couple days. Then we’ll turn on the news.”
“We’ll… wait. We’re not mail terrorists, are we?”
“Not unless it’s terrifying to get a giant chocolate cake on your birthday.”
“Then why would we make the news?”
“Because we just happened to send a chocolate cake to someone in the smallest town around here with a news station.”
“Oh. That… that actually makes sense.”
image: ShamsD on flickr
155. Pen Pals
September 1, 2008
Dear Robin,
Will you be my pen pal?
Do you play chess? If so, pawn to e4! Ha, ha.
But seriously, your move.
I hope you like living on 46th Avenue. Do you? Is that a busy street, or a quiet one? Do you live with your family, or roommates, or alone? How old are you? Are you a boy or a girl?
Hope to hear back from you soon. Ask me any questions you want. I don’t know what to write otherwise.
TIM.
PS: I got your name and address out of the phone book. I hope that’s OK.
image: CPSutcliffe on flickr
Tomorrow: 1000+ words.
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
