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!
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 »
It was a steamy summer day. The humidity was so thick that you’d swear the air was ten percent banana pudding. And another five percent might have been cigarette ash, judging from the layer of grit that dusted our sweaty skin. By the time we had locked up the apartment and set foot on the street, we already felt like we had been camping for days without showers.
I had finished a raspberry Tootsie Roll Pop a few minutes earlier, and the aftertaste of seemingly real raspberries coated the inside of my mouth. It tasted like I was returning from picking fresh berries in a green, leafy patch. Like I had stood there in the sun for hours, sneaking every fifth berry in my mouth and carting the rest of the fragrant, bleeding fruits homeward in a heavy, shallow cardboard box. I could make pie with them, or scones. Instead, I was just heading out into the city on a humid day, a few minutes after finishing a sucker.
As our four slick arms collected their layer of city grime, I rolled my tongue in the berry taste on the roof of my mouth. It’s strange that the raspberry Tootsie Roll Pops taste like real fruit, while the cherry and grape and orange and chocolate always taste like chemical facsimiles. Somehow, Tootsie only got raspberry right.
We left my apartment, which was on the second floor of a building that held three other apartments. The building was made with bluish-green bricks. It had been built before 1900, and now some of the bricks had a tendency to crumble apart. When they crumbled, they looked just like soft, blue tofu.
Sometimes the building had strange problems. Like the doors wouldn’t shut in hot weather because they swelled. There was a leak in the ceiling over the toilet, so sometimes when I was sitting on the can I would feel a drop of rainwater in the part of my hair. Read the rest of this entry »
109. Lightning Bugs
July 17, 2008
1.
Kelly stood on a subway platform in New York. It was March, but unreasonably warm. An actual rat scurried across the grimy tracks. Kelly shuddered. Maybe it was her shuddering that made him notice her, or maybe he only felt right approaching her when to do so would distract her from vermin.
Sometimes, later, as she packed the children’s lunches or baked her hundredth cake, she would wish he had never approached her. Usually, though, she wished for other things.
“Kelly,” he said softly. She turned around. She looked up. His eyes looked kind, but hungry, she thought. It was true that he was thin. Read the rest of this entry »
108. White and Orange
July 16, 2008
She loved him more than anything. How could she not? With that unstudied, resplendent grin, that way of staring into the distance when he was consternated, those eyes, temples, earlobes, eyebrows, shoulders, tummy, hips. That laugh, those jokes, that way of listening, that way of nesting his thoughts when he talked, like a stucco of layered parentheses. Really, she thought, everyone who ever met him had to be in love with him. They probably were, too.
She was a yam farmer, and she loved yams, too. Loved their grainy sugary orangeness, their rumpled dirty skins, the hairs that stuck out of eyes. Yams brought her closer to friends, they let her express her love through cultivation, cooking, the offering of dishes. She loved to put yams in pies, cobblers, casseroles, salads, stuffings, soups, and fries. She snuck them into bread. She loved to get the dirt ready for them. She loved to water them and dig them up at harvest. They were her livelihood, her business, her love, and her self.
Once, during an argument, he called her “just a white trash yam farmer.” He said, “I hate yams. They’re squishy. They’re disgusting. They make me think less of you.”
So she threw him out. But it made her so sad that for the first time, she wasn’t hungry enough to eat any yams, not from the whole batch brought in that year. She barely ate a thing, and certainly not yams. But somehow, she channeled her sadness into the farming and cooking of yams. As she got thinner, her yam jam and yam souffle and yam cornbread, and all the other dishes she made with yams, became better than ever. She won awards. She sold her businesss. She wrote a book.
Months later, he came back. “I’m sorry, I was wrong,” he said. “Will you take me back?”
“I’m going to keep farming a lot of yams, darling,” she said.
“Yes! Of course! But could you also farm some plain brown potatoes, maybe, for me?”
And she was happy to do it. She started making a white version and an orange version of everything. White and orange mashed potatoes, next to each other in two ceramic bowls. A white salad and an orange one. And she was never happier.
image: digiyesica on flickr
88. Alexis and Marcel
June 26, 2008
1.
The first time Alexis saw Marcel, Alexis was walking to the breakfast table, wearing a knee-length robe and coarse terry slippers. Her hair was uncombed. It was a Saturday. She’d made herself pancakes and eggs and was carrying the plate in one hand and a mug of hot tea in the other, absently contemplating what to read with breakfast—the Times or Martha. That’s when she noticed the strange, young, brown-haired man at her table, wearing all black, his feet propped nonchalantly on one of her expensive maple chairs. With a little yell, Alexis actually dropped the plate of food on the carpet. The scrambled eggs bounced once and returned, quivering, to the plate. A single drop of brown syrup oozed like an afterthought onto the ecru pile.
The man put one hand over his mouth; other than that, he didn’t change his relaxed posture. His weepy brown eyes looked genuinely apologetic.
Alexis was conscious of the ceramic mug of boiling hot tea. She hefted it like the weapon it was.
“Who the fuck are you?” she demanded. Read the rest of this entry »
69. Seeing Stars at the Laminator
June 7, 2008
When I stand over the laminator, I see stars. I’m sure it’s the fumes from the melting plastic, but the ecru and light gray that dominate the copy room make it worse. The walls make a nice blank canvas for my aqueous humor to paint little stipply dots on.
I’m laminating, and the stars are twinkling. Not a skyful, just a few constellations. The hot machine groans as the belt inside pulls on my paper-and-plastic sandwich. When the sandwich is done grilling, I assemble another: stick a picture inside the plastic cover. Stick the cover into a long, white, paper hoagie.
One time, the boss forgot to use the paper carrier, and he ruined an expensive laminator. True story. Made a huge mess, too. Burning melted plastic everywhere.
After 20 minutes or so, I start getting dizzy. It smells like someone threw plastic on a campfire. The ecru walls waver and breathe.
I hear Axel F.
“Hello?” I say, opening my phone.
It’s Jane. Jane who I practiced kissing with when we were seven. Jane who I starred in the school play with when we were fifteen. Jane who’s now married and has a kid and has learned to cook and sew while I’m still looking for a girlfriend and microwaving popcorn for dinner.
“Hi, how was the rest of your party on Saturday?” she asks me.
“It was pretty fun. It died down a little after you left.”
“Oh. Sorry I couldn’t stay longer—”
“That’s cool.”
“Listen, I really want to have you over for dinner.”
“OK.”
“But I don’t know when, because Bob has this friend visiting from Phoenix, and I want to see him. While he’s here.”
“OK.”
“Yeah, so, I’ll give you a call.” She sounds so sad.
“Sounds good,” I say.
“Bye.”
“Later.” I clamshell the phone and return to my machine.
I was sitting on a counter to talk to her. When I stand, the stars come back all at once.
This story has been postdated to appear on Saturday, June 7. The author will be away from her computer until Monday, June 9.
image: Two Big Paws on flickr
55. Kiss Raffle
May 24, 2008
“Here, Amy, let’s give people these raffle tickets I just found.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re bored.”
“Oh yeah. OK.”
Amy and Kel left their dorm and started passing out raffle tickets to everyone they saw. Kel kept half of each ticket in a big jar. People peered at their tickets and put them in wallets and pockets.
“When’s the raffle?” everyone asked.
“At five in the quad,” Amy said.
Five rolled around, and they had no prizes to give away.
“Do you have any beer or cigarettes in your room?” asked Amy.
“No, I want those for myself,” Kel said.
“Well, we could make it a kissing booth, and the winners could win kisses.”
“That sounds great!”
There was a mini crowd waiting in the quad, and Amy and Kel drew tickets and called out numbers. People got to choose between kissing Kel and kissing Amy when they won. When Kel and Amy had had enough kissing, they said the raffle was over, and then they went home for beer and cigarettes and kissed each other.
image: alykat on flickr
29. Jeneane
April 28, 2008
It was one of those September nights that surprises you with how warm it can still be. It was eight PM, and the sun was still blazing. Earlier that day, Jeneane had seen a patch of moss on the sidewalk and thought it was a teeming cluster of ants, like it would have been in March. That’s how warm it was. Tonight, Jeneane was even wearing flip flops. Her toenails were a shiny lavender.
She left the bar, calling goodnight to her friends. Tim and Matt and Kerry and Diana were all going to catch the train. Now that she lived on the west side, Jeneane had to catch her bus alone.
She fished in her purse for change. Her depth perception was cheerfully, drunkenly impaired. It struck her, as she tipsily rifled through her knitted shoulder bag, that something was different. There was an odd, a completely unfamiliar, sensation in her right pinky finger. Not that the inside of her wool purse felt different, or her comb, or her embossed leather wallet with the familiar jagged teeth of its broken zipper.
Her finger itself felt strange.
She stopped walking. She pulled her hand out of the shoulder bag and studied it.
She had four fingers and a thumb, all five nails painted with the same lavender polish she’d used on her toes. But there was a sixth finger, too.
She had six fingers on her right hand.
She wiggled what was now her pinky. It had three perfect joints and a perfect, unpainted fingernail. A freckle sat between the top joint and the healthy cuticle. Read the rest of this entry »
24. The Way They Used to Be
April 23, 2008
When the alien came to stay with us, I was nice at first. I didn’t even mind cooking her those weird foods she ate for dinner, all boiled leaves and nothing else. When she first mentioned that she would die if she ate meat, I never dreamed of betraying that trust.
But then you started to like her more than me.
I guess she was more interesting, being from another planet and all. But it hurt seeing you two laughing and sharing stories on Wednesday nights. Those used to be our movie nights, remember? Who fucking cares about other planets? You used to be interested in our world.
So I started brushing beef blood on one of her bizzaro leaves every night. It was thrilling to watch her spear a piece of kale or dandelion, using her knife and fork with those beautiful hands so different from ours, exciting to wonder if this was the leaf that would hurt her. While you two talked about whatever you talked about, I surreptitiously watched her eat.
What did you expect? You were giving all your attention to her. All I did was cook for the two of you. I needed a game, I was bored.
Every night she grew a little grayer. More ashen. And then, one day she went into the yard to die. And that’s the story.
So, I’m glad that things can go back to the way they used to be. Don’t you agree?
image: ninjawil on flickr
