172. Vacation
September 19, 2008
The kids all stood in line to go down Splash Mountain, sweat trickling down their expectant faces. They had chosen a ride and were waiting to experience it. I don’t know why that depressed me. Probably I just wanted to be someplace that served beer.
172. Floorboard #2
September 18, 2008
The house had a magic hole in the floor that granted wishes. I think something bad happened, and I wished to have never moved in, because now I don’t live there, but I kind of feel like I started to.
171. Floorboard
September 17, 2008
I moved into the house. It had a secret hole in the floor that granted wishes.
170. Prosthetic
September 16, 2008
When I got a prosthetic hand, it helped. But I still can’t play poker; it clicks.
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
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.
167. Casio
September 13, 2008
There was a keyboard, and any music you played on it would be played in a room somewhere else. You never knew who was listening.
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 »
165. Sculpture
September 11, 2008
“Stupid internet. Stupid hot weather. Stupid television. I didn’t make anything today.”
“Here, step on this cereal box. There, sculpture!”
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
