DAY 11.

an excerpt from my short story…

The girls move like water. Every time their hands reach up to rake through their hair, it reminds Harrison of the ocean. He’s had far too much whiskey. He drinks his beer. It’s the social norm.

These girls are wearing too much makeup. They stood in front of their bathroom mirrors only hours earlier, awash in a dusty yellow light. Applying their lip gloss was a delicate science to them. Their outfits were meticulously arranged. They show too much cleavage, too much leg. Harrison never thought there could be too much of that, but he’s been proven wrong tonight.

The girls all fuss with their hair. They look at the guys and then look down at the ground, biting their lips. They stumble. They vomit in the bushes. They smell like heaven.

Harrison takes another sip of his beer. It’s getting warm. His body is growing warmer too. The air is thick outside, humid and muggy. Chad grins at him from across the lawn and holds his red cup in the air. They clink from thirty feet away.

“You are a gentleman and a scholar,” Chad yells over the group of girls surrounding him. “Damn, I want some pizza.” Harrison finishes the remaining dregs of his drink and throws the cup onto the grass.

DAY 05.

We are thrown together by circumstance. The sun is on our backs and we squint as we look down the road. We wait. It’s all we seem to do anymore.

This commute is not one we take by personal choice. It is a necessity. We are the unlucky few who live too far away to walk and are too poor to drive. Perhaps some of us are just lazy. Why spend a half an hour moving our legs when we can spend forty minutes waiting impatiently for a school bus disguised as a shuttle?

The elusive bus sputters and whines as the brakes are hit in front of our stop. We are a haggard bunch of strangers beaten down by days’ events. Some of us have had enough of the bullshit that this year is sure to bring. Some of us are involved in a very top-secret comic book club. Money is exchanged in a conspiratorial manner. We put our headphones on and tune out the outside world. We shift our backpacks and think about what we’ll eat for dinner. We dread returning home to an empty apartment. We sneeze.

We get on the bus.

None of us want to sit with each other. That would imply that we want to converse. We all have so many things to say but we don’t want to waste the words on people we don’t know. We keep our banal thoughts inside our heads as we pull out of the parking lot. The seats feel no more comfortable as they did when we rode these buses in elementary school. The green upholstery is peeling. We pick at stray pieces of stuffing coming out of the seats in front of us. We lean our heads on the windows. We tap our feet. We eavesdrop.

The bus driver strikes up a conversation with us. We aren’t sure who he’s talking to but there’s no way we can avoid him. We are all trapped in this cage of metal and rolling wheels. The drive back isn’t long, but today it feels like an eternity. We listen to him discuss his great Aunt Mildred. She’s turning 92 soon. We don’t care but we can’t stop listening. We crane our necks to see outside the windows, feeling jealous of all of the other riders getting off before the rest of us.

We are subjected to more information about Aunt Mildred. We begin to question the sanity of our bus driver as he talks about the ways he could make his poor Aunt Mildred kick the bucket. All he needs is an air-tight alibi. He’s been mentioned in her will. She’s in perfect health. We don’t make eye contact with him as he peers back at us. Only one of us decides to answer his questions. The rest of us stare at each other, wondering if this is actually happening.

We hate this ride. Our backpacks are heavy against our bodies and we hope we’ve remembered our keys. We go through lists of things we need to get at the grocery store. We send dirty text messages to our significant others to pass the time. We despise Wednesdays.

DAY 04.

The world has gone to bed but they’re still awake, eyes wide open.

The back patio overlooks a line of apartments. Every light is off in every window. There is an illusion of privacy. Not a sound can be heard. He packs the bowl in a methodical way and makes suggestive conversation. This is nothing new. This was expected.

She eases back in her chair and shivers. A cool breeze tickles her face. She wishes she had worn a sweater. He’s saying things to her that feel out of place. She’s almost certain he’s used these lines on others before her. A star-filled sky stretches out over the tops of the other apartments in the complex. He lights the coal with a flick of his lighter. His face bursts into clear view in the darkness.

“I’m only staying for a little,” she says as he passes her the hose. He smirks at her like he assumes that’s a lie. He might be right.

Inhalation.

A smoky, sweet vanilla rush invades her lungs. She holds it there and then lets it out, watching the smoke rise in puffs above her. She passes him the hose and tries not to notice the way his fingers linger on hers as their hands brush.

“I’m going to die alone,” he says, taking a pull from the hookah himself. She stays in her seat and feigns sympathy just this once.

He blows smoke rings and hands her back the hose. She inhales again, longer this time. A slight buzz is overtaking her and she closes her eyes. Her body feels lighter than usual. If she wanted to, maybe she could fly. She opens her eyes and he’s out of his seat. He’s crouched in front of her and it is then, when his cheek presses against hers, that she remembers why she might be here.

He says the things that hold more promise in the dark. The things she wants so desperately to believe. His hand traces over her skin like he cares. Like he wants her. His lips on her neck feel like distrust. Like broken promises. Like rebellion. She grips the arm-chairs. She doesn’t budge. His fingers tangle in her hair. It feels like something forbidden.

“Are you lightheaded yet?” he asks.

They kiss. They smoke more. He suggests she stay.

“Just to watch a movie,” he assures. She knows better.

His apartment is empty. No furniture, no people, just vacant rooms waiting to be lived in. The movie is turned on and then turned off. She feels like a ghost, drifting in and out of what is happening in the here and now and what she remembers from months before. When it was a different person, a different body, a different bed. When it was love.

But there is no bed here. There is nothing but a blanket, a living room floor. Her heart remains in pieces on the tiles of the kitchen. Her self-respect has disappeared into an abandoned closet. He got what he wanted. She got what she thought she wanted.

But this was not what she needed.

DAY 03.

We contemplated all of the wires, all of the parts. They came in a shiny plastic bag. That bag made us feel good. We could see everything inside. We knew what to expect. So unlike people, we thought. You could never see inside someone from the get go. Never knew what you were getting.

We read the instruction manual. Or maybe we skimmed it. People never came with instruction manuals. So unpredictable, human beings were.

We scoffed at the task ahead, as if we installed television sets all the time.

“This will be a piece of cake”, we thought. “We’ll finish just in time to tune in to “Hell’s Kitchen”. That Gordon Ramsay, he’s a pistol.” We scowled when we missed our eight-o-clock deadline.

“This is sure to be a snap”, we said with a positive attitude. We were obsessed with staying positive. It would be a dark day if the installation of our television sets was enough to send us into a depressive spiral. We took enough pills as it was. One for sleeping. One for weight control. One for staying focused.

We shook off those dark thoughts, put them in the backs of our minds. We were capable. We were intelligent. We were so self assured. So confident. Nothing would get us down.

We scratched our heads in thought. We kicked the television stand harder than we probably should’ve. Some of us ended up in the local physician’s office with stubbed toes. We took care not to kick the actual DVR box, because if that happened, well then we’d be really screwed.

Often, we pressed the power button on and off.

And then on again.

And then off again.

And then one more time on, because you never really know with these things.

Our technologically talented spouses swept us out of the way. They brushed us aside with a flick of their hands. They had read the instruction manual from cover to cover. They knew it inside and out.

“Leave this to the experts,” they said. Some of them got stubbed toes too.

Our smart friends who received computer science degrees came over to take a look. They’d only be a quick second. This whole problem, this headache, would be solved. With a pill. With a quick fix. With a remote control and a comfortable seating area. Except it wasn’t.

We ached from boredom. We tried reading our books. We subscribed to more magazines. We went jogging. We had sex. We went to lunch.

But what was there to talk about? How could we keep up with Brian from accounting at the water-cooler at work? His cheesy smile and gelled hair. That bastard. He could rattle off stats about “Lost” like no one’s business. He knew all the great conspiracy theories. We couldn’t add our input to the heated discussion of the final show of the series because we hadn’t seen it. Surely our jobs would suffer if we didn’t seem interested in our fellow co-workers, and the things they were invested in. We’d never beat out Brian for that promotion.

We were exhausted. Our toes were so sore. The couches weren’t nearly as comfortable as we had previously thought, so we upgraded to something leather. The kind that sank when we sat in it. The sex wasn’t that good. Our lunches became too expensive. We bought new running shoes. And then we called the cable guy.