story

The Lady With the Violet Hat

The moisturizer on Lynda’s desk at home is past its expiration date by several hundred months. She bought it thirty years ago and never used it. She discovered that moisturizer was not her cup of tea, but the bottle was pleasing to look at and so she kept it.

Lynda is not a hoarder. She is a collector. She collects various items and keeps them around her in lieu of family photos. Lynda has no family anymore.

The back of the medicine cabinet in Lynda’s apartment goes back deeper than expected. She keeps her safe there. With the family jewels, such as they are.

Kids in the neighborhood call her Lynda with a Y because that’s what she is. Lynda doesn’t begrudge them that. Linda is a popular name in her age bracket. She’s glad she sticks out somehow.

When the lady with the violet hat came to call, Lynda always pretended she was out. Except one time. This one time, Lynda lets her in (that time is in fact right now, this exact moment). It feels momentous, letting the lady with the violet hat in. She is beautiful, and Lynda has the strangest urge to kiss her forehead, but she restrains herself.

The woman in the violet hat has no name. She is as invented as Lynda is. She is a figment of Lynda’s imagination, as Lynda is a figment of mine. But she is important, just like Lynda is important. She is made, the lady with the violet hat, of the sentences that go through Lynda’s head and then disappear. She is the accumulation of all of Lynda’s castoffs.

Lynda makes the woman with the violet hat coffee and they sit together. Lynda waits patiently to hear the lady with the violet hat start talking. She wants to take notes when that happens, but fears it might be rude. She knows just what kind of voice the lady with the violet hat will have. It will be zesty, like an orange.

Goal Oriented

Rest when you’re dead. Carve up those calves, chisel those muscles. Make a sculptor of your will. Your body is the block of marble. The angel just needs to be freed.

Don’t mumble, stand up straight, wear suits. Make a good first impression. Crate your baggage upstairs on your own and leave it there to rot. Leave it in the attic, at the top of the house. Lock the door, swallow the key. Leave the skeletons to decompose. You have thousands of years at your disposal. You can afford to wait.

Sport a pair of sunglasses. Hide your eyes. Leave the sagging skin in bed with the rumpled sheets. Keep the smile in the corners of your mouth. The only acceptable wrinkles when you’re pushing thirty are laugh-lines.

Good Enough

The sponge lying on the floor of the tub is unattractive. It is still relatively new, but its shape is unappealingly squat and it has sooty stains on it, as if someone has been scrubbing rust crumbs off their body.

It is leftover, this sponge, from previous tenants. It is incredibly absorbing, I find, when I get in the shower and begin to use it. Some people would find this disgusting. My roommate would tell me off, like she does when I pee and don’t wash my hands. She is a neat freak, putting ever pin in its place and surrendering her body to the needle over and over again. There are knife scars on the inside of her wrist. She’s exchanged one habit with another when scratching the surface stopped being enough.

She and I have just moved into a new place. We’re getting actual furniture. We listen to music loudly and don’t care about the neighbors. There are children in the apartments all around us and they cry at night. It’s not exactly payback, blasting Led Zeppelin, but it’s close enough to be vindictive somehow.

The windfall that has allowed us to do this comes from my disgusting habits. My frugality knows no bounds. I scrimp and I save for a living. Companies pay me to do this. It’s a handicap that I stumbled through for years until someone told me it was a talent. I get paid nicely now, but I make my roommate pay me back exactly for half of everything. When we move out one day, each of us finding a new home, we will saw our things in half. I can see the gleam in her eyes at that suggestion. She likes playing with knives.

My room is bare of artwork, books, personality of any kind. Like me, it is unadorned. The only items of significance are hidden beneath my bed, in taped-up boxes. The cardboard is old and falling apart, but I wouldn’t let me roommate unpack and repack them when we moved. Their rotting edges remind me that they won’t always stay shut. It’s important to remember that things can burst from their seams.

One day, maybe I’ll open those boxes. And maybe I’ll buy a sponge of my own. But for now, I keep the boxes shut tight, reinforcing the tape and sweeping away the cardboard dust that accumulates under them. And for now, I use the leftover sponge to purify my pores. I shave my legs with my roommate’s old razor. I tie string around my pants instead of a belt. It’s a good enough way to live, for now.

Mayor

Greenlighting the project was easy. The mayor looked over the figures, read the reports, talked to a couple experts and figured that she could approve it. She failed to anticipate the backlash. Streams of letters flowed into her office over the next few weeks. She stopped opening them. Each had enough rancor in it to last a lifetime and she didn’t need to feel like someone other than her boyfriend  was slapping her around.

The boyfriend. He was another bit of uneaten dinner languishing on her plate. She wouldn’t get any dessert until she’d licked the whole thing clean. A lesson learned in early childhood, the mayor applied it to all aspects of her life with equal fervor and taught her children to do the same. The mayor’s boyfriend was a coal-miner, and proud of it. She’s gotten together with him partly for political gain. Nothing screamed one-of-the-people more than a widow and mother of four who also dated what most would call “a common man.” But now that he was leaving bruises on her a couple times a week, she needed to figure out a way to get out.

At least the children were gone for summer camp, up near one of the state’s beautiful lakes. The mayor spent the summer trying to handle the mess she’d made by approving the plans without backing out of them. That would be no good. She couldn’t be seen as weak, caving in at each bit of opposition. No. She would tough it out.

The mayor went to bed on July 23d, her birthday, with a black eye and a squad car guarding her house. She had received several death threats serious enough to worry the police. The morning was far away, she’d kicked her boyfriend out of her house, and she missed her children. She tried to picture them going to sleep in faraway bunk beds, whispering with their new friends, but another image kept intruding: her own body lying mangled in the kitchen, greeting the children when they got back.

Nowism

Sparks fly in a pathetic attempt at fireworks. Jared takes his fingers out of his ears and peers into the cardboard box. Faulty. The cylinders he got for cheap off of Old Man Bombay are all faulty. They’re sputtering quietly as their fuses go out. Jared kicks the box and one of the fireworks whistles and bursts horizontally. It hits a tree and releases a few pathetic bursts of color that melt into the dark ground.
Jared curses. He’s lucky nothing caught on fire or he’d be done for. Prime brush fire area this is. Stupid to try to light the fireworks here. Lucky they didn’t work, he figures. His forehead is damp with the panic of what could have happened. The damage that could have been done.
Jared’s biggest enemy is the subjunctive. Might have been, would have been, might and could be. Lethal expressions as far as Jared is concerned. Past and future are full of them. Only the present, the ever-occurring now, is free. Jared is a strong believer in the now. He tried to start a cult once, called Nowism. It didn’t go very well. None of the women he wanted to bone would join. And what’s the point of a cult if you don’t get to screw everyone’s women, Jared decided.
He occasionally pretends that it had worked out. Pesky imagination, fraternizing with the enemy. Nevertheless, he does this. Imagines that his tent under the overpass is his private domain, that the women and men who follow him have tents set up all around him. They would have chosen this spot because of the traffic noise, shifting and surprising in its rhythms, a perfect metaphor for Nowism. Something could come flipping off the overpass any second, a drunk driver crashing through the barrier. Or there may be a scream ripping through the night as a happy couple shout their joy out the windows on their wedding night. Anything could happen down under the overpass, but the only thing that matters is that it is happening now.
Jared scratches his ear and wonders whether it’s time to head home. Is it time for bed or is it time to go beat the crap out of Old Man Bombay, the skinny heroin addict who’d never set foot in India. Big thoughts for Jared’s big head. His ear is really itching. He takes a nail file out of his pocket and digs in his ear, trying to locate the source of the itch and pry it out. Maybe an insect crawled in there and died in his earwax. The nail file comes out waxy but insectless. A good sign.
It’s too dark to beat up the addict. Jared decides it is time to go home. His tent is always there. It IS, this solid ISness of it a comfort. Jared takes the cardboard box of fireworks to show Old Man Bombay as evidence tomorrow and begins to trudge home through the field.
When the police came to investigate who’d been shooting illegal fireworks in the middle of the Hellers’ field, they found a wide, bony, ravaged body missing a head. It seemed to have been blown off by something. When they found the head a little ways away, it was wearing an expression of surprise on its face, as if it was expecting something else that should have happened.

This is Why You Became a Writer

You crave punishment. You don’t go so far as to sit on top of the railroad tracks, but you hold your hand out, waiting for the honking train to rush by and break it.
You crave rejection. You seek out men who will banish you and women whose hearts you will break and you succumb to the sweetness of the chase even long after the black t-shirted back is out of sight. They have run on ahead without a thought to you struggling for breath, jogging in heels you despise, mouth smeared with redness from hurried, forceful kisses.
You crave a world of goodness, where people peer into one another’s minds and consider the feelings and emotions of others. You write them, and you destroy them, because perfect people are boring. You give them flaws and bruises and illicit desires and you kill them, mutilate them, smash them into tiny closet corners and down mine-shafts and into irretrievable peril. You are like a child tearing the heads of dolls because she cannot look as pretty as them. You are like a songbird, rising every morning to chirp at the sun with absolute faith that it will rise. But in your world, the sun does not rise, has not risen since your own glow was snuffed out. You keep chirping, pill beneath your trilling tongue, and you hope.
You crave order that is chaotic and chaos that is orderly. You crave the paradox to make sense: for the boy to kill his time-traveling grandfather and still live, for Achilles to beat the tortoise while the tortoise triumphs. When asked if you are this or that, you want to simply answer YES.

For a Generation to Come

For a generation to come, this will be a town in motion. Mothers giving birth in hospital beds will be wheeled down the hall with doctors running backwards in front of them, heads between their legs, in order to accommodate the shift. Children in playgrounds will find their slides more entertaining than ever, as the ground shakes beneath them on the way down. Teachers in schools will have to take a couple paces every time they want to write on the board, as it drifts a few inches while they explain to the class the value of X. Cafe owners will take out special insurance so that they will be covered if a patron complains about spilled coffee falling into their laps unexpectedly as the construction continues.

Turtles will not notice the change. They will stretch their legs out and pull their tails in and go to sleep in one place and wake up in another and will not be aware that their pace has changed perceptibly. Birds will be confused and the rate of ducks flying headfirst into buildings is expected to rise.

Analysts predict that war will be untenable should it break out, and have suggested that the mayor call for a state of neutrality for the coming generation, to be broken when the babies of tomorrow reach their thirtieth birthday and are old enough to hate and condemn. Opinions, analysts agree, are not valid before aspirations and delusions are shattered. They believe this is a policy more townships should adopt.

Dreams are said to be on the move already. Complaints have been phoned in from all around town of people having the nightmares of their wives, their children in the next room, their neighbors on the next block. Whether or not this problem will persist is, as yet, unknown.

Pillar of Salt

A lamplight of approval blushed up her cheeks, bringing out the radiance she had only imagined in the shower, as the stinging hot droplets of water pinged off her oily skin. Eliza, the letters told her, you are going places. Eliza, the phone calls told her, you are successful. Eliza, Eliza, Eliza: you are beloved.
She believed it, but she didn’t feel it. Her hands and her voice changed gradually with the confidence allowed by such an assumption of power and will. It took some practice to flick the switch that released synapses allowing behaviors she hadn’t known were in her. She ket the electric currents flow through her, unabashed, doing what electrons are supposed to do, magnetically surrounding her with an appeal that called out to others. I am desired, her eyes signaled.

Her hands and her voice became smooth, the callouses chipping away one layer of skin at a time as her confidence grew and the need for such constant participation in her craft waned. The buzz around her rose in tone and deepened in pitch and became a hum, a melody of impossibility. Eliza flourished.

She still didn’t feel it. It happened to her, around her, an envelope marked with a resounding YES. Still she stood in the eye of the storm that was her durable success. She was a pillar of crumbling salt, and she was certain that sooner or later, the chips would be noticed and people would realize she was not the sugared candy they thought she was.

 

The Veteran

The local paper interviewed his parents. A reporter with a deep chocolaty voice and kind eyes came to their house and sat down right in the living room and asked them questions about him. She asked how it felt taking care of him. How they handled the commitment to him. She spared no detail, poking her pen into everything, from the way they’d dealt with him being in a coma to how long it took before they could stop changing his diapers because he’d managed to get to the bathroom on his own for the first time.

“It wasn’t even a question,” his mother said.

“Paul was always our first concern,” his father said.

In his room, bedridden, Paul listened. He had asked them not to let the reporter lady see him because he was tired and wanted to sleep. If they can lie, so can I, he thought, listening to the words seeping through the walls.

When the reporter left, his parents spoke softly and hugged one another. “We’ll get through this,” his mother said. “We’ll get him back on his feet in no time,” his father said. When they came in to check on him, Paul pretended to be asleep. He’d gotten to be even better at it since waking up from his coma. It was a skill he’d always had. His friends in service always made fun of him for sleeping so much – by military standards, of course. But he wasn’t a big sleeper at all. He’d never needed much of it. If he hadn’t had such disdain for anything that sounded even a little bit spiritual, he would have said that he was into meditating. He remembered long, sleepless nights when he was a teenager and obsessing over a girl. He’d lie there, hand still sticky, completely still but for the involuntary fluttering eyelids and muscle twitches that characterize slumber. When he bounced out of bed in the morning, his parents never suspected he hadn’t slept a wink.

Of course it was a question, Paul thought as his mother shut the door and his parents went off to do whatever it was they did on Sunday afternoons. He was basically an adult now, twenty-four, and he knew that parents weren’t perfect. He refused to believe that his mother hadn’t wondered what it would be like to have him recuperate at some rehab center for vets like him. She must have thought about everything she would lose from her life, keeping him at home and caring for him around the clock. She didn’t go to her chess club anymore, and he hadn’t heard of her meeting a friend out for coffee since before he’d gotten half his head blown off. He didn’t think his dad could have been so blase about the whole thing either. Paul knew about the woodworking shop his father had begun to assemble in the unused half of the garage, and he knew that the shelves and the chairs and the tables his father had planned on building would never come to fruition.

They’d also told the reporter that helping Paul achieve independence was what they wanted most in the world, because they knew he wanted to be a useful member of society. His muscles convulsed and he clenched his fists, practicing the movements his physical therapist wanted him to do. He wanted to tell his parents that they were sweet idiots. He didn’t want to be a useful member of society. He didn’t want anything. He wanted to have been left on the battlefield to bleed to death so that he wouldn’t have to ruin his parents’ retirement plans. They’d planned to learn how to take naps. They’d planned to take a cruise to Alaska. They’d planned so many things that didn’t involve him.

His only motivation for getting better was giving that back to them and getting the hell out of their life. The only society he wanted to be useful to was theirs, the society of two people, by removing himself as the third wheel.

In the Green Room

This is what they were thinking about as the crowd streamed in through the double doors to the auditorium and created a ruckus that could only be drunk:

They were thinking first and foremost about their bodies. They were thinking of their protruding stomachs or the skin peeking out from under shorts. They were thinking about the comparison the roused audience would no doubt begin to make. They were thinking they should have gone on a diet. They were thinking they were hungry. They were thinking about the cookie in their bag that would find its way to their mouths in seconds.

They were thinking about the end of the night. Which would be morning. They were thinking about the star charts they would fail to fill out because the night would be keeping them indoors, entertaining dozens of people with their feet up on the chairs in front of them and the smell of cigarettes lingering on their clothes and hair.

They were thinking about the impossibility of this endeavor, its endlessness and incomprehensiveness. Why were they here? Who thought they could do this? Who did they think they were? They were thinking about the panic accumulating in their bowels and the crunching of air through their throat and into their lungs. They were certain it was made of glass and scratching every bit of the way down. They were almost sure they were bleeding internally.

They were thinking about the boys whose hearts had been broken and about their own hearts breaking. They were thinking about the text they hadn’t received, the little plus signs they were slowly adding to the ‘against’ column that was outweighing the ‘for’. They were thinking about their love for their friends and the comfort they could take in the vividness of their lives outside the realm of their cellphone screens.

They were thinking about their parents and how proud or disappointed they would be if they were here.

They were thinking about love, because they always think about it one way or another.

They were thinking about life and death because these are matters of great importance.

They were thinking they would be on stage soon.

They stopped thinking. They moved. They felt. They reacted.