Tag: Short Story

I Wanted to Write Something You’d Like

You always told me how much you liked the way I describe things, so I’m going to try to do that now. 

I had just got home from work. I parked my Focus in the driveway. The early-December frost was still lazily slumped in the corners of the curb. The clouds had layers, many wispy strands floating together attempting to make a uniform grey sheet. The air was cold and thin, much as it always was on the top of the hill we lived on. 

We called it a hill, anyway. Ryan and Laura had called it a mountain when they first moved here, remember? They were really confused when we laughed, and then we got into a senseless argument about the differences between the definitions of “hill” and “mountain.” Far too academic for such a stupid thing. 

Right, so, I had left the car, situating my your-beanie on my head. Thank you, again, for finding it in a shoebox in the back of the closet when I had lost mine, and subsequently not wanting it back. The car’s warmth that had soaked into me and my clothing dissipated far too quickly; I hate thermodynamics. 

I went to get the mail, the chore I always do before going inside the house. The sidewalk, somehow, still had a layer of frozen dew. The border of the frost followed the shadows of the Diaz’s house and Tyrell Jackson’s pick-up. There was a soft, faint crunch when I stepped. Not a full-on-snow crunch, but there was an attempt, like Simba trying to impress Mufasa with his roar.

The mailboxes recently got changed from the individual sub-sandwich-shaped boxes nailed to several two-by-fours to the factory-farm-chicken-cage letter prisons on metal poles. Our box was number 7, even though our house number was 23561. I don’t understand why they couldn’t consolidate the numbers to be the same— I’ve talked your ear off about this thing before. Too much, in fact. I’ll move on. 

There was nothing there. Well, there were ads for Safeway and Albertson’s, but those don’t really constitute mail; anything that lands in the recycle bin instead of on the dining room table doesn’t count as mail.

The apple tree in the corner of the Tanaka’s yard by the mailboxes was bare. Its branches were thin and weak in the breeze. A plump robin perched on one of the lower branches, making it and its relatives bob up and down under its weight. It must frequent their bird feeder. The robin’s head twitched left and right, seemingly unperturbed by the cold. Perhaps by instinct, perhaps realizing how alone it was, the robin took off and flew down the block. 

Our mailbox, if you remember, was around the corner on 22nd Street. The view on the way back, where 22nd meets 162nd, faced west. When the sky was clear, we could see the Olympic mountains. Today, the wispy clouds bunched up high enough that the silhouette of the mountains from the setting sun was crisp. A deep-orange fire burning behind the glaciers and rock reached up to meet the blue-black of the evening sky. 

The colors blended, or met, or touched— I don’t know, but there was a line in the sky between them. It felt like there should be a word for it. Or, maybe I thought I was supposed to see some undiscovered color that would give me some transcendental realization. But there wasn’t a word that could placate me, no epiphanies. 

I didn’t turn on 162nd back to the house that day. I kept walking west down 22nd, taking deep breaths of icy air, seeing how long I could exhale steam. The steam coned out from the pinpoint precision of my mouth to the broad shotgun array a few feet away, before losing all sense of rhythm and deforming into clusters of chaotic clouds. 

At the end of 22nd, where the housing development started to turn back on itself, there was a clearing on the northern corner— something about how if the number of houses exceeds x, then the developer needs to build and maintain a small park, so the lot was left empty. The wild grass still had white tips, completely untouched until my footsteps broke their peace.

I could see the abandoned golf course from the lot. Well, the edge of it, around the tree line— you know. We drove by it whenever we went to the highway, and we had walked around the lonely concrete trails that lead from hole to hole. There were three parked cars on the shoulder of the spur that lead to its parking lot. The company that bought the land barricaded it years ago, but never did anything else with their purchase. 

I had always meant to draw up a map of the golf course and blow out the proportions to become the world for a story I had thought of. When we had gone on our first walk around it, I had started piecing together the cities. There was a railroad track along the eastern side that would transport goods throughout the towns along the foothills of the impassable mountain range. There were rolling hills and vast lakes and small, dry patches of desert; ocean would hug the western coast.

The story was supposed to revolve around a woman making a dessert for some special occasion, how stressed she felt while making it. Maybe stress isn’t the right word; she would be excited to make the thing and for people to eat it, but she wanted it to be perfect. She’d walk around the floating flour specs of her kitchen and pour precise measurements of sugar into different measuring cups, some complicated fractions would stick out from the recipe that would need to be broken down and converted.

With every ingredient she’d add, there would be a cut away to another person who would be moving through their daily routine to gather, package, distribute, or sell the ingredient the woman just used. Their lives would be rough and stressful and tiresome. Then, it would jump back to the woman and her dessert.

I never wrote that story. I had thought about it, as I said, but I never wrote it. I knew that if I did write it, I’d show you, and you’d probably tell me it was weird. So, I’d save it on an external drive somewhere and always mean to come back to it and fix it, but be too afraid to read it again. Its 0s and 1s would sit on that disk undisturbed until the end of time.

Maybe I should have written it. Maybe you would have liked it. I don’t know.

The orange was dimming around the peaks of the Brothers and Mount Constance. The bones in my fingers were starting to ache. It’s weird how the cold pierces so deeply so suddenly. Small icy flakes shifted horizontally in the air carried by the soft northerly wind. I started to walk back to our house.

Your hatchback was in the driveway. I had forgotten. It had sat there for several months, and I had seen it there every day, but I had momentarily forgotten that you were gone. 

This realization happens too often, I admit, but your death just hasn’t dug its roots deep enough. I’m afraid they never will, that I will keep forgetting and having to remember all over, and the gale of grief will consume me again.

I cried that day. I curled up in the front yard and hugged my knees into my trembling chest. The grass was cold and wet, slowly changing colors in the faint glow of the Morozov’s Christmas lights.

A Morning in Kroa

The sun rises over the Haurathon, the centerpiece of Kroa. Its spire shoots out 1000 feet above the neighboring buildings. The Haurathon is used as the symbol for Congress, who use it to decorate their lapel pins, our flag, our money. You are to never forget about the Haurathon or Congress— they own you.

Sunrises are my favorite part of the day. The way the sun peeks at Kroa, like it’s wincing, makes me feel seen. It looks at me directly, tinted in the haze of the green fog dissipating from the streets. I think the beauty may be in the way Congress’ night poison rises with the sun, like a final battle cry to the heavens.

“Aja. It’s time to wake up,” I say to my sister. She’s sleeping on the couch, as she does almost every night. Her feet stick out of a mound of blankets covering the couch cushions. 

White stitches stretch out where we sit every night. Our family has had that couch since both our parents were alive; I guess that would be at least eight years or so. The dark green upholstery, the color I remember old fir trees having, has faded a lot since then, too.

Aja rolls around under the blankets, making tired groans. She says half words and flails her arms. Usually, it’s around this time that I pick up one of the blanket edges to help her out. This morning, I do not.

There’s a picture on the mantle
in a simple black frame
with four people in it.

One was
a woman with a black ponytail
and wrinkles around her smile
and small, green eyes that asked you how your day was,
          and was Mom.

Another was
a man with a thick beard
and a lumberjack’s flannel shirt
and thick arms that would hold you up to see over the crowd,
          and was Dad.

The smallest was
a girl with brown eyes
and small hands that held an old 3DS
          and was Aja.

The last one was
a girl with dyed purple hair
and a shirt from a cyborg-punk band no one listens to anymore,
          and was me.

The corners are chipped and faded.
Dust layers tint the grass’ green hue.

I sit cross-legged on the coffee table, facing the window, the couch on my right. The Haurathon dominating the view. I can feel steam from my coffee graze against my chin out of the mug I made Mom back in school. It’s wide, the sides thick and lopsided. The purple paint starting to peel around the edges. Coffee stains line the rim on the inside, no matter how much I scrub it.

“Boa, any help would be appreciated,” Aja grumbles.

“You’re 14. You can figure it out.”

“Not when the blankets travel between dimensions!” Two mountains erupt under the blankets.

“There are only three dimensions, dummy.”

“No lines think there are squares, Boa.”

I pause, sip my coffee, bask in the bitter grip in the back of my throat. “Still dumb.”

“Boa! Please! I’m dying!”

“No you aren’t.”

“I can feel Death’s cold hand on my neck. He’s dragging me into the abyss! Boa! Take care of Cat for me! Noooo!!!” Her plea fades.

“Super dumb. Cat doesn’t even need us.”

“Fine.” Aja sits up, blankets cocooned around her.

Cat sits in front of the window, staring at us. She gives me a disappointed meow, stretches her forelegs, saunters off, her chin up. 

“Cat hates you,” I say, taking another sip. The sun starts to give definition to the clouds. I can see shapes forming, green and white clusters.

“Cat loves me,” the blanket pupa replies. “She could not live without seeing my beautiful  face.” The blankets peel away, and Aja emerges. Her short, black hair sticks out in all directions. She reaches her thin arm out of the oversized shirt she wears to bed and grabs my mug. She takes a sip and recoils harshly. “Nope. No. Still no. Never. How!? Why!?”

She quickly puts the mug back in my hands. “Get up. You’re going to be late for class.”

She lets out a long, exasperated sigh. “But I’m sick!” she counters, giving two well-paced coughs into a blanket. “I think I should just stay home and rest,” she continues, putting one of the blankets back over her head.

“You literally said the same thing two days ago.”

She pauses. “But the blankets are warm, and comfy, and I named this one Gerard.” She pulls out a quilt Mom made. It has red and white squares alternating in rows.

“No you didn’t. I named them Margaret before you were even born.”

“You were three!”

“Shut up. Go get dressed.”

She gets up, walks away slowly, leaving a trail of blankets in her wake. “I’m doing this under protest.”

“You know not to tell those jokes. They’ll hear you.”

“Whatever you say, Boa. I don’t think Congress has enough interest to keep track of what every apartment is saying all the time.”

I look at my coffee; it’s almost gone. I feel a chill growing in my fingers. “That’s what everyone said when the night poison started.” 

My eyes are fixed on the bottom of the mug.

Sunset.
Orange cirrus clouds
          streaked the mauve sky.
Tiny stars awaken,
dance above the rooftops.

You joked
about curfew,
and I laughed.
          I laughed.
                    I laughed.

Night.
Green stratus clouds
blanketed the roads.

Echoes
of doors and windows locking shut
bounce off the walls and sidewalks and stoops,
and I got inside.
          I got inside.
                    You didn’t.

“I know, I know, I know. Roads dangerous after dark. Stay inside, Aja. You don’t need to remind me again. This isn’t The Hunger Games.” Aja’s annoyed voice and the sounds of brushes falling on the counter fly out of the bathroom, the door wide open. The light seems brighter than usual. I look away.

“I’m sor—”

“You don’t need to do your passive-aggressive apologizing, Boa.”

The roar of her hair dryer punctuates the conversation.

I look at the dregs of my coffee. Stains like layers of earth spiral to the bottom. Droplets stuck in place like fossils. I tilt the mug, watch them collapse, fall into a puddle at the bottom. Persistent coffee grounds swim around.

I hear Aja walk out of the bathroom, the light out. Her bedroom door creaks and clacks shut. 

She never understands. No one ever does. I’ve been told a thousand times that it wasn’t my fault. I’ve heard it from hundreds of faces; none of them have helped. My guilt is cold coffee I can’t swallow.

I was turning six,
and she baked a chocolate cake,
even with her two-year-old crying the whole time.

I remember the chocolate frosting and them smiling at me.
They sang to me.

The cake was delicious.

“When do you get off tonight?” Aja asks. Her black boots announce her approach.

“I’m opening, so I should be off around four.” I get off the coffee table and walk to the kitchen to wash the mug.

“Great, so you’ll cook dinner. Awesome. Thanks!” Aja quickly grabs her backpack and moves toward the door.

“That would only be the case if you somehow clean the apartment before I got here.”

“Bring home some fries, and it’s a deal.” Aja sticks her hand out to shake. She smiles confidently.

“Deal,” I shake her hand. “Go learn things.”

“I always does. I learn real good.” Aja grabs her keyring from the basket by the door. She uses Dad’s old Super Mario keyring. It’s faded, the colors starting to become a uniform red.

“I swear, Aja. Another F and I’m calling Skynet,“ I say, pointing a soapy scrub brush at her. 

“They’ll never find me. I’ll go off the grid. I’ll live off the land with my trusty bow, relying solely on my archery skills and stealth to stalk my prey.”

“This isn’t the Hunger Games, Boa.”

“Shut up. Bye.” She smiles, turns to the door. Her red coat swishing behind her.

It doesn’t take long for me to give up on scrubbing the stains out of the mug. I place it on the drying mat next to the sink and get ready for work.

It never takes much time. The beauty of working in the kitchen of a restaurant is that you don’t have to doll yourself up for the public if you don’t want to. Management likes it when you do, as they can force you to do more jobs that way, but it’s not a strict rule.

I put on some worn-in jeans and a red shirt with the restaurant’s logo on the left breast, “Rodwell’s” in some modernist font inside a neat, blue rectangle. It’s starting to fade, but they change designs every two years, so I think I’ll be fine.

I check the mirror before I leave. I try to make my hair go in one direction with a brush. It’s futile, so I put on a black beanie. Hat hair seems like a good enough excuse.

At Four in the Morning

The room is filled with the dark of night. Red bricks of light that connect into the shapes of “4:30” are the only light. The numerals imprint on my eyelids.

I roll over onto my back and stare at the ceiling. It hangs like a Monet piece if he had met Yves Klein. The ceiling always fades away eventually. Not into the black of sleep, but into a blur as I start to see through it. I move through an eggshell fog and wooden frame and see clouds. But I’m still in the bed, it is still dark, and I still cannot sleep. 

I roll over more, on my right side this time. I see the open doorway to the master bathroom, its edges hidden in shadow. In horror movies, the doorframes have straight, clear lines. The monster is in there, yeah, but there is a line of division that it cannot pass. Not here. Not really. The doorframe was slowly being eaten away by the monster. It was winning battle after battle, spreading its rule. How long would it take for it to get to me? It’s 4:35 am. 

I give up on sleep. I convince myself it’s the logical choice, but, if I’m being honest, it’s a purely emotional response. I slip on some old shoes that I don’t need to tie and walk out of the apartment to my car. I need to move. I need to go somewhere. I need to drive. 

–    –    –

When I was in high school, I’d walk down Forgoen Avenue at four in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. It was something you could do when the town’s population was fewer than 2000 and the closest house was another farm a half mile away. 

My parents’ house was a blue, one-story rancher that sat on a plot with a small apple orchard in the back acre. A small barbed-wire fence drew its perimeter. Their apples didn’t go much further than the small family-owned grocery stores in Oatsdale, about two miles north on I-85, or Brenton, three miles east on Highway 234. 

At four in the morning, when I wasn’t able to sleep, I grabbed my shoes and my house keys and headed west on Forgoen toward the Hilltop Mart. The house keys were a formality I learned from various shows we’d watch on NBC; my parents never really locked the doors to the house.

No one was on the road at four in the morning, and, because of the lack of local funds in Karnapa, no streetlights punctuating the road. The lack of light pollution let the moon and stars pick up the slack, though, so not all was lost. The lay of the road was so flat and so straight, that you could tell the exact molecule the horizon sat on. It was like the first drawing they make you do in art in elementary school; the one where they try to tell you about perspective and you just draw lines from the bottom corners to the center. That’s literally what Forgoen looked like, even with the few hastily-drawn trees sprinkled in after the teacher said you didn’t put in enough detail.

There was a space after the Herston’s land, the farm a half mile away, and before the Hilltop Mart where the transmission towers stood, giving a lane for the power lines to travel to us from Karnapa proper to the north, the central part of town with the library and the city hall and the paper mill. There was a light popping under the power lines that you could only hear at four in the morning, because the rest of the day had too much sound for you to observe it. I’d stop for a minute on my walk and listen to it. I’d look at the stars and imagine every pop being the birth or death of a star, somewhere out there hidden by their boisterous friends. 

The Hilltop Mart was maybe a mile and a half one-way. It was an odd name, since it wasn’t on the top of a hill. It was on a hill, sure, but it was in the middle of a hill at best. It’s possible the hill of trees and Methodist chapels weren’t there when the Hilltop Mart was built, but that seemed unlikely; the trees were tall and the chapels didn’t have plumbing. It was open 24 hours a day because of the slim minority of me showing up at odd hours in the night, but mostly because of the two gas pumps outside of it and the state law that said an attendant had to pump your gas for you. 

The aisles were empty, like the road the store sat on, but the shelves were full. Three aisles were devoted exclusively to American beer. Budweiser had cases stacked on cases in the aisle with a neon sign of the logo above, the fluorescent lights drab in comparison. I gravitated toward the snack aisles during my morning walks: plump bags of chips bursting from the shelves, candy bars laid in an orderly fashion in their little cardboard houses. 

The nights in summer got down to the mid-60s. I grabbed a glass bottle of Snapple from the refrigerated section on the south wall, just before the refrigerated beers, and a Milky Way. I brought them to the counter where the clerk, Gill, stood. Gill was a middle-aged man with straight, shoulder-length, black hair pulled back into a ponytail. He wore a flannel shirt tucked into denim pants, his belt buckle changing every couple months. On this day, his belt buckle had a picture of a cowboy riding a horse, lasso raised in the air. Gill usually went with old Hank Williams songs when he was in charge of the store’s radio. The only thing he was missing was 10-gallon hat, I realized as an adult, but that never occurred to me then; that was just what Gill was like.

I gently eased the Snapple bottle onto the counter to make less noise and followed it with the Milky Way bar. A sad twang of steel guitar filling the store. “Hey Gill.”

He looked up from yesterday’s crossword. “Hey Pete.” His voice had a low drawl to it. When he talked, you didn’t see his mouth move so much as you saw his mustache roll. 

“How’s business?”

Gill met my eyes. He raised his right hand, palm up, and gestured to the empty northern wall on his right to the empty southern wall on his left. “Booming.”

We laughed. It was the kind of joke that works at that hour in that small of a town. Gill scanned the tea and the candy bar, and I pulled out the five I had in my pocket that I earned from my summer gig as a bagger at the Safeway by the library.

The register opened with a pang, the jostling of coins ringing out of its mouth. “Eight-letter word. Person from Calgary or Edmonton.”

“Got any letters?”

“Ends with N.” He answered, placing my change on the counter and picking up his pencil. He looked at me expectantly.

“Canadian?” 

“Tried that. Doesn’t fit with nine-down. Country where David lives: Italy. It ends with T-something-N.”

I pictured a Canadian map on the neon Coors sign and split it into provinces. British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, “Albertan.”

“Ah. Right. Thanks, Pete.” Gill started scratching the letters into the squares.

I nodded. “Anytime.” I shoved the bills and coins into my pocket, picked up the Milky Way with my left hand, Snapple with my right.

The door to the store closed with the dinging of a small bell. After walking down the steps to the road, I placed the Snapple on the edge of the stoop to open the Milky Way. I tried to do it while walking once, and I lost half the tea to a ditch. I’d walk the mile and a half east back home, listening to the last bit of the transmission tower’s electric popping with the sun peeking over the Herston’s silo.

–    –    –

I get to my car, which I had to park several buildings away in the complex due to all the free spots being taken by other freeloaders. It’s a green Kia I got at a “pre-owned” dealership last fall. I went on about the weird euphemism with the dealer; how it wasn’t a good term since it was longer and more complicated than the original term, “used,” and in response, he said, “I need your signature here, here, and your initials here.”

There’s no one on the road at four in the morning, because, it turns out, sane people just aren’t up that early. It isn’t just true in rural Karnapa; it’s true in suburban Harpen too. These roads have streetlights though. The people in Harpen want to play God and make the roads live in perpetual day. No sleep for you, Lauren Drive. 

I drive south on 267th, winding through a dim forest that’s been partially emptied for a couple houses every hundred feet for lake people who can’t afford to live on Lake Rhonda, but want to live by it. Their houses blend in with the tree trunks at least, peeling paint, cedar shingles, whatnot.

I take several turns in places I don’t think about; all muscle memory. The car just drives to a place, and I am on the journey with it. The drive is about a half hour. I end up in the parking lot of Valley Middle School, where I teach. It’s 5:15 am. School starts in two hours. The first day of the year.

In Kia’s trunk is an emergency stash of clothes I am expected to wear as an adult at a school: a purple button-up with thin, dark, vertical lines; a black tie; jeans that don’t have any holes; and shoes that don’t have visible holes. I keep some deodorant, a comb, a toothbrush, and toothpaste in my desk as well; I’m not worried.

I get out of Kia and stretch my back, on my tiptoes, trying to grab the clouds. Harpen isn’t as warm as Karnapa— it’s in the low-50s— and there’s fog hovering over the fields behind the school. I rub my forearms a little, feel the goosebumps travel up them. I climb onto Kia’s hood and sit cross-legged, not resting my back on the windshield.

I watch the fog flow around the fields and lap the parking lot. I look at the building, with its red-painted, cinder-block facade slowly getting chipped away. There are dots in the places students had written something in sharpie the previous year that hasn’t been painted over yet. A tennis ball lodged in a vent above the door to the science hallway. A blue frisbee (literally and figuratively) sitting on the roof above Ms. Spencer’s history classroom. 

An hour later, the sun rises over the portables that sit between the school and the fields. The clouds are whipped-cream streaks over strawberry puree. The portables’ antennas like small spoons dipped in it, stuck there.

“Sure. Okay,” I say, taking a deep breath of fresh morning air. I get my clothes out of the trunk, and walk toward the building.