part deux

Dear Dan,

It’s Nathalie again. I know it’s poor form to write another time without hearing back from you, but I simply couldn’t resist. I heard you’d been in town, and in fact, I’m rather pleased that you didn’t come to see me. Not that I don’t want to hang out with you, of course, in a friendly, tea-having sort of way (as mentioned in my previous letter), but I would really rather not have to worry about your returning the invitation. I mean, I wouldn’t want to put you out of your way, of course, and while you’re welcome to have as much of my tea as you’d like, I’m thinking that if we kept our relationship to correspondence only, it might be better for everyone.

I’m still thinking about that novel. It’s only in the planning stages right now, unfortunately, so I haven’t even started with the writing yet. I’ve got some really good ideas, which I’d love to share with you, but they are top secret. I’m sure you talk to a lot of people in your line of work, and I know you wouldn’t do anything on purpose, but I’d hate to have one of my crucial plot points slip out during one of your warning calls, you know? There’d be plenty of time for the ideas to make the rounds before I even managed to finish writing the thing, and that won’t do at all. I’m sure you understand, seeing as how I’ve asked you to postpone your visit until I’m finished with this thing, and if my letters convey even a small percentage of my personality, I’m sure you want to meet me as soon as possible. I flatter myself, of course, but one is allowed a few indulgences in letters, isn’t one? Anyway, I’m not usually all that interesting.

I also haven’t been to Africa yet. I don’t think I mentioned this last time, but I’ve always wanted to go to Africa and go on safari and help people (I’m not exactly sure how, but there are ways of helping people that don’t totally intrude on their lives, and I want to do that). This trip to Africa, which is potentially on the docket for three years from now, would be really amazing, and I’d be helping people! Less work for you, right? But anyway, there’s further proof that I’m not that interesting. I haven’t even been to Africa!

Anyway, I am hoping for a continued, friendly détente between us, Dan. It’s pleasant, and gives me a bit of time to wrap things up before I go traveling with you.

Thanks again,

Nathalie, age 26.

epistolary, with misunderstood recipient

Dear Dan,

I am writing to you today about the Great American Novel. You know the one: it resonates with everybody because the characters are simultaneously perfectly real and perfectly imaginary and the situations are just weird enough and just quotidian enough to make people really understand them. There’s a story arc, but the plot doesn’t bash anyone over the head, and there are puzzles, but none of that faddish cipher-and-codex crap you keep seeing everywhere after that novel-that-shall-not-be-named. It even talks about you a little bit (or maybe a lot), because you are, if nothing else, reliable and feared, and mixing trust with fear is always so titillating. Not to say that you are “titillating” per se, though I suppose there are a few people who feel that way about you. But you know what I mean, surely. You must see it all the time.

So, anyway, this Great American Novel hasn’t been written yet, but more specifically, as of today, I personally have not yet written it. Therein lies my dilemma.

Especially because I am asking you such a great favor, you may be wondering why I would address you so informally, and in fact, as “Dan.” It may interest you to know that there was this goth kid in my high school French class who always wore this hideous pale cake makeup and asked everyone to forget that his name was “Dan” in favor of your name. I thought it might be useful for me to be able to put a name to you while I was writing this, seeing as how you’re mostly conceptual and all. And for me, when I am writing a letter, it is so important to feel as though I am just chatting with the recipient, as though I were having a nice cup of tea with a friend over an extended distance. So, rather than use your regular name (which, I fear, is just loaded with portent), I thought I’d give Dan a try. I hope you don’t mind.

This bit of familiarity is not meant to suggest that we are friends right now, but certainly, that development in our relationship is always a possibility. I’d love to chat with you more (over an extended distance, like so) to learn more about you, as my future readers would almost certainly snap up a novel about you, with a catchy title of course, like, “Dan, The Man,” or “Dan, Revealed,” or “Dan of the Underworld,” though I suppose that last one is just speculation on my part. I also suppose that I’d like it to remain that way, at least for another couple of years or so.

In conclusion, I am not ready right now, and I implore you to leave me behind when you make your next trip to my little corner of the world.

Yours truly,

Nathalie, age 26.

matcha in the office

Matcha worked in a high-tech financial services firm where the majority of the young female employees (and some of the male ones, if you really get down to brass tacks) had slept with the boss at one time or another. She could understand why he would want to sleep with them: These were hard-bodied, statuesque ideals of men and women who had only recently defined themselves with the Greek letters of their sororities and fraternities. Many of them still did, despite having graduated from college upwards of three years ago. Matcha had not slept with anyone in a long time.

Monday mornings were Matcha's least favorite time to be at work. The statues would stand by the coffee pot, sucking on styrofoam cups of the stuff while they compared hangovers. "I totally did a keg stand last night!" one would say between gulps of hot coffee. "Oh yeah? We played effing Robopound---" ("effing," she would say in order to be office-appropriate) "---and I effing won!" Matcha had to walk up to them to get water for her tea. She did, after all, drink her namesake, the powdered tea that became a smooth, green froth when she whipped it into hot water. Coffee was too bitter for her, and she needed something hot to start the day.

She knew that they called her "The Machine" when she was supposedly out of earshot. Just because she wasn't a partier, and didn't care to be chummy with her age-regressed coworkers, they thought she was a work-machine, built to do her work and nothing else. She was diligent, for sure, but it wasn't out of any particular devotion to work. Matcha hated the work, actually, and only worked hard at it so that she could leave on time every day and go home to her plants and her puppy. They don't know what it's like, she thought, to have to care for another creature. They would be too busy drinking and dancing and having wild, casual sex with all the other little Aphrodites and Adonises---well, maybe that part wouldn't be so bad---to take responsibility for feeding, walking, and loving a dog. And that, according to Matcha, was their great loss.

This Monday morning was much like all the others. Though Matcha was not looking forward to her unpleasant eavesdropping around the hot water dispenser, the dread was no more palpable or unpredictable than it had been on every other Monday. But today, there was a new person in the perfectly-pressed hangover crew. A new tailored black dress stood among the other tailored black dresses and suits, but there was something about this one that stood out. Her shock of naturally brassy blonde hair fell in waves down her back (a contrast to the messy chignons and sleek ponytails of the other girls), and her perfectly-formed little legs stood like stalks in a pair of high-heeled ankle boots (a look that the peeptoes-or-pumps crowd would not have dared to attempt).

The other thing about her that set her apart from the rest of them was the fact that she was standing there, hunched over the hot-water dispenser, clearly eschewing the coffee pot to fill a mug for tea. Matcha quietly waited behind her until she finished, and then reached for the water.

"Oh, hello," said the new girl. Matcha took no notice of this and continued filling her mug. "Oooh, what's that you're drinking, there?" Matcha looked up at her, then. Her face was kind of like a Barbie doll's face, but with better makeup, and with some fleeting imperfection that Matcha couldn't place, but instantly adored. "I'm sorry, I didn't introduce myself," the new girl went on. "I'm Lucy."

"I'm...well...umm..." Matcha could hear someone snickering over by the coffee pot. "I'm Matcha. And I'm drinking this powdered green tea, here..."

"Ooh, wow," Lucy said. "I love tea. This is a Jasmine white tea blend." She inhaled the steam that was pouring from her mug. "Could you show me back to my desk please, Matcha?" Matcha was surprised, but she was not one to be discourteous. Lucy led and Matcha followed. As soon as they were away from the breakroom, Lucy leaned to Matcha and said quietly, "Is it just me, or is everyone in the breakroom completely vapid and deathly boring?"

"Oh!" Matcha said, a bit louder than she was expecting. She grinned. "You said it."

"So you're named after the tea?" Lucy asked. The look of surprise did not have time to melt away from Matcha's brow. "Turn this way. My desk is over here."

"Yes," Matcha said.

"I know perfectly well what matcha looks like," Lucy said. "Just like how I know perfectly well where my desk is. I just wanted an excuse to get away from those ghastly people. How do you stand them?"

"I don't," Matcha said.

"It seemed like a couple of those very good-looking cretins wanted to take me out to lunch today, but if you go with me, I can tell them I've already got plans," Lucy said. "11:45 in the lobby?"

"Sure," Matcha said. And just like that, Matcha was going to leave her lunch in the work refrigerator and venture out into the concrete wilds of city dining. She had a companion for lunch for the first time in three long years. It's a wonder she got any work done at all that morning.

stay

There are only a few victories in the abode quite as satisfying as seeing the bottom of a laundry basket. I hadn't seen the bottom of my own for five weeks, maybe six. And yet, when I finally reached the shiny blue plastic of triumph over task, I could not celebrate. There, in the bottom of the basket, lay two thin plastic collar stays. His.

All I had to do was reach in, grab them, and throw them away, and they would be gone, forever. The finality of that action was more than I could bear, so I plucked them up and brought them to the kitchen table instead. There I sat, contemplating them.

I turned the stays over in my hands, studying them intently. My eyes wandered to my fingers, which looked as though there were some sort of ban on hand cream. The small hands that held those collar stays had somehow become worn and creased through a process that I could not consciously remember. Then I noticed the softer, pale mark that three years of wearing wedding jewelry had left around my ring finger. Three years of dishes and laundry and cooking, three years of pulling the stays out before the wash cycle and pushing them back in after the hot tumble dry. Three years of respectable marriage, and then, a note in a solitary winter coat hung in the hall closet: "I love someone else now." And nothing else. The shirts were all gone, and the ties and suits. No time for arguing. No time for the little legalities. The car was gone too.

I drew the plastic stays closer to my eyes, examining them in the light for something, for any kind of answers. Then I got a whiff of them: even after all this time, they smelled like what it smelled like to press my face into his neck when we made love. But there were other odors, too. Perfume, mine. Perfume, not mine. Toxic, all.

I hurled the collar stays at the table, where they clattered like slides of old vacation photos. I pushed my chair away from the table and got up to fold the clothes.

the pocketknife

Theresa turned it over in her fingertips as she ambled back into the forest, pressing the small piece of pockmarked plastic and rusted metal against her own clammy palm. The rust grated against the soft flesh at the heel of her hand and prompted a flow of questions that she could not staunch, even with her most educated guesses. What had happened in the clearing, the night before? Had she passed out? And when she awoke, why did she have his pocketknife?

It was his pocketknife--she was sure of it. His initials were the first thing she'd noticed about the knife, professionally engraved in the red plastic casing. It looked as though it had a number of useful tools inside, big knife, little knife, scissors, tweezers, corkscrew, screwdriver, nail file, bottle opener, maybe even a toothpick, and a few more that she couldn't identify from the outside. But she didn't dare open it. It looked like it might give her tetanus whether she opened it or not, and she didn't want to fiddle with it any more than she had to until she was somewhere safer, somewhere with tools, somewhere where she wasn't wandering through a forest at dawn, still wondering what had happened the night before.

The trees suddenly began to look familiar again, but Theresa's hopes were dashed as she emerged into the full dawn rays, growing across the open space. It wasn't the road home. It was the clearing. Again. She whirled around on her heel and scrambled through the forest, back the way she came, flying over piles of crushed brown leaves and tripping on tree roots as she ran. Two minutes later, she burst into the sunlight.

"Aaaaaaaaaa!" Theresa shouted up into the sky at everything, at nobody, at herself for letting this happen, for going to the forest with a strange man and dancing around the fire and taking off her clothes and singing, singing, singing until the wine was all gone and then there was blackness. The memories of their midnight bacchanal came flooding back to her in bright, chaotic flashes.

"Are you quite finished with your most excellent show of running and screaming?" A voice seemed to filter in on the early morning sunbeams, through the trees.

"Who said that?" Theresa shouted, her voice tinged with fear and her recently-remembered shame.

"Perhaps you ought to try the knife," said the voice, ringing with authority.

"What? Who said that?"

"Just do it," the voice came again. It was like his, she thought, but deeper and more powerful.

"Look, Mister," Theresa shouted up into the trees. "I realize that I'm not in the best of situations right now, but I really don't think that killing myself is the way out that I'm looking for." She cocked her head, waiting for a response. When it didn't come, she realized that she had probably imagined the entire thing. But then she heard a low rumble, like the voice was conferring with other people that Theresa couldn't see.

"Open the knife," said the voice. The sky became dark, the sun suddenly obscured by heavy stormclouds that had appeared out of nowhere. The wind picked up. "Open the knife or I'll make it rain, and then you'll be stuck AND soaked." The wind blew some leaves away from the center of the clearing. A lightning bolt licked the sky, and Theresa saw the cold glint of metal on the ground as it reflected the light. She kicked the leaves away to reveal a grate. The grate was secured to the ground by means of a hinge and a small metal lock.

"What is this, Return to Zork?" she muttered as she pried at the rusty knife with her fingernails. There was something in here that would work just fine to pick the lock, wasn't there? The first blade she managed to extract from the knife was a tiny metal key.

"I told you so," said the voice. Theresa opened the lock, cast it away, and pulled up the grate. Even after staring down into the dark hole for a solid minute, she was unable to determine its depth.

"If you think I'm going down there," she said to the voice, "You're on some pretty good drugs." Theresa thought she heard a sigh, but it might have been the wind whistling in the trees.

"They told me this wasn't going to be easy," the voice said, as a gust of wind came up behind Theresa and knocked her into the hole. She was too surprised to scream. The grate seemed to snap shut of its own accord, and the pocketknife started to emit a golden glow that was bright enough to let Theresa see her surroundings.

in tea and cigarettes

I'm not as glamourous as all of those photographers seem to think I am. Sure, someone bought me this fancy monogrammed tote bag for my birthday, but these shoes are on loan from my stylist. Yes, of course, it's glamourous to have a stylist. But recently, all she's been doing is glaring resentfully at me over our cups of hideous Chinese weight-loss miracle tea, which really resembles water from the salt marsh more than any tea I've ever had. I almost expect some minnows or guppies to be floating around in there, dead from the flavour of the stuff.

I'm not even sure how I got here. One night a couple of weeks ago, a friend who was returning a favour got me into one of those A-list only clubs. I borrowed some designer denim from my roommate, squeezed my ample thighs into it, and sausage-waddled my way out to the club. I breezed by a long queue of mannequins on my way in, and I must have impressed some of them, somehow. An hour later, when they finally managed to get in, a group of these plastic-looking boys and girls (surely no older than my youngest sister!) found me at the bar, where I had wheedled the bartender into passing me extra champagne cocktails in a furtive buy-one-get-one kind of affair.

"You look...new," said one of the boys. He looked like he could have been an Abercrombie model. I'd seen an Abercrombie and Fitch shoot once before, in London. It was like someone had plopped the entirety of a self-contained alternate universe directly into the middle of Trafalgar Square.

"Thanks?" I didn't intend for it to come out as a question, but it did. I downed the last of my most recent cocktails. The bubbly tickled my throat as the bartender pushed a fresh one my way.

"Want to come to the VIP room with us?" he asked.

"Sure," I smiled. "Can I take my drink?"

"Take whatever you want," he said, also smiling, as though he wanted to light the entire room with the glow of his teeth. "It's the VIP room. Enjoy yourself." I picked up the champagne flute and winked at the bartender. Over my shoulder, I could see the small crowd of Barbies and Kens following us.

I partied hard. There were photographs taken. And now I'm an It Girl, I think.

squinting

Sometimes when I squint real hard into the sunlight, I can see him again. I don't know what he looks like, these days, but I can see that he's there. It had been years since I'd talked to Gary Indiana on a regular basis. That was his name, you know, "Gary Indiana," and he liked to eat cooked peas.

Gary helped me out of a lot of tight spots that way, eating all the mushy green stuff on my plate so that I could get dessert, and claiming that he would watch the dog out in the backyard and make sure he pooped so I could play on the swingset while it was just getting dark. I say "claiming" 'cause sometimes he did, and sometimes he didn't. But sometimes he just sat there quietly when I thought something bad was going to come out from under my bed.

Gary Indiana was the best imaginary friend a kid could have.

Dictionary Words

Merriam-Webster.com keeps an alphabetized list of the words that I looked up last. Mainly, my primary interest in looking up words is to make sure that they mean exactly what I think they mean (or for spellings, pronunciations, etc.). For me, precision and nuance are the most important aspects of written diction.

Do they tell a story? Or are they simply a catalogue of the everyday bizarre?

collusion
douchebag
eclat
grotesquerie
indices
principal
puerile
roofs
spectacular
sprang
stultifying

I finished!

I did it! This picture is totally worth 50,000 words. More fiction snippets when I stop being burned out from work.

Truth: I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year.

So this fiction blog is on hiatus until further notice.

Some possible first lines:

Because I had never fainted before, the startling sensation of waking up after unconsciousness was entirely new to me.

She was always worried about her appendix, but terrorism didn't faze her in the slightest.

When the morning starts with a jumper, it's never a good morning for anyone.

She sucked the coffee down defiantly, though it burned her throat and made bile churn in her stomach.

You were the one I'd hoped for.

this is it

I woke up this morning and didn't have to go to work anymore. Simple as that, a million ideas were careening through my head at breakneck speed, for all the projects that I want to start and all the extreme sports I want to try, and all the wines I have to drink and all the music I have to make and all the mountains I have to climb just so I can see what's at the top before I die. But first, I thought, I'd heat up the old arthritic knee and maybe get some breakfast in me. Breakfast turned into lunch, and into dinner, and early to bed, of course, the better to get a jump on the next day's dreams.

i'm almost certain that we both lied

This morning's metro ride was supposed to be the sort of affair where I get on the train, I find a seat, and then I proceed to sit in that seat and listen to my iPod for twenty minutes after a semi-sleepless, hungover night. All was going according to plan: after my miserable walk through puddles and merciless roadspray, I found a seat on the train, right at the edge of the seat bank (my favorite seat). A black woman of a certain age was sitting next to me, and she made her presence known by saying, "Good morning." I'm sure I mumbled something moderately pleasant back to her while an old Cardigans song blasted in my earbuds.

The ride was like any other, the calming influence of familiar music punctuated by the screeching of the brakes and the periodic stops. But right after we had passed the first stop, I saw the woman next to me take a pink pamphlet out of her bag and rest it on top of her still-folded copy of the Post Express. She held it up for a while, as though she expected me to get a good look at the cover before she opened it. It was called Happiness Digest. Like Readers' Digest, only for the Bible. As the train crept through the district, she made a big show of opening the pamphlet and folding it over to read it.

It was the kind of booklet that my grandmother always kept around her house, piled in neat stacks on her coffee table. They were basically portable sermons, replete with quotations from Scripture and affirmations of God's love through Jesus Christ. The woman, whose smooth face belied her age, was visibly checking on me, to make sure that I was reading over her shoulder. I was not.

Fiona Apple was crooning about sin in my ears. The woman knew that I would be getting off the train soon, as I was buttoning my coat and unbuttoning my umbrella, so she turned to me and spoke in a slow, frail voice. "I like to give away this pink book on my birthday," she said. "Will you take it?"

...so, what would an angel say?
the devil wants to know...

"I already have one." The words slipped out before I was even sure what I wanted to say.

"Really?"

I was in it, now. "Yes."

"Take it anyway, and share it," she said, thrusting the book into my hands as I stood to leave the train. "It makes me happy."

"Ok, thanks," I answered, the words tumbling out of my mouth in a curious hurry. "Happy birthday."

"Oh!" she laughed, sounding a bit startled. "Thank you."

I hadn't noticed her perfume until that moment, cloying and heavy like old people and incense, but the scent stayed with me all the way to the office.

he licks the spoon, he throws it away

He licked the spoon from his yogurt like a well-behaved little boy taking his cough medicine. A man of thirty, he knew, of course, that yogurt would help his internal colonies of healthy bacteria repopulate during his current course of antibiotics, so he consumed the last from the plastic cup as meticulously as he could. His pitted and mottled patches of skin were suddenly visible in contrast to the serious pink tongue that darted out from between heavily whiskered lips, painting the whole picture of this almost lascivious licking with a broad-brushed grotesquerie.

When he appeared to be done with the yogurt, he paused for a moment to consider the spoon. It was plastic, black, and probably covered with inactive forms of whatever it was that had made him require antibiotics in the first place. "I like to wash these things," he said, "and reuse them." But he knew that wouldn't be the safe, clean thing to do. So he chucked it into the garbage can like so many nickels into a tollbooth receptacle. Gone and good. I wondered about him, sometimes.

life is a junior mint

Peppermint ice cream makes me exist fully in the moment. No flashbacks to long summer days of running barefoot in the tall grass. No memories of mom's homemade stuff: she didn't even start making her own ice cream until we kids moved out. There is absolutely no emotional baggage to stand between me and the perfectly cold pink dream that is currently performing a miracle of slow, sweet melt on my tongue.

Unfortunately, my next spoonful was somehow tainted with this month's extra-chocolate specialty: the clerk must have used a scoop that wasn't entirely clean. While I am in the clear as far as peppermint is concerned, the bittersweet of chocolate recalls a series of events in my life that I would otherwise rather forget.

open your gift

It's not my birthday. It's entirely too warm out to be Christmas, and it certainly isn't any kind of normal holiday, considering the fact that I went to work and it was drudgery as usual. There's no card, no tag. Just a nicely-wrapped gift box sitting on the floor of my apartment. In fact, I almost tripped over the damn thing as I stumbled through the front door, laden with all the trappings of a long commute (lunch bag, jacket, commuter bag, purse, keys). I'm not sure how it even got in here, though I suppose the management has keys and can put your newspapers inside if you leave them out there for too long.

It had been forever since I'd gotten a strange gift, and I wasn't quite sure what to think. "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts"? But I didn't know who gave this to me, or even, for that matter, if it was actually intended for me. It was merely a gift bearing gifts, and it might have been delivered to me by accident. I wouldn't know unless I opened it, right?

So I took it to the couch and set it down on the coffee table. The box itself glowed almost supernaturally, as though it absorbed all the light in the room and reflected that warmth and life back through its mother of pearl wrapping paper and iridescent white ribbons. It looked like the sort of painstaking gift wrap job that I would do, all smooth and self-sufficiently pleasing to the eye, to the fingertips. Absentmindedly, I had been stroking the box, presumably trying to find the seams: I wouldn't want to just shred a wrapping job like that, so I'd have to open it where it had been taped. It was too lovely not to.

But I had run my fingers all over the box, and there were no seams at all. I picked up the box and studied it. The underside? Like pearly glass. The place where the ribbons were? Nothing. I couldn't even tell how the ribbons were attached. It was like someone had wrapped the box in a thin sheet of clay, and rubbed out all the lines of the folds.

I was willing to accept that someone would give me a random gift. It was within reason to believe that it could have valid reasons for appearing inside my locked apartment. But I drew the line at this, the perfect, seamless wrapping paper. The aura of the box, the glow that I had immediately found appealing, seemed to take on a ghoulish cast. I made up my mind to call the landlord tomorrow, to ask him about the box. Then I went to the kitchen to heat up some leftovers for dinner.

When I was in the kitchen, a knot of unease tightened in my abdomen, compelling me to go back and look in the living room, to make sure that the box was there. When I saw it, I felt better, and could go back and tend the microwave. Heating the leftovers took twice as long because I had to keep taking breaks to check on the box. But it made me nervous, being around it but being unable to see it. Why did I feel the need to keep looking at it? Was I afraid of its contents? Or was it something else?

I didn't want it in my house while I slept. It had to go outside and wait in the hallway until I could call the landlord about it. But that's silly! Of course I was overreacting! It's a gift, it's lovely, and it would be rude to the giver if he or she ever found out that I made it sit in the hallway all night, wouldn't it? But he or she would probably not find out, I reasoned, as I opened the door and deposited the gift onto my welcome mat. And it would be fine out here. My neighbors would all be asleep in a couple of hours, and I would too. I could deal with it in the morning.

---

Morning came, and I rolled out of bed, groggily downing a glass of water and putting in my contacts. Ah, Saturday! The one day of the week when it's acceptable to putter around for a while, with asinine cartoons as background noise while the coffee percolates! I ambled into the living room and tripped, falling flat on my face. When I hauled myself up off the floor, I saw what I had tripped over. It was the gift. It was back in the apartment, even farther in than it had been the first time. But something about it was different. There were seams in the wrapping, now, places for me to slide my fingers under the paper and pull the taped flaps up from the package. So tempting...but so wrong! I ran to the phone to call the landlord.

if you can't dance to this...

There was a small video crew setting up yesterday before my broadway/jazz class. I mean, this is a class for young adults, for people who want to dance for fun and exercise, so I was pretty sure that it wasn't a talent scout or anything like that. So I duck into a changing room and strip down to my dance clothes...leotard, tights, little athletic shorts. Nothing matches, of course, and I quickly pray that this video crew is just for someone's resume tape or something. They make us sign waivers before we walk into the studio. MTV. So much for my dance outfit's obscurity.

The music starts. Seemingly for dramatic effect, it's 42nd Street, and as I'm just starting to sing along in my head, I notice this one awkward little boy in the front, right in the center of the studio. He's jiggling around a little, presumably loosening up. But it must be hard for him to "loosen up" when the video cameras seem to be trained directly on him. Sure enough, their unforgiving lenses are pointing straight at him, and I realize that he's not jiggling at all: he's trembling, and trying (unsuccessfully) to hide it.

He's probably fifteen or sixteen, but he looks about ten...towheaded and bespectacled, skinny and short, kind of how I always pictured Owen Meany in that book, you know? A very well-groomed man with an MTV t-shirt is crouching in front of him, with his back to the mirror, giving him the thumbs up and telling him sotto voce that he'll do great, just watch the teacher and do what she does, etc. I figure it out...he's on that show Made and he's taking this dance class to get graceful, or to be a better football player (poor tiny thing!), or to gear up for the prom.

But nobody I know watches Made for the inspiring endings. We all watch out of sheer schadenfreude: "Thank God I'm not a klutz like that!" or "Can you believe that people like this haven't been naturally selected out yet??" We watch because we like to see ordinary people humiliate themselves on cable. You know it, I know it, and the producers of the show know it. Why else would they put this newbie high school kid into an adult dance class and follow his every awkward step with two cameras?

"Come and meet...those dancing feet..." I felt a little sorry for him, but it was all I could do to concentrate on my own steps, to make sure that I wouldn't be the one tripping over my own feet in front of the cameras. My friends and family wouldn't be watching him in this scene anyway.

the fires of autumn

Today I find myself in a dying sunshine, with its falling leaves and the specific blue of its sky. The office girls on the street are little open flowers, hurrying to drink in the warmth by getting the last wears out of their peep-toe pumps, cap sleeves and peasant skirts before the cold comes. The boys just loosen their ties as they always do. The weather is perfect, and I am walking apace toward my certain failure.

You see, I have a meeting in about half an hour. A big meeting, with my bosses, my bosses' bosses, and the biggest-name potential clients that we have ever had. And I have nothing to show them but my smart little suit (why did I bother?), this beautiful autumn day, and a leather portfolio full of blank paper. Why did I think that I could do this? I am not cut out for the long hours of a magazine advertising maven. I don't have the print background, and I've been out of fresh ideas since my junior year of college. But they hired me anyway, probably thinking that I would suddenly rediscover whatever talent I once displayed with gusto on student-group posters and flashy websites.

I should turn around. I should turn around right now and go sit in the park. In fact, I should get used to the park, because that's where I will be living in a few short months if I don't get another job after I lose this one. Rents here are not cheap!

"Not cheap." Hmm. Not bad. I knelt on the sidewalk, ripping my pantyhose to shreds while I opened the portfolio and took out a pen. I started writing and sketching. "Not cheap, by design." "Not cheap, but you get what you pay for." An expensive-looking apartment, with one of these things sitting on the coffee table. A car with an all-leather interior and a GPS system, with one of these on the hardwood dash. Not bad. Twenty minutes left. Maybe I won't have to live in the park after all.

miscommunicated spanikopita

The words have been few and far between in our apartment, lately. I hear him running the dishwasher, and sometimes he hears me slam the door by accident when my hands are full of the laundry basket or the mail. So when he asked if he could pick anything up for me while he was out, I remembered how to say, "No, thank you," and he was gone, the door clicking quietly behind him. But when he returned, he had a bag full of aromatic takeout from the Greek place. "I brought you a spinach pie," he said. I couldn't eat it right then because there were too many other variables at play, but I knew what he meant. I was glad that he had done it, but I couldn't figure out how to tell him. Later, I heard him put some music on his stereo, and I put my empty water glass in the sink. I think we are ok.

the dooryard

"You have to see this place to believe it," she whispered fervently, grabbing my hand and practically dragging me out of the car. "It's unlike anything...it's...unlike...anything."

When Madeira got so worked up that she was at a loss for words, I knew that she was about to show me something amazing. "You won't believe it," she whispered. I love Maddy when she gets like this, cheeks flushed, eyes sparkling, dark shiny hair flowing in every excited direction. I love her. We stumbled up the side of a small mountain, kicking up dirt, moss, and small sticks in our haste.

"How did you find this, again?" I asked her in a low voice. I wasn't sure why we had been whispering in the first place.

"Shh!"

Apparently this place, whatever it is, demands a respectful silence. We reached the top after another five minutes or so of scrambling, and I immediately felt that we were at a different elevation. The air seemed a little bit thinner, and I was getting lightheaded. Or maybe that was just hunger, as I tend to get a little peckish if someone drags me out of bed just before dawn and pulls me up the side of a mountain. But it's Maddy, so I stay quiet and ignore the mild sense of dizziness. "Do you see it?" she whispered.

I followed her luminous arm with my eyes, down into the ravine where she was pointing. That tricky predawn light obscured my vision, but after staring for a few seconds, I was beginning to make out shapes. It wasn't just a ravine. It was a rectangle set into the top of a deep, wide ravine. A solid, flat rectangle. With...what was that...? A doorknob?

"I call it 'The Dooryard,'" she whispered. "Go ahead. Open it."

She had to be insane. I can't just open some random door in the ground, especially in this light, where I can't even really see what might be coming out of the door to eat the pair of us. And no guy wants to go without telling the woman he loves how he feels, or knowing that she died too and he couldn't save her. "Uh...no?"

"I'll do it!" she snapped. "I did it before." She dropped to her knees and gingerly twisted the doorknob. The door opened outward, and she pulled it all the way open, letting the knob rest on the soft earth near where I was standing. Inside, I thought I saw another door.

"Is that...?" This door was made of metal, with a handle instead of a knob, and when she turned it, it inexplicably opened inward. But there was another door right there. I couldn't explain the physics of it. It just worked.

"I needed you to come," she said. "In case something bad happened."

My night with Maddy just got much, much longer.

smoke and mirrors

Silently, mouth open, I watched the first triumphant steps of the Wacky-Wall-Walker as it made its unsteady way down the face of the mirror wall in the dining room. I was trying to not look at the back of my hand, so I focused on the blue goo-rubber spider, the cereal box toy that had an appeal that my mother just couldn't see. Out of the corner of my eye, I could still see the temporary tattoo (also from a cereal box) on the back of my hand and I hated it. It was Batman's eye, or something, rendered in a comic-book-style blue and yellow, and all I wanted was for that awful bruise to stop staring at me.

These, of course, are the thoughts you have when your heart is pounding and your head is spinning and different aromas of flavored tobaccos are filling your nostrils like a thousand ball-peen hammers slowly pounding your brain out to the rhythm of the newest Kama Sutra soundtrack. Or at least, this is what I was thinking about after I'd had three vodka cocktails and some strawberry-mint shisha in the hookah bar.

Eventually, I cried about the tattoo and Mom scrubbed it off with some rubbing alcohol (the cool burn of freedom!). A cool, sweet burn like the ice water that the veil-clad waitress brought to chase my vices.