Testimonial

"Did you remember to take out the trash, Craig?" her voice filtered down the stairs into my little home office, interrupting the rapid click-click of my fingers on the keyboard.  She really had an uncanny knack of bothering me when I was in the middle of something important.

 

"Yes, honey, I did," I yelled back. "You know I'm workin' down here, sweetheart!"

 

"Oh, sorry," she said, poking her head through the door at the top of the stairs.  I looked up to catch a glimpse of her long, brown hair and her doll-like face.  She was scowling, but on her, a scowl was only a crinkled button nose and a delicately scrunched eyebrow.  "I'm always so tempted to talk to you because I know you're so close."

 

"I know, babe," I said.  "Just try to pretend I'm not here." 

 

"Well, I'm going out now, anyway," she said.  "I'll bring some dinner back." 

 

"Bye, darling," I said. I cringed a little, fully aware that I'd used four different pet names for her in as many sentences. I found myself hoping that she would ignore it this time, even though we were both aware that the pet names usually only came out for two occasions: when I was irked, and when I wanted sex.  The gentle thud of the front door told me that she had ignored it, and I laughed aloud at the folly of my mixed messages, mostly to fill the silent space with something before I returned to my work. 

 

The annoyed "sweetie"- and "honey"-ing had been going on for the past month, ever since I started working from home. I had been "decentralized" from the media and publishing firm where I used to work, which meant that it wasn't worth the price of overhead in this energy market to keep writer/editors in cubicles. They actually sold the whole building, mostly to pay the bills that had accrued during the transition from print to electronic media.  A number of my colleagues were downsized as a result.  In the small favors category, while I wasn't technically "downsized," my job functions were.  I used to be full time, but the work they sent me was often not enough to fill more than half of any given week. And editing is still one of those jobs that pays by the hour, unless you're some kind of superstar. 

 

I really feel like I inhabit my world right now, which is an interesting sensation for someone who had always felt like watching the nightly news was akin to sitting in the back row at a huge, foreign sporting event. When people realized that gas prices weren't going to go back down anytime soon, commuting essentially became obsolete.  Now, working from home is not unusual among my friends and former colleagues.  I move less during the day, and I eat less, but my meals end up costing about the same as they did when I bought them from the hot truck three times a week.  Such is the life of the middle class American these days, according to the CNN.com "iReporters."  Such is my life. 

      

On my last day in the office, I was browsing the jobs in the back of one of the commuter rags and I found an interesting little ad. "Wanted: Testimonial Writers/Must have firm command of standard English/Multiple dialects and Internet speak a plus/Creative, self-starter, work from home/negotiable rate based on fiction portfolio."  I was going to be working from home already, so I ripped out the ad and put it in my wallet. It only took me a few days of running out of firm work and being bored out of my mind before I sent a portfolio of my short and flash fiction to the email address in the ad.

 

Not to brag, but they hired me within minutes.  I negotiated a reasonable per contract/per hour rate and signed and faxed back the employment agreement.  The next morning, the work just started rolling in.  It was every creative writer's dream job, really.  They would send me information about products or services, and I would write glowing testimonials from satisfied customers. Occasionally the contractor would ask for a couple of testimonies with reasonably bad grammar or spelling, just to lend them a little verisimilitude.  Sometimes, they'd ask for a negative one, but it always had to point to another of the company's products as the eventual solution to whatever problem the product in question was supposed to address. Dishonest?  It was fiction like any other, and as long as I didn't think too hard about it, I didn't really care.
 

I'm mostly just thankful that I was able to get a second job at all, considering the economy.  It makes little difference to me, as a writer and editor, how many jobs I'm working, as long as the work is sufficiently stimulating and it fills the days as well as it fills my bank account.  But for some reason, I was still unable to tell my wife about it.  When she asked, I told her I was writing "freelance ad copy for small publications."  I love her, but I didn't want her to know exactly what I was writing to supplement our household income.  Maybe it was misplaced machismo, or maybe the dishonesty of it rankled on some subconscious level, but then, I've always been secretive about my creative work.  In a way, getting to know my characters often felt like a betrayal, no matter how unattractive they were to me.  It was the intimacy of it more than anything else, and I loved her too much to confront her with all of that.

 

The loose timeframes on the work allowed me to really inhabit these imaginary customers, and I slowly built a stable of distinct voices that could be called upon to testify whenever their expertise was needed.  There was "Maryann," the mother of three whose children always had some ailment and were always too obstinate to bend to conventional remedies.  Then there was "Steve," the average guy who was always on the lookout for better, easier, and faster ways to do his dreaded household chores.  "Tara" desperately wanted a magic weight loss bullet, and "christine" only used the shift key on her keyboard to type out emoticons.  "Peter" often had problems with products, but was always able to recommend an alternative.  "Jack," "Lily," and "Dee" mixed modifiers, dropped verbs, and sometimes misspelled words.  If any of my characters, even the one-offs, had to claim to behave in an unusual way (for example, eating only one meal per day), I'd give them a compelling reason to do it (violent reactions to eating before or after sleep).  I often had to let them be gullible to make them beguiling.  I loved these characters, even if their purpose was slightly less than ethical.

That evening, I emerged from my office and greeted my wife with a kiss.  "You know I had an appointment today," she said, half asking, half telling. 

"No," I said. "What sort of appointment?"

"With Dr. Bhat," she said.

"Didn't you just see her?" I asked.  It was odd for her to go to the internist any more than she had to. She had a fear of doctors that she would never admit to, but she'd never had a proper blood pressure reading in her life.  She was perfectly healthy, but her blood pressure skyrocketed every time they slapped the cuff on her.

"She asked me to come back for a follow-up," she said, sitting down in a kitchen chair.  My wife was a small woman who was always bubbly enough to fill a room.  But right now, she looked even smaller than her five-foot-two.    

"What's the matter?" I asked, reaching out and rubbing her shoulders gently.

"I have a tumor," she said.

"Not..." I didn't want to say "cancer" because that word reeked of finality.

"No," she said.  "Not cancer.  It's just a tumor.  But it could grow.  And it could become cancer."

Relieved, I choked, "Oh!  So you can get it out, right?"    

"Yes," she said. "I could.  But I'm not sure I want to."

"What do you mean 'you're not sure you want to'?" I asked, incredulous.  This was not like having your tonsils out because they might get infected again in the future.  This was a tumor that could eventually kill her.

"I've been reading about some other options," she said.  "People have shrunk similar tumors with dietary changes, exercise, and herbs."

"Oh, honey," I said.  "You can't believe everything you read on the Internet."

"But some of these stories!  They're so compelling!" she exclaimed.  "I have already ordered a few things."

"Oh, no." I could feel my stomach falling into a deep, dark pit.     

How did sisters speak in the olden times?

"Every time I see him, I must look like a startled doe by coachlight. I'm surprised, nay, shocked, at the way the mere sight of him...affects...me," Julia complained, only relaxing her terse, clipped tones as she carefully decided on "affects" as her verb of choice. From the tone of her voice, I knew that she could have easily replaced that particular word with "elates," "thrills," or "exhilarates" to describe the phenomenon. However, Julia was practicing her signature restraint. "I consider myself to be a woman of densest moral fiber and most solid constitution, Helen," she said. Something about her is dense, all right. I sat in the living room crocheting a lace doily, trying not to smirk. I pictured her getting weak in the knees when the object of her affection, a small young man whose life appeared to be a series of quick, efficient motions, passed by her classroom door. "And I'm supposed to be a role model for all those girls! It simply will not do to have me...swooning...whenever the new headmaster walks into the room."

"Julia," I said, looking up from my work. She shuddered. I loved saying my sister's name because she appeared to hate it so viscerally. (Whenever it was announced in public, she would ask the heavens why our parents couldn't have given her a slightly less Roman-sounding name. I think she may have decided to work in the boarding school because everyone there was obliged to call her Miss Chase.) "Why don't you just go out with him? Isn't there a barn-raising on Friday?"

"Helen!" she snapped. "Don't you understand? I am not the sort of woman who 'goes to barn-raisings' with gentlemen. Specifically not with gentlemen who are my superiors at work. That would be unseemly, and on the whole, undesirable."

"What's better," I posed the question: "An evening of companionship and possibly even some fun? Or being afraid of running into him every day for the rest of your tenure?"

"You don't understand. Not at all," she sighed loudly, collapsing into a rocking chair. For such an uptight priss, Julia certainly had a way of becoming melodramatic. Normally, when I tell a story about my life with my sister, it invariably ends up as a semi-tragic version of The Taming of the Shrew, in which the concerned father will not allow his younger daughter to marry until the older one is married first. Nobody dies at the ends of my stories, but nobody actually gets married, either. But after many stories of the kind, I'd sort of given up on ever even being pursued. All the eligible gentlemen had heard the legend of Julia Chase, and feared that the little sister would be just like her, but worse for having had to skulk around their house like a scullery maid to avoid her temper. Or so the boys said, according to my friend Emma. These rumors were, of course, much exaggerated versions of the truth.

Truthfully, I'd recently taken up crocheting. I found that the small, repetitive motions of it soothed me, particularly when Julia got it in her head to talk about emotions, relationships, or anything else she didn't really understand. Even now, my hands and fingers moved deftly, around and through, making lace while my sister was speaking of being in love. As smart as she was, and well-trained in the arts of nursing, Julia was still entirely unable to diagnose this particular ailment in herself. I smiled, knowing full well that she would skewer my logic if I even attempted to explain it to her. No, she and this headmaster of hers were going to have to figure it all out themselves. With my next stitch, I sent up a prayer for Julia to figure it out sooner, rather than later. From my crochet hook to God's ears, or something.

some old poetry

I am working on some longer stories right now, so I thought I would post a little bit of my old poetry.

Krishna, Stargu, Lisa, Talasi and That One Guy Who Wouldn't Let Neruda Go

Your names, my thoughts of you, are lazy snakes
hissing through my tall-grass lips and teeth:
you, unfamiliar friends, go undetected.
Yet, once upon a time you were
the local loci. The rotation of your words
made gravity,
music, like gyroscopes skipping across
the kitchen floor.
The rhymes and words and lines
in reedy teenaged voices, all ready to
crack mirrors, spewing beauty so extreme
that it became hideous: your meanings are forgotten,
but the hum remains.
We took turns lapping each other on the same circuit,
racing for three minutes and ten seconds apiece,
never knowing defeat.
With each of us in stages of poetic undress, we drove,
and hoped to find a sexless, skinless nudity
at the edge of the centrifuge.
Did we find it? Did we have fun?
And now the memory of you is snakes.
I grab one by the tail sometimes, and swing the serpent
like a sling,
in circles over my head.
I do this crazy thing to hear the hiss become a hum.

---

Storm Story

When the sky was painted, tumultuous gray
and we stood behind screens of dirty metal
your eyes reflected everything.
I could hear the moist, electric air
and feel the low rumble of your voice.

We watched as water bounced, defied gravity,
was thwarted by dry dirt and concrete.
We watched the parched earth
as it slowly learned to take its medicine.
It was not unlike
watching me with you.

Saturated with seeing, we closed the windows
and made our own rain.

---

“the object of someone else’s madness”

never have I been so loaded
as when, failing to avoid your stare
I thought I could be placated

into pleasure, with a blind eye
to slow approaches, your
fingertips. at least I hoped to try

to be myself. when the day is done
I like to kick back, relax,
enjoy an ice cold vodka
with a warm lemon gun.

Secrets

My mother never knew that I used to spend my summer evenings getting wasted behind the Safeway. There was a big parking lot there, and all my friends were stockboys, so that's where we went. They unloaded the flats during the day, and they would stack them up so that there would be nice places for us to sit when we got there. We sat around by the back steps of the Safeway and drank cases and cases of cheap beer.

I used to walk to the far part of the parking lot with my boyfriend, whichever one he was at the time, and we'd share a joint and compete to see who was the bravest with the semi-public displays of affection. Sometimes we would just talk, though, and he would tell me how he ended up hanging out behind the Safeway. A lot of them had some real sob stories: mothers who didn't love them, or discouraging teachers and guidance counselors who advised them that their only options were manual labor or enlistment. A couple of them were just spoiled, and thought that drinking shitty beer behind the Safeway was some kind of rebellion. But me, I was the one who did it just to do something, slurping my Bud Light from the can and letting the summer night take me wherever it pleased.

Was I bored? Sure. Was I tired? Of course. Did I have a story that would make me rest my head in my hands as I imparted it to my boyfriend du jour? No. I was just the girl who listened as the buzz settled in and the long night behind the Safeway became a quiet therapy session for boy after boy. I don't think I loved any of them, but I listened as though I did. It was many years before I grew weary of always being along for the ride.

Tuesday, 7:30, Community Center

It was a Tuesday, and the walls of the municipal building looked more like doors than walls. "All the best stories seem to be a delicate blend of careful nostalgia and unrelenting fear," my teacher said, a startlingly earnest look gracing her unwieldy features.  I opened my mouth to ask what she meant by that, but I suddenly remembered the three best stories I'd read in the past week and promptly shut it again. The stories that resonated with me were the ones that described seemingly insignificant details with loving precision: the crumbs on the checkered tablecloth, the dull grey of the living room sofa set.  You would imagine that these descriptions were written to lend verisimilitude to the scenes being set, the stories being told.  But you would, of course, be wrong.  Any painstaking rendering of my teacher's too-large, bulbous nose and beady, close-set eyes, or, for example, of my insistence on carrying a zippered pencil case (just like the one I had in grade school) to my adult-ed class would merely serve as reminders that each moment is but one more step toward our eventual, terrifying demises. Descriptions remind us that our time on Earth is ephemeral, and that we must notice everything we can before we die. There is always the unrelenting fear that we will have missed something when death has caught up with us, the idea that there will unexpectedly come a time when our senses will close themselves off to the sublime and leave us only an empty experience of the subterranean.  The doors opened a little bit wider, then, coaxing.

 

With every adjective, the authors of those stories insinuated that they knew we were afraid of dying, and outwardly proclaimed that they would do their best to keep us living in the moment from the first word to the last. That is why we read, after all.  Especially if it is a fictional moment of someone else's device, the reader forgets the self and all the ugly trappings thereof. If I were to allow you to read what I scribbled on my sheaf of looseleaf paper, and watch me sigh with pleasure as I zipped my number 2 Dixon Ticonderoga back into its case, you might think, perhaps for a moment, that something great was waiting for me when I strode confidently into the summer night. You might think, perhaps for another moment, that when a gust of wind carried my hasty notes to the farthest reaches of the subway platform, some handsome stranger would be there to help me pick them up again.  You might conclude by imagining my mouse-brown hair blowing in cinematic waves behind me, my thin skirt clinging to my legs while the stranger reads my musings on life and writing and learns my soul before he even knows my name. You would be wrong, of course, but the way you would be wrong would be much different than anything you expected, as you would discover when I disabused you of your false assumptions.  Then, I could enjoy my two small triumphs: if only for a few moments, you will have forgotten how to fear your insidious fate, and I will have learned how to write.

Memory/A Love Poem

Who among us remembers how to write a love poem? In this, the age of electric courtship, we have become slaves to expediency: shortened words abridge even the lengthiest sentiment. There was a time when the entirety of art was the commission of one's innermost fantasies to paper, when subject and object mingled in public without exhibitionism. In those days, each horseshoe from the village blacksmith was a tiny piece of genius. But now, even pen and ink have fallen into obscurity, like the smithy's anvil and chisels. If I were a blacksmith (replaced by a machine), I would try not to forget the way I used to hoist red-hot iron from the fire, feeling the heat of the forge against my skin like a passionate embrace. And you, the dangerous, beautiful iron, would try not to forget the way I used to bend to your desires.

monologue

Your voice is like music, he said, the saddest song. There are always tears in it, brining the rounded notes until they are plump and delectable. I moved to protest, but he spoke again.  I only hear it at the precipice of my despair, and every time, it pulls me back from the brink. Your eyes are much the same.

Seven Minutes in Heaven: or, Revisionist History

I had never heard of the game "Seven Minutes in Heaven" until Allison Crawford's fourteenth birthday party. She was new in town, and her parents desperately wanted her to be popular, so they let her have a big boy-girl party with minimal supervision. My parents probably would have shit bricks if they'd known exactly how often Allison's parents planned on checking on us (which was three times: once when we arrived, once in the middle of the party to see if we needed more snacks, and once when we went home, just to make sure nobody had gotten into the liquor cabinet, or if we had, that we'd sobered up enough to be presentable to our parents).  Allison was old for her class, so we were only eighth-graders at the time, and many of us hadn't been introduced to the wonders of kissing games until that night.

 

I soon saw that it wasn't just a kissing game, this "Seven Minutes in Heaven." It was a game where you were thrust into the spare coat closet with a boy for seven minutes.  It was pretty much too dark to kiss without making a horrible mess of it, so all you could really do was grope and be groped for seven minutes, hoping to avoid an accidental elbow to the head or poke in the eye.  The boys in our class were certainly not clean enough to make this a pleasant experience for the girls, nor did they have any idea how a young woman (even one who was adventurous enough to actually play this game) might want to be touched.

 

I stood off to the side, epitomizing the wallflower as I watched the faces of those who had entered the coat closet as children and emerged as full-fledged, emotionally scarred young adults.  Some of them (mostly boys) came out with stupid grins plastered to their faces. Others (mostly girls, but still a good number of boys) returned to the light with a confused look that practically shouted, "What the hell was that all about?"  When Allison came out, looking incredibly self-satisfied with her experience of the captain of the lacrosse team, I caught the eye of a fellow wallflower and shared a grin with him. His name was Dave, and he was as quiet and shy and smart as I was, and I felt a sudden kinship with him that I'd never felt when I saw him in school. I imagined that he shared my train of thought, feeling out of place at a party with kissing games and no parents: these were things that popular kids did, parties that would become illicit keggers just a few short years into the future. 

 

It was no affront to Dave's popularity to say that he probably wouldn't be invited to those future keggers. Even though he was on the lacrosse team, he wasn't a star player. And he was cute, but he had an uncanny knack for wearing unflattering clothes, probably hand-me-downs from his near infamous older brother.  But he was highly invested in student government, the engineering team, and the concert choir.  He was much more likely to spend a weekend night at the library than anyone else at school.  Except maybe me.  I'd seen him there a few times.  Allison's friend Lindsey snapped me out of my reverie by grabbing my hand and pulling me toward the center of the crowd. "You're going in!" Lindsey cackled.  She pushed me into the closet.  Someone in the crowd said, "Who wants to go in with her?" in a tone that was part question, part insult. Yes, I know I'm a nerd. Thank you very much for reminding me.  But then I did wonder about the answer to the question.  I was standing in a dark closet, about to be joined by some boy who would volunteer to grope the least popular girl in school for seven minutes.  It all happened so fast, I'm not even sure how it all unfolded. But the next thing I knew, there was a boy in the closet with me, and the door was closed.

 

"All right," I said quietly.  "Do your worst."

 

"What?" said the voice in the dark.

 

"Go on."

 

"No," he said.  "I came in here because I didn't want you to get pawed like those other girls."

 

"Oh," I said, starting to relax.

 

"You're too good for that," he said. "I like you."

 

"I'm sorry," I said. "But it's really dark in here.  Who are you?"

 

"It's me, Dave," he said. I could hear the smile in his voice. I thought he was cute before, when I was watching him from across the room, but now that we were in the closet together and he was practically invisible, he was even more attractive.

 

"I like you too," I said. I reached out to where I imagined he was standing and accidentally smacked him with my hand as I tried to hug him. 

 

"Ow," he said. "What was that for?"

 

"Sorry, I can't see you," I said. "I'm trying to give you a hug, though. I really appreciate what you did for me."

 

"Oh," he said. He slowly reached out until we could touch each other's hands and arms. "Your skin is so soft."

 

"I use a lot of lotion," I said.

 

"It smells nice, too," he said. I noticed then that Dave didn't smell like the other boys in our class. He was probably the only one who bothered to have a shower before coming to the party.

 

"Thank you," I said. I ran my hands up his arms, to his shoulders. He was developing a fine musculature, probably from all the lacrosse. I vaguely remembered that he was also on the winter track team. "How much time do you think we have left?"

 

"Enough," he said. He leaned down and pressed his lips to my forehead, then lower, to my cheek, then to my nose, then to my other cheek. He must have eaten eighteen carrots a day to be able to see so well in the dark.  I was surprised by the kisses, but in all, still quite pleased with the experience. Then, he moved in for the kill, his perfect lips pressing softly against mine, then a little harder.  I had always read about kisses in scores and scores of novels that I probably shouldn't have been allowed to read.  But they couldn't prepare me for the rush of adrenaline that rose up from my stomach and made my heart flutter.  At the moment when we were about to make the kiss even deeper, the door opened and thirty bratty kids were ruining my first kiss with their leers and cries of, "oooOOOooh!"

 

I pushed him away and he looked down at me with his beautiful icy blue eyes, which were, now that I saw him in the light, welling up with tears.  Was he so nervous about kissing me that he couldn't help it?  Was I doing it wrong?  I grabbed his hand and pulled him out of the closet, out of the finished basement party room, and up to the top of the stairs, where I sat.

 

"Are you ok?" I asked. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.  

 

"I didn't mean to," he said.

 

"You didn't mean to what?"

 

"I didn't mean to take advantage of you," he said, still finding errant tears to brush away so that he wouldn't have to look at me.

 

"I didn't mean to take advantage of you, either," I said. "But I'm glad we both did." His expression seemed to melt as an unbidden smile crossed his lips. The other kids were now egging on some other poor pair in the closet, and they had long since forgotten about us.

 

"It was my first kiss," he said.

 

"Mine too," I said. "But I think I'd like to try for my second."   

 

  

 

   

Just a little crush

Having spent the morning trudging through wet leaves and heavy mist, my eyes had grown accustomed to the low visibility and my lungs were almost enjoying the watery air. Although my friends and I were just barely pubescent, we liked to think that we handled ourselves at least as maturely as the leaders who hiked with us.

It was therefore a complete surprise when an acorn connected with my temple, the hollow little knock echoing through my head while the point of contact started throbbing. I was so shocked, I didn't even say anything at first. I simply turned around to face my attacker, half expecting a squirrel to have bombed me from a tree. When I'd turned sufficiently to see that it was the leader (looking incredibly sheepish as he perched on a rock), I was finally able to choke out, "Hey!"

"I'm so sorry!" he said. "Are you ok?"

"What, did you expect me to duck? This pack is heavy!"

"Sorry!" he repeated. I felt a quick surge of energy before the throbbing returned. Did all women have this kind of power over men? To look them in the eyes and let them know with barely a sentence that they'd done something stupid? It was, no pun intended, a heady feeling for a thirteen-year-old to have such sway over a man who was at least twice her age.

"Heh, well," I said. "It's fine. You have really good aim."

"Or really bad aim," he laughed.

"One or the other." This hiking trip had basically been a ploy to spend some weekend time with our favorite teacher. He was our favorite, of course, because he was only twice our age, and about ten times better-looking than our short, greasy-haired middle school classmates. If I had been a sillier girl, I would have picked that acorn up and framed it in a heart-shaped shadowbox.

We had taken a rest near the highest point of our hike, at a clearing near a cliffside. It was difficult to see the cliff itself as the heavy fog rolled in over the edge. If we didn't know it was there, we probably would have fallen off of it. I did pick up that acorn, after all. But instead of shoving it in my pocket as a romantic keepsake, I tossed it over the side. And when I watched the mist swallow it whole, like a hook falling into a murky pond, my headache subsided completely.

Misanthropy

Although my mother was claustrophobic, I never really understood the fear of small, enclosed spaces. When I was twelve, my favorite hiding place was in my closet, on the side where I'd pushed away the old shoes and hung all the sweaters and sweatshirts so none of the skirts and dresses could reach down to strangle me in the unrelenting darkness.  My closet cave was too small for anyone other than me, and much too dark for any activity other than sitting and being surrounded by my secrets.

 

I can only guess at my motives for designating those few cubic feet of closet space as a hideaway.  Who or what was I hiding from?  Was the blackness of my cave just another layer of security for my precious secrets?  I remember some of those secrets, those nascent sexual fantasies faithfully penned in locked diaries. I can recall my fictional accounts of eroticized corporal punishment, which turned into rescues and romances and things that I knew the mechanics of but never thought I'd actually have an opportunity to try. Did I know even then that society would have looked down upon my impetuousness?  Or was I simply taking the space and time to learn how my most powerful sexual organ---my mind---really worked?

 

There were other secrets too: I'd gotten extremely bored of Barbie dolls; I wanted to live in a  spacious New England farmhouse and write for a living; I thought the Gap was the be-all and end-all of designer clothes, and resented every girl in my class who could afford to shop there even though nothing in the store fit my precociously curvy figure particularly well. Those were equally worthy of guarding from everyone and everything. Perhaps my body had started to take up more space than I was used to, and I wanted to reassure myself that I could still fit in something that resembled a womb.

 

In hindsight, my attraction to the inner sanctum of my already private sanctuary was probably just a symptom of my larger-scale malaise. I was afraid of the big, wide world and all the people in it.  Certain people scared me more than others: "strangers" of all stripes; people who gave out stickers at Halloween; garbagemen; the teenager who lived a few doors down; and people who drove unmarked vans, to name a few.  The very idea of talking to a store clerk was akin to facing a firing squad. Traveling anywhere alone was like setting out on the Oregon Trail with an empty wagon and a cannibal. 

 

Every adult I had ever dared to trust (my parents, my teachers, and the police officer who lectured at my school) had imprinted upon me a distinct fear of the unknown.  The idea that a predator lurked around every corner with a piece of candy in one hand and a rope in the other was a common meme in that era. That picture of the stranger with candy pounded itself firmly into my innocence.  When horror stories of rohypnol started filtering down from the college scene, I swore to myself that I'd never drink anything at a party unless it was from a sealed container, which would be promptly reclosed after every sip and would never leave my hand or my sight.  I learned early on that people simply could not be trusted.  Every person in the world was a facade of friendliness with a heart of evil intent, paving the road to kidnapping with a smile and a cleverly disguised bottle of alcohol.  My overprotective trusted adults had unknowingly raised a misanthrope in their midst.     

 

Perhaps that is why I recognized my fantasies as just that: flights of fancy that never had a chance in hell of reaching fulfillment.  In order for me to have sex, I'd have to meet some people to do it with.  And I'd have to trust them enough to let them into my smallest spaces.  Maybe my closet was the only place I could hide from the cognitive dissonance of it all.     

Alcohol makes everything an epic

Suddenly I noticed how easily we fell into step. With equal strides, we pressed forward into the darkness. It was as though we had found a way to communicate with only our footsteps, or that we had both tapped into the steady beat of a quiet, unknown drummer. Our little walk had a destination; a door through which you would pass and I would not. When the door closed, you and I would be a world apart. That is why I did not hasten to break our embrace in the doorway. I strained to feel the drummer's quickening thrum one last time.

As a note:

I have been writing, actually. I've been involved in some playwriting, but I find that plays don't work quite as well when you read them on the blog. And I've been working on this story about Simon. Here's the first part, for your reading pleasure.

Delusions of Grandeur (part 1)

Simon was a very ordinary man when he packed his towheaded daughter into the back seat of the car, carefully buckling her into the safety belt and arranging her picture books and her plastic baggie of Cheerios on the seat next to her. He told her to watch her fingers, and gently but firmly closed the car door. Then he pushed his round, horn-rimmed glasses up onto the bridge of his nose and opened the door to the driver’s seat. He hadn’t planned on committing any crimes today, but sometimes, he reasoned, certain circumstances warrant unorthodox measures.

Ever the conscientious driver, Simon signaled before pulling out from the parallel parking space. It was a very ordinary car when he had picked it out from the selection on the curb: champagne with a tan interior, four-door sedan, no vanity plates, no bumper stickers. No damage, which was rare for cars in the city. Usually, they at least had a little dent in the side, or an empty square on the license plate where the registration sticker had been clipped off for the purposes of evading registration fees, but this one was as pristine as they come. The only possible identifying features were inside, where a small statue of St. Anthony was mounted on the dashboard and an air freshener that looked like the ace of spades hung from the rearview mirror. Simon studied his daughter in the mirror for a moment before he removed the air freshener. She was still taking in her surroundings in that precious way that children have of understanding the world.

“This is a nice car, Daddy,” she said. “It smells good.”

“It is nice, isn’t it?” he answered, smiling at her in the mirror. The plastic statue came off in his hand with a sharp tug. Simon waited until he rolled up at a stoplight before reaching into the glove compartment to deposit the defunct decorations. When he opened the glove compartment, traces of an illicit green odor that he hadn’t smelled in many, many years wafted up to his nostrils. He slammed the little door shut, hoping that the aroma hadn’t flowed back to his daughter. Looking at her in the mirror, he noticed that she was preoccupied sucking on cereal bits and fingers while she turned the pages of her book. He opened the glove compartment again and was suddenly thankful for the length of this stoplight. Simon’s fingers caressed the tiny St. Anthony and the playing card with the strong-enough scent before coming to rest on a bulgingly full plastic bag of high quality weed, the likes of which Simon had never even seen before. After determining that the bag was closed, he pulled it out of the glove compartment so as to fully revel in the glory of it. Before he could bring it up to his nostrils for a good whiff, the light turned green and he threw the bag back into the glove compartment. He hoped the scent from the playing card would continue to be strong enough to mask that delicious scent, and at the same time, he hoped it wouldn’t.

The onramp approached with an intensity that Simon experienced in that precious way, like a child behind the wheel for the first time, in someone else’s lap, driving but not driving, with no responsibility and all of the heady pleasure. Surely the smell of (admittedly) excellent weed hadn’t affected him so much? But he let the onramp wash over him and relaxed into a cruise-controlled sixty-five miles per hour. At this time of day, the highway was never as crowded as other times: stragglers had already made it to work and school, and lunch and rush hour were still another two solid hours away. This was Simon’s favorite time to be on the road, and he zipped along, bobbing and weaving around the midday drivers who seemed to think that it was their God-given right to cruise down the highway at 45, or worse, at variable speeds between 35 and 80 miles per hour.

“Where are we going, Daddy?” the girl asked.

“Daddy isn’t entirely sure where we’re going, sweetie,” Simon said. He glanced at her in the rearview just in time to see a Cheerio fall off of her cherubic little cheek. She hardly missed a beat.

“Like last time?”

“Yes, just like last time,” Simon smiled. She was just a baby, still in the car seat, the last time this happened. She claimed to remember, but her voice betrayed no hint of doubt or fear or bewilderment: she and Daddy were going on a ride in a car, and the last time they went out for father-daughter time, one of them got ice cream and both of them flirted with some very pretty ladies. She smiled then too, remembering.

“Can we get ice cream again?” she asked.

“Anything you want,” he said, thinking of what he might do with the weed while she was distracted by ice cream. Could he really get away with selling it? Would fast-food restaurant or ice cream parlor workers be better equipped to pay for the really good stuff? If he kept some for himself, he could always make them include some rolling papers in the trade, and he could smoke it after she went to bed, out on the balcony of the hotel room. They could pay for a really nice hotel this time if he sold most of it. Not that he would sell it for the money, of course. He hoped there were empty baggies in the glove compartment.

An hour later, they were 65 miles away from that first ultra-vivid onramp. The rest of the roadway had been enough of a blur that Simon did not know where they were. Perfect. Simon’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket, startling him just enough to make him step on the brake, snapping his cruise-controlled trance back to reality, or at least, the reasonable facsimile of reality that Simon was currently occupying. He answered the phone, tentative.

“Hello?”

“Simon, darling, where are you?” said the voice, restrained, measured. He didn’t hear breathing on the other side.

“I’m at work,” he said. “I dropped the kidlet off at day care, too.”

“Oh, good,” the voice sighed audibly, a release of breath and tension.

“See you later,” he lied.

“Ok, darling, I’ll see you later,” the voice said.

“I love you,” he didn’t lie.

“I love you too.” Simon hung up the phone.

“Was that Mommy?” the girl’s voice pierced the silence that followed the phone call.

“Yes, it was,” he said. “She says hi.”

“Hi Mommy.”

The next hour of the ride was passed in silence, but the chatter wouldn’t stop in Simon’s head. It’s not as though he had to steal a car. He had a perfectly functional one, a nice one, even (an Audi) sitting in front of his house (which his wife would discover in the driveway at the end of the workday, when she arrived home to an empty house). But this car was serving his purposes (the gas tank was even full!), and there was the fringe benefit of the giant bag of quality marijuana in the glove compartment. The owner of this car was probably missing that weed right about now, he thought.

Simon had left the house this morning with every intention of walking his daughter to the daycare, walking back, getting into the Audi with a cup of coffee and a paper he wouldn’t read, and driving to work, where he would while away the time by surfing the Internet and writing erotic fiction that ultimately turned him off. Eight hours of his life he’d never get back. But on the way to the day care, this pristine car called out to him from the curb. “Take me for a ride,” it said. Or was that the crystalline voice of his precious progeny, like little breezes and bells on his spine? “Take me for a ride.”

So he jimmied the lock and packed his daughter into the car. “Am I going to day care?” she had asked.

“Not today.”

What he loved about these little sprees was that he could share them with her. If only she had enough exposure, he thought, she would develop a taste for a life of danger, which was something that his wife didn’t have and he felt their relationship suffered for it. He wanted to share this with her, not so that she would put herself into dangerous situations, but rather, so she would know how to enjoy dangerous situations and how to extricate herself from them when necessary. He truly believed that this would be a very useful skill for the contemporary American woman of the future, and he wanted his daughter to be prepared. As of now, she’d only developed a taste for ice cream, as far as he could tell. Perhaps this trip would help her.

These little trips were as much for her as they were for him. What he wanted out of life, even more than a family, a paycheck, and occasionally-successful tax evasion, was for a stranger to approach him when he was out on one of these jaunts and ask, “Excuse me sir, but are you a novelist?” Of course it would be an odd question to ask a man who was not writing at the moment, or for that matter, had never written anything more complicated than a quarterly earnings report. His photo graced missing persons reports and milk cartons; not dust-jackets. But in his mind, Simon glamorized the life of a novelist to the point where he assumed that if anybody had any idea what he was doing away from his usual sphere of influence (that is, taking his daycare-aged daughter on a spree of petit crimes to teach her the value of an adrenaline rush), they would automatically assume that he had a fascinating career, and was not actually a financial analyst.

He assumed incorrectly. Most people just considered him an unfit parent (seeing how much ice cream he let her eat), and irresponsible (especially when she was up late, rubbing her bleary eyes and tugging on his pants leg to alert him to her needs).

This is, in fact, what the employees at the Roy Rogers thought of him when he brought her into the restaurant that night. By this time, they were hundreds of miles away from home, and she was the only child in the entire restaurant (they were putting the chairs up and starting to mop up the bits of lettuce and onion from the fixins bar) but Simon’s daughter did not seem the least bit perturbed by any of it. Simon found the most pothead-looking clerk (who was closing out the registers) and leaned in to him.

“Yes sir?” he said. “Make it quick, we’re about to close.”

“Perhaps I can interest you in a business proposition?”

“Excuse me sir?”

“Would you be interested in…making a little exchange?” He tossed a trial-size baggie of weed in the general direction of the clerk, and it landed on the cash register and fell into the drawer. Just then, Simon’s daughter knocked a couple of stacks of cups from the drinks counter onto the floor. Everyone turned to look at her, and she blushed as though she’d been caught trying to steal a cookie from the jar before dinner. Simon smiled to himself and attempted to retrieve the baggie from the cash drawer, so that he could offer it to the clerk again, for real, but the clerk saw him reaching into the drawer and before Simon could stop him, he hit the silent alarm.

“I’m not trying to…” Simon started, but then he thought better of it. “Since you’ve already called the police on me, I might as well rob you. Hand over the cash.”

“This is the weirdest robbery ever,” the clerk said.

“I was just trying to sell you some weed. I’ll even let you keep the trial size bag for your trouble,” he said. “It’s in the cash drawer, next to the money you’re about to give me. Now hand it over, or I’ll tell them you tried to rape my daughter.”
“All right, all right,” the clerk said, pushing fistfuls of money into a paper bag. Simon saw the little bag of weed tumble into the bag.

“I said, keep the weed,” Simon growled. The clerk fished it out of the bag.

“But I don’t smoke,” he said.

“I’m sure you know someone who does.” Simon took the bag and folded it up. “Thank you very much. Have a wonderful night. Come on honey, we’re going.” She stopped trying to clean up the mess of cups and trotted out of the restaurant behind her father. “And good luck explaining that weed when the cops show up,” Simon muttered, simultaneously angry and elated. Perhaps he would have better luck at a coffee shop or a bar. The only condition was that it had to be across county lines, just in case the police weren’t too busy busting that Roy Rogers clerk for possession of extra special fixins.

“Do you want to get a hot chocolate with me?” Simon asked as he buckled her back into the car.

“Yay!” she smiled.

“You’re not too tired?”

“No,” she said. “I’m too excited from dropping those cups. Everybody looked, Daddy!” She blanketed her pride with humility, but Simon couldn’t find a way to temper his own pride. She was truly his daughter after all!

“All right then,” he said. He could hear sirens in the distance. He pulled out of the parking lot slowly and cautiously, waiting for an opening in traffic like any other satisfied customer on any other night, his bag of cash stuffed firmly under the passenger seat, his bag of weed hidden safely in the glove compartment, and his glowing golden daughter sitting wide-eyed in the back seat.

Novella #2, complete

I'm pretending I posted this right when I finished.

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.