Only three stories again. Thanks to everyone that submitted this week. My big goal is to get ten stories a week, or so. Here’s dreamin’!
The topic for next week is: Being invisible. Either metaphorically, or literally.
Enjoy the stories!
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-Anne Jindra
Val comes in wide-eyed like usual, sporting her gap-toothed grin and maniacal (and always unprovoked) laughter. She sits down in one of my wooden office chairs, then immediately gets up to look out of the window, then sits down again and laughs. She smoothes out the folds of her worn wool jacket, tames the fly-aways in her hair, and finally rests her hands in her lap. I watch as she goes through her ritual, noticing that her fingers look like a Diego Rivera painting, and I stare at them.
A brief silence follows before I remember that I am her social worker, and she helpfully reminds me by offering, “I’m in a lot of trouble,” which she follows with another cackle.
She had been receiving unemployment for almost three months – she lost her job cleaning rooms at the college inn. Recently though, she got a letter in the mail from the Office of Job and Family Services telling her that she has to pay back her almost $2,000 award because they didn’t really mean to give her anything to begin with. After she relates all of this to me she says, “and I know I can trust you because you didn’t tell anybody about the other thing,” but I have no idea what she’s talking about.
She gets up again, looks out of the window in my door, stands for a moment, then sits back down in the stiff chair. She cuts right to the heart of the matter, with a swift decisiveness, “Do you have any cereal?”
To which I reply, “Yeah, we have Cornflakes.” She mulls this over and eventually decides that cornflakes are acceptable. She proceeds to verbally go over a mental list of items that she needs (chocolate chip cookies, toothpaste, sugar, potato chips, pudding) and I jot each down on a drab yellow post-it, my pen racing to keep up with her stream-of-consciousness. When she finishes, she rolls her eyes back and tries to recall if that was everything she came for.
She fixes her gaze forward again, and looks me in the eyes for the first time since this visit began. “I am tired of this shit. God. I am tired.”
I offer back a smile, and get up to procure her needs from the shelves of our emergency pantry.
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Sustenance
-Theo Porter
Martin sat on the couch and thought about food. He couldn’t help it. There was a poster opposite him of a perfect French crème Brule and the more he stared at it the more drool collected in his mouth. He arched his back, reaching into his back pocket for his tattered wallet, trying desperately to run over his monthly budget in his head. It was useless. He was a gadget guy and if the purchase of a mediocre doohickey for his home theatre meant he would starve for the rest of the month, it was worth the sacrifice. As he separated the corners of his wallet and peered inside, he imagined a little cartoon fly zipping from its empty interior at full speed. Feeding the habit had taken on a whole new meaning. The poster on the wall had never seemed so far away.
The need to eat filled Martin’s head. He knew how to cook, that wasn’t the problem. There was just nothing to cook. Anywhere. He rose from the couch, sighing heavily. “Old Mother Hubbard,” the old nursery rhyme, ran through his head at full volume. His own mother loved to repeat little rhymes while she cooked and Martin had taken up the wand when the beloved family matriarch was hospitalized for being too old to live on her own. Shoving loving nostalgia aside, Martin searched the empty cupboards for even the ghost crumbs of a forgotten loaf of bread. No such luck.
He pulled out his wallet again and there, at the very bottom, was his lone credit card. Fund management was a foreign concept, but somehow, probably through the influence of a micro-managing father, Martin had paid off most of debt owed on the thin, unobtrusive piece of plastic. Though he tried never to use it for technology, maybe food was worth it. Yes, it definitely was. Survival is paramount and these were dire circumstances. But, standing alone in the kitchen of his apartment, he couldn’t help but feel that if he was going to dip into the irresponsible jar, it needed to be for a good reason. He pulled out his cell phone and began to make phone calls. The friends lined up like bowling pins the moment he said that he was cooking. Several agreed to bring salad, bread, wine, dessert, and it was set.
His heart skipping a beat, he walked down to the store around the corner. It was a cool, clear night with the moon sitting just above the horizon in perfect counterbalance with the ruby red sunset. Martin couldn’t help but break into a smile. He could see it in his head: good friends, good food, and good music; it would be perfect. There was a perfectly good shopping list in his head and he went over it again in his head as he picked up a little red shopping basket.
The little card in his hand felt lighter as he exited the store. It hurt, but when it comes to sustenance, sometimes one must go to extremes.
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Tacos aren’t romantic at all
-Ahniwa Ferrari
So last night my roommate’s girlfriend came over and they made tacos and I had some and they were amazing like tacos of divinity or ambrosia or something. So we were sitting around eating our tacos – mmmmmm – and I’d had some ice cream earlier and that was good too but not like a heavenly taco, and I was telling them the story of the Summer of 2000 when I walked across town in a state of pure romantic distress. I was also distressed because I had no tacos, mind you, but also flustered by romance. I like tacos but I don’t find them romantic. They’re sexy though, but I wouldn’t bother buying them champagne or taking them on a moonlit walk on the beach. They’re sexy and I’d just use them and then leave before they woke up, and I wouldn’t be able to respect them anymore afterwards.
So I was walking across town, all the way across, from the west end to downtown and then up the hill to the southeast, to see my friend who’s my roommate now and whose girlfriend made tacos last night – coincidentally he knows this story already – and about halfway there I was like “Well fuck, I’ve walked a lot, and if I turned around I’d have to walk a lot more just to get home, and that’s where I came from so I’ll keep walking forward and get to my friend’s house and then maybe he’ll drive me somewhere and we can have tacos.” So after like another hour or something I made it to his house and he wasn’t in his room asleep like I thought he’d be so I could easily wake him up and make him drive me somewhere. At first I didn’t know where he was and stood outside wondering how I might be able to find a taco at two in the morning walking – I’d be walking, not the taco – and as I was wondering I saw the light flashing in the upstairs window like you see when someone is watching a movie, all blue and the dark and then flash and flash and from outside it seems so bright you wonder how someone could watch it without going blind.
So I’d found my friend, but he was upstairs and I was on the ground outside and I couldn’t just walk in because he was living with his mom at the time and I didn’t want to get shot or hit with a frying pan or have anything else violent happen to me. I warily eyed the fence that ran around the little house and thought that if I could get up on it I would be nearly at eye level with the window upstairs and then I could throw little twigs at the window and get my friend’s attention, because surely he’d prefer my company and tacos to whatever movie he was watching. So I climbed up the fence, and then I fell off but I landed on my feet, and I had to climb up again, which I did. Then I could see my friend, but throwing little twigs at the window didn’t seem to be having any effect. There was a tree that loomed over the fence, and had branches that extended very nearly to the window, so I grabbed a branch and shook it so that it hit the window and made a big motion which my friend wouldn’t be able to miss. And so I guess he was watching a really scary movie and the branch hitting the window on its own – because he couldn’t see me – really freaked him out and he screamed. But then he looked out and he saw me, and we laughed about it and he drove me to Denny’s at three in the morning until five in the morning while we drank coffee and ate food.
But not tacos, because Denny’s sucks and they don’t have tacos, and I was bitter at first but then I got all strung out on coffee and cigarettes and romance and lack of sleep so then I was okay with it, and I had a sandwich instead. Sandwiches are okay, but they aren’t as good as tacos at all.