#12 – From Now On

Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention Span-Challenged,

Annika didn’t like sports. 

She didn’t like that nearly every bar she frequented catered to those who did. She didn’t like the loud TVs and even louder patrons who found it acceptable to stand up and scream like Cuckoo’s Nest mental patients. She didn’t like the way conversations so often drifted to the score of her hometown’s latest football/basketball/hockey/baseball/(insert latest new sport here) victory or defeat. She didn’t like how it brought out the ugly tribalistic aspects of humanity that were always lurking just under the surface. 

She DID love the shirt though.

It was a sparkly number – covered in cobalt blue sequins with the words GAME DAY spelled out in blocky iridescent-sequined letters across the front. She’d always had a weakness for things that sparkled. Like a magpie. And this shirt was displayed front and center in a large sunny window facing Winston Avenue.  

“I want that,” she said to her boyfriend, Phil, who was appropriately perplexed by her proclamation. Sure, he knew her love of sequins. She made it well-known. But he also knew that that love was outweighed by her deep disdain for sports. 

“Wouldn’t you rather have a sparkly sequin shirt you’d, I don’t know, actually wear?”

“Oh, no,” she flashed him a Machiavellian smile. “No. I’d totally wear that.”

“You’d wear that,” he pointed at it. “The blue one. Right there.”

“Yep.”

“The one that says Game Day on it.”

“Yep.”

“When? When are you going to wear that?”

“Every time we go to the bar and there’s a game on. From now on, I’m going to be part of it,” Annika said, looking over her shoulder at him as she pushed her way into the store. “I’m going to play their game!”

Phil rolled his eyes but didn’t protest any further. This was not his first rodeo. As Annika inquired of the saleswoman the price of the shirt and then proclaimed that she would take it, he was well aware that it wouldn’t be his last. These escapades were just a part of her fabric. He knew that going in. 

“You don’t even want to try it on?” he asked, to which Annika rolled her eyes, pulled out her credit card, and handed it to the woman whose name tag said CHERISE and whose hair was the color of a manila envelope. Cherise deposited the shirt into a clear plastic bag which delighted Annika. “People will be able to see it!” she squealed happily, which caused Phil’s heart to trip over itself. He dragged his hand affectionately down the curve of her spine. 

As they exited the store and walked up Winston Avenue, she clutched the now bagged shirt to her chest like a suckling sequined blue baby. She suddenly stopped and flashed him a smile again. It was the one that said either, ‘I love you, Phil,’ or ‘shit’s about to get real, buddy’. Even after nearly a decade, he still couldn’t tell. He had to admit, it was part of what made her so interesting. 

“I’m ready to suit up,” she suddenly said. 

“Now?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Well, I mean, not right NOW. Not right this minute here on the street,” she held up the bagged shirt up to the sky Lion King-style and widened her eyes as she stared at it in the sunlight. “But we could go to McDonald’s and I could change there,” she said in a dreamy voice without taking her eyes off the shirt.

“You think that’s a good idea?”

“No,” she glanced back at him. “I think it’s a GREAT idea,” she grabbed his hand and guided him toward the Sixth Street Mickey D’s. “Let’s go.”

When she exited the women’s room, he had to admit that the shirt, though ridiculous, looked great on her. The coldness of the blue danced gracefully off her Swedish features – pale milky skin, icy blue eyes, and bright blond hair that bordered on white. (Phil once joked that she would have been Hitler’s wet dream – which she said was not really a joke at all.) Plus, the shirt was cut so that it accentuated her delicate shoulders and well-defined collarbone – both of which endeared her to him. 

“Wow,” he said. “I gotta say, that looks amazing on you.” 

“Thanks, Bunny,” she said, resorting to her pet name for him.

“So where should we go?” he said, taking her hand and feeling strangely possessive of her. “Delaney’s?”

“Nah,” she said. “We know too many people there. They’ll know I’m an imposter.” She adjusted the shirt, pulling it this way and that until it was exactly where she wanted it. “I’m thinking B-Dubs.”

“Seriously?”

“Yep.”

“Buffalo Wild Wings?”

“Yep.”

“I thought you hated it there.”

“I do. I mean, I did. Annika did.” She paused. “But Casey loves it.”

He looked her straight in the eye. “Casey.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re Casey, I’m assuming.”

She nodded. “Fuckin’-a, man.”

“That’s delightful.” 

“But you can call me Game Day Chick,” she said, lowering the register of her voice. “Now let’s take this show to B-Dubs, babe,” she said with a husky voice, punching him in the arm. 

Phil was hopeful that this latest game of hers wouldn’t end up playing out the way some of the others had; that it would be more like the most recent time when she decided that ‘from now on, I’m going to wear all my clothes backward’ lasted all of three days and with no ill effects – barring the occasional questioning of her sanity. And frankly, Phil felt that Annika liked that aspect.

Whatever the case, their tenure at B-Dubs began pleasantly enough. While Phil sat at the bar, Game Day Chick Casey started making the rounds and picking up new friends. Going against her natural inclination, she made frivolous statements that held nothing of substance or controversy but still seemed to give her pleasure. She exclaimed things like “Get that first down!” and “Intercept, you son of a bitch!” without knowing exactly what she was saying. The patrons showered her with compliments on her shirt. One went so far as to call her a saint – though he was drunk so his credibility was at stake. (This was further compounded by his claims to be from Alpha Centauri.) 

Two hours into their time at B-Dubs, however, things began to shift. Phil ordered his third beer – a stout that tasted too dark and somehow wrong. And he could tell that Annika was growing weary of the Game Day Chick act. She was staring blankly at a guy who was explaining football stats and how he liked to hold his children by the ankles and turn them upside down.

“That’s great,” she said, yawning, then patting him on the back. Just an hour before, she and this very same man had been zealously cheering on the Ohio State football team  – a group of people with whom Annika had no affiliation whatsoever. “It really is. But I’m getting tired, ya know? So I think I’m gonna split.” 

“Tired!? Seriously!?” he stared at her, mouth agape. “The Buckeyes are about to take this!” 

“Yes,” she nodded. “And I’m sure they’re very excited about that.”

“Hell yeah, they’re excited! I mean, come on! This is for the playoffs!”

“Hmmmmm,” she smiled, twirling her blond hair in her fingers. “Yeah. I just don’t care.”

“Whatdya mean, you don’t care? I thought you were totally into this! Where’s your spirit?”

“I’m guessing somewhere in Columbus,” she smiled politely. “Thanks for the education today. It was nice to meet you.”

Annika walked away from the man, leaving him standing there dumbfounded as she made her way over to Phil at the bar who was finishing a drawing. Second to drinking beer, this was his favorite bar pastime. 

She crawled into the chair next to him and sighed.

“How’s it going?”

She picked at the sequins on her sleeve. “That wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be.”

“No?”

“I thought the sports fans would all suck.”

“But they didn’t?”

“Nope,” she shook her head. “They were okay, actually. Could it be I’m getting boring?”

“Seems unlikely,” he said, though hoping it was at least a little true. 

Annika sat up taller and stretched. “Can you do me a favor, Phil?”

“Anything.”

“From now on,” she began, “when I’m conjuring up bizarre ideas and plans, just go ahead and stop me. Okay?”

He smiled at her, putting the finishing touches on his drawing. He had perfectly captured the smile and the glint in the eye of this woman who loved to play games. He was having a little difficulty capturing the sparkle in the GAME DAY letters though. “Yeah. Okay,” he said, recognizing now just how appropriate her shirt was. “From now on, I’ll do that.”

*(modified excerpts from The Wife by Meg Wolitzer)

#11 – Surveying My Queendom From a Carpeted Rock

Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention Span-Challenged

Look. I’m going to be very upfront here. I look down upon you. It’s my birthright as your queen. I make no bones about it. 

Well, I didn’t elect you, I hear some of you murmur. Duh. Obviously you didn’t elect me. You don’t elect royalty. And anyhow, you’re insects. It’s my understanding that insects do not hold elections – as elections are a uniquely human way to pass the time. Like flying a kite. Or decorating your most favorite pink plastic suitcase with stickers from exotic places and then shoving it to the back of your sister’s closet until you need it again which is probably never because your dad and sister aren’t around anymore.

You cannot be my queen because you are a child, some of you say. And yes, that’s true. But so too is my mother. And Hal, the wizened bagger at the grocery store. Because isn’t every human nothing more than a child subjected to a mounting number of indignities known collectively as aging? This is something that you, as an insect, are not likely to understand, with your fancy exoskeletons that will never be riddled with atrocities like spurs, fractures, or arthritis. They are far more prone to crushing though. It takes a lot to crush a human skeleton (though the spirit is another thing altogether) buried under all the skin, muscles, and organs as it is. 

And that is why I am superior to you.

If it is that which makes you superior to us, then so too is the bear, the wolf, even the lowly frog, says a particularly talkative grasshopper whom I could crush with one stomp of my foot. Or hand. Though that would be messier. And frankly, there’s no mazel tov in that.   

Look, I say again but this time with a world-weary sigh for dramatic effect. First of all, I’m not sure why you would refer to the frog as lowly. Is not the frog more similar to you, grasshopper, than any other non-insect? To condemn the frog is an indictment of your own ability to leap over a building in a single bound. And I find this confusing. Here’s what I think. You see me up here on this moss-covered boulder staring down upon you and you wish you were human. Admit it and we can all move on.

I wish no such thing, the grasshopper scoffs. Yes, he actually scoffs. I didn’t know grasshoppers had it in them to scoff. What’s more, I see a spider roll her eyes at me. All eight of them, moving in perfect synchronization off to the right, straight upward, off to the left, and back to center like Suzuki method-trained dancers performing pirouettes. It’s impressive, really.  

None of us wants to be human, says a stately praying mantis who, for some reason, sounds exactly like George W. Bush on helium. It’s mildly off-putting. Even so, I’m dazzled by his proper use of grammar. I immediately suspect that the insectular educational system is superior to the American one. Not surprising though. When I was in fourth grade, there was more than a handful of hopelessly… well, stupid kids. Billy, who sat behind me, for instance, told me that his mom couldn’t wash the windows of their house because his brother ate them. At first I’d thought he was kidding so I’d laughed. He didn’t laugh though. Then I thought maybe he was speaking in code; that perhaps he was one of those savant-type kids that do seemingly weird things (like line up different colored bottles or categorize cereal by fiber content or talk to insects) but are actually brilliant. The truth is, Billy was sitting in that same seat the following year. I was no longer in front of him though, except metaphorically. This gets me thinking. 

Do insects ever get held back a grade? I ask a ladybug because I assume she might be an authority on such things. There’s sexism baked into this assumption, I know. Whatever the case, she slowly lifts her black-spotted red gull-wing doors to spread her wings and flies away. Rude.  

My subjects go about their business while I sit on my rock throne and glance out over the land behind the house my mom and I share. I catch myself picking at the moss in the same way I pick at the hangnails on my fingers. There’s something peaceful in the way both the moss and the skin release from their anchors. It’s a nasty habit. Or so I’ve been told. I feel that’s an exaggeration though. A nasty habit would be something like smoking or smearing my feces across my shirt. Or someone else’s shirt. 

A butterfly flutters by and I think of my sister. She’s been gone 462 days, 18 hours, and 25 minutes now. I’m not sure where she is. I hope it’s somewhere with peacocks though. She loved those silly creatures – always coming home from the Bailey’s farm with long turquoise, teal, and green feathers, fanning them across her face while reeking of peacock shit. How I despised that smell. 

But now, like a dung beetle, I think I would savor it.

*(modified excerpts from When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz)

#10 – These Three Words

Extraordinarily Brief Stories for the Attention Span-Challenged,

“Why do they always shake them?” she asked, only to be provocative. She was bored and the guys were ignoring her. 

“Gotta shake those money-makers!” Roscoe cackled, brown juice from chewing tobacco dripping from the corners of his crooked and disgusting mouth. Roscoe made her squirm. She didn’t want to say that she hated him but, well, yeah. She hated him. 

“Hmmmmm,” she sneered at him. “Leave it to you to impart such mind-blowing wisdom, Roscoe,” she said, leaning back in her chair, watching the young woman’s mammaries bounce and bobble and swing. To her, it looked more painful than sensual and made her wonder if gay men liked to watch testicles swing – even though they were well aware of the discomfort involved.  

“You know me,” Roscoe yelled over the clichéd raunchy music track. “A real road scholar!” 

On cue, she glanced sideways at her boyfriend, Carl. It was what they did whenever Roscoe said something stupid. By now my neck should be permanently turned to the side, she thought. But Carl was otherwise occupied – his eyes following the path of the woman’s nipples like some white trash backwoods eye exam. 

She glanced back over at Roscoe. He possessed a certain kind of confidence that life was nothing more than a cosmic joke – which in his case was true. Still, she had to admit that he was happy most of the time while she more often than not felt irritated, bored, and restless. Especially since the plant closed.  

“I’m tired, you guys,” she said, twisting the straw in her drink. “Let’s get outta here.”

“Stop your bitchin’,” said Jeb, Carl’s brother. She gave him the evil eye and his mouth swung shut. It was a playful exchange though and he smiled at her and winked. She’d always liked Jeb; wondered if maybe she was supposed to be with him. It wasn’t that he was better looking than Carl. Nor was he particularly aspirational. There was just something about him that left her questioning.

She’d been doing a lot of questioning lately though; increasingly haunted by a compulsion to cast off the white trash badge (of which she’d always been proud) and try on a new persona for a while. 

“And leave all this?” her best friend Maggie had jokingly asked her when they met up at Caster’s Bar last year and she suggested they skip town and get an apartment in Louisville. “And anyways, what about Carl?” 

What about him? she’d wanted to respond. But it was no time to be flippant. She’d learned the hard way how conversations could be taken out of context and then spread like wildfire through Harken Falls. All it would take to strike that match would have been for mealy-mouthed Martha Comston (rather unaffectionately referred to as ‘cum stain’) to overhear their conversation. And that chick was never far from earshot. So the three phantom words floated above the two square feet of vacant, dingy-carpeted land surrounding their table before vanishing into thin air. 

Maggie got knocked up just a month after that conversation and was too busy with a newborn now to meet up at Caster’s anymore – any dream of her moving to Louisville (or anywhere else) dead in the water. 

The strip joint was crowded for a weekday afternoon. More crowded than usual. She leaned forward in her chair and tried to imagine what it would be like to be up on that stage. There was no judgment. She knew a lot of the girls that danced there. Had known a few of them since kindergarten. We all do what we have to do, she thought. 

The young woman who’d dazzled the mostly male crowd sauntered off stage to be replaced by an older woman. Gravity had done some work on her breasts and they didn’t possess the perkiness of her predecessor’s. Some of the men, and even a drunk woman in the corner, made no secret of their disapproval of the replacement. Wondering how they would ‘measure up,’ she reached under her jacket and cupped her breasts in her hands. She was surprised by the surge of anger she felt for even entertaining this thought and knew she had to leave.

“I’m gonna take off,” she said defiantly, getting up from her chair and hoping that Carl, or at the very least Jeb, would follow her. Neither did though. They sank deeper into their seats, nudging each other and laughing while throwing back their fourth PBR of the afternoon.

She moved swiftly through the club, tripping on a beer bottle and nearly falling. A few people laughed and she felt like crying. She pushed open the door and stepped out into the blazing June sunlight. She stopped to get her bearings and noticed a sequin pasty stuck to the top of her shoe. Peeling it off and looking at it glimmering in the sun like a rare treasure, she stared straight up Front Street and sighed. 

“What about him?” she finally said aloud. 

*(Modified excerpts from The Book Thief by Mark Zusak)