Spyglass

[A work in progress on my big project for class. I’ve not been particularly inspired, but I’m running out of time.  I’ll get around to noting tomorrow–it’s 4:30 in the morning.]

My truck is in desperate want of repair, but I can’t afford it.  At every turn it rattles and shakes like a wind-up car, and it slides like a sled in the snow.  There’s four inches on the ground by the time I pull in to work.  I jog through the blizzard, pulling my hood up as I go.  A hatchet-faced woman walking her Shih Tzu passes me by, an arctic fox walking a cotton ball.  I smile and nod, but she ignores me.  She ignores me so well, I wonder if I’m there at all.  Some proof, please, I supplicate to the buzzing neon sign above the front door.  It shines on, ignoring me brilliantly  I open the front door and survey the dining room.  A neck-deep low chatter blankets the floor, chipmunks chittering away about walnuts and hiding from the cold.

You’re late, my boss snaps.  I guess I am there, after all.  The board bristles with a laundry list of kitchen orders, and the kitchen workers move like ecydesiasts at a no-touch club.  The waitress tries to squeeze by the shy fry cook, and her butt skims across his crotch.  He nearly drops an order of breaded potatoes on the ground.  His eyes follow her as her hips gyrate through the crowded aisles.  She didn’t notice the contact, I think.  Two people sit down in table one.

The first, a mother, glances over the menu, reading prices she’s meticulously parsed over the years.  Her face is made up with scarlet lip stick and matching eye shadow, shades of color I haven’t seen since before the Macarena was done as disco–she is the result of hours of artistry.  She must be thirty-five, that age where people decide to start trying again before they’re old.  Older.  Her prepubescent daughter is a dead-on doppelganger for my young cousin.  She folds the menu’s patent leather and its thick lamination, finally curling it into a lens-less spyglass.  Pointing her improvised monocular at me, she solemnly announces, Psst.  I can see you.

She stands now on a sidewalk before a parish church, a black dress devouring the sunlight.  It’s July.  It’s unbearably and unconscionably bright.  She spent the wake gathering dandelion heads, bursting them like human hearts into the directionless summer wind.  That breeze is dry and dusty, like the unspent breath of a dessicated corpse.  Her father passes by beside her, beyond her, through her.  Now she’s crying; one hand rubs at her eye, and the other one pulls at the folds of her dress.  As I leave the graveyard through the newborn oaks, she waves goodbye to me.  No, no, no.  Not to me.

What are you doing? my boss demands.  Go get a sign on your truck.  I’ve got deliveries for you.

The deliveries have tired me.  I walk into the back room and wash some dishes, running scouring pads in lazy circles over the cheap plastic plates.  I drink too much Mountain Dew at work, that over-carbonated shit that the fountain belches out.  My tongue tastes of stale sugar, so I sit on a bucket by the cooler and nibble on slices of pepperoni until heartburn demands that I stop.  The buzzer rings.  Delivery.

My boss hands me a couple of pizzas and a bucket of chicken.  Hurry home, honey.  I slide the pizzas into the insulated bag, pulling the flap closed although the Velcro is too worn to stick.  I’ll miss you dear.  I push open the door with my shoulder and lower my hooded head against the snowfall, nearly running over a short brunette woman.

I smell like fryer.  I reek like burning anxiety, and the fat flakes of snow do little to douse it.  Are you going out after work? she asks, although we both should know that neither of us want to run into the other once, much less twice.  She should know it by now, unless she’s a damned fool.  I fill her up on emptiness and send her sputtering away.  Relieved at her absence, the snow falls harder.  It fills her snow prints until our conversation never happened. 

We’d laid in my bed like it was a mass grave, and I’d asked her naked body with a conscience as clean as a New Jersey crackhouse: How can you possibly love someone who loves you back?  She left as the sun rose, and I boxed her clothes.  I kept one of her DVDs, though.  I don’t know why.  The Rules of Attraction, starring James Van Der Beek, neither of which I like.

I see my cousin again at Christmas.  Her father is conspicuously absent.  When we sit at the table, my mother moves an empty chair against the wall beneath the clock that makes bird calls on every hour.  At noon, halfway through grace, a nightingale unabashedly interrupts.  My father frowns in confusion.  Who reset the clock? he asks.  The twelve o’clock bird is a spotted owl.  I frown as well.  Those birds are completely unrelated.

In fifteen years she will ask me if I remember her father’s funeral.  I’ll say in a voice made wise or bitter by thirty-eight years that I do remember it.  And, that if  I can recall it correctly, she wore a black cotton dress on a July summer day.  That she waved to me as I left the graveyard.  No, no, no.  Not to me.  She’ll tell me, I don’t remember it at all.

As my shift comes to a close, the boss, the waitress, and I sit and talk in the dining room.  I nurse my Mountain Dew like Clara Barton.  The waitress is marginally pretty, and she obviously takes diligent care of her appearance.  I once overheard the pizza maker and fry cook debating whether or not she wore thongs; they’re consensus was yes, if only for hope’s sake.  Here, in the booth, she excitedly describes her brand new boyfriend, describing that hazy place where perfect men are made.  Unfamiliarity, I think.  The low-watt bulbs in the off-white scones diffuse upwards, and I can’t help but but imagine shadows hiding beneath umbrellas of illumination.

She is quiet for a few minutes; my own silence says volumes.  Are you going out tonight? she queries, absentmindedly brushing her long, straightened brown hair out of her face and down her shoulders.  Yikes, I say back.  I doubt it.  She tilts her head in curious surprise. Really?  Why not?  Haven’t you made decent money tonight?  I ponder my glass of soda like it might answer the question.  Yeah, I guess I have.  But I don’t really feel like being around people tonight.  She leans back in the booth, taken aback.  Really?  But you’re always so funny.

Eh.  I’ll probably go out for a drink or two. But I won’t enjoy it.

[This was recently posted on Facebook, a picture circa October 2003.  Thought I’d share it with anyone who happens by.]