Hamilton Stone Review #24
Fiction
Meredith Sue Willis, Fiction Editor
Ken Champion
Educating Rita
It was supper time. I was looking out of the back room window at the aluminium bath hanging on the high fence that separated us from Mrs.Barrett's. My mother was sitting on my left opposite my father, bending his knife to harvest the steak and kidney pie gravy and which he would slide in and out of his mouth with a sucking ‘pop.’
‘Must you do that, Alf?’
He took no notice. He never did. She gave a sigh of fatalistic acceptance, stood up, went to the kitchen and returned with the salt. Wiping her hands down the front of her apron she seated herself again, fussily patted her black, greying hair and resumed her meal. I forced my food down as quickly as I could without offending her and left the house. It was all so familiar, like watching an endless loop of the same episode of a kitchen sink drama.
I walked north towards Wanstead Flats, my childhood sanctuary where I’d lay in the tall grass, jump the stream between the houses, return and play ‘odds and ends’ on the pavement or ‘tin can Tommy’ in the middle of the street till mum called me in for tea. It was nineteen fifty five, I was twenty four, had finished a decorating apprenticeship, done National Service, and wanted to get out, get my own place, not wanting to rent as my father did, with his forelock-touching every week to Mister Surrey when he came round for his money, and who owned half the street.
After a couple of hours or so I found I was walking uphill towards Plaistow Station, homing this way on automatic pilot. I used the station every weekday, sometimes on a Saturday, to get to work, having returned to my old firm and working in the city.
That’s when I saw her; a tall, auburn-haired woman, older than me, in a long green coat and bright scarf around her throat, a few yards down from the station entrance. It was dark and had begun to rain. People were scurrying along behind her down the hill. She didn’t have an umbrella, she looked bemused. I stood and watched her. She seemed very lost. I walked across to her in front of a bus slowing down for the bus stop, its front wheels turning at an angle, pushing the water away from the three headscarved women standing there.
I stood a yard from her, feeling the rain splattering my face. ‘Er, excuse me,’ I mumbled, not having the energy to adopt a confident, urbane persona, ‘D’you need some help? I think you should get out of the rain, stand in the entrance here.’ ‘Oh, thanks,’ she said with a smile that sent startled neurons crashing around insanely inside me. It was Rita Hayworth.
I just looked at her. I didn’t and couldn’t move. The cynical, intellectualizing little man, perennially on my shoulder, kicked in defensively and told me she was merely another human amongst the six billion on earth, no different from any other stimulus-response mechanism, and yet another media construct. I saw her green eyes. The little man fell to the ground and died.
She frowned, looked even more puzzled. I then, somehow, actually touched her elbow, guided her the few yards to the entrance. We were out of the wet. I managed to say something.
‘What, what are you doing here? er, are you okay?’
It was hard to believe that I could say something so rational, so... articulate. I didn’t know whether or not she knew that I’d recognised her.
‘Well, I was supposed to go to Pinewood Studios and - oh, it doesn’t matter, I shouldn’t have said I’d come. Do you know the subway well? I left my hotel, got on a train, but I think I’ve come the wrong way. I was looking at all the station names. I recognised a few at first and then... got off. I don’t know where I am’. She raised her eyebrows and laughed at herself.
‘I’ve never been to London before. I’ve been to Britain once.’
‘Didn’t you ask anyone on the train? I mean, there must have been people in your
carriage.’
‘I was tired. I just kept looking at the station names. And then they sort of ... run into each other.’ She looked down. ‘I’m not sure, really.’
She had a voice I hardly recognised, not as strong as in her films, an accent that was modulated, almost lilting, less of an obviously American one.
I told her, trying to keep my voice steady, that she was in East London and she’d gone the opposite way to where she should have been heading. She frowned again. Then,
‘Thank you. I guess I’d better be going back to my hotel if I can find... ’
She stopped and leant against the wall inside the double wooden entrance doors. She looked pale... that lovely skin. Her hair was wet and a little flattened on top. I felt I needed to breathe again, I’d been holding my breath for minutes.
‘You’re not okay, are you’ I said.
‘No. No I’m not.’
‘Look, keep here, I’ll get a taxi. You’ll be okay if I leave you a minute. Yes?’
She nodded weakly.
I went quickly across to the phone booth near the deserted ticket office and looked for a taxi firm in the phone book. I’d only been in a taxi once, when my father’s dog was running in an early race at Hackney Wick and we’d got there just in time to watch it lose. I knew I could pay for this one; my weekly wage packet was in an inside pocket, unopened - I’d wanted the crisp thrill of opening it later, to go out somewhere, the mirage of afterwork; to a café with a friend, arguing about method acting, art, to see a film, perhaps one that she was in. I went back to her, her head was bowed. I was shaking.
‘It won’t be long.’ I said comfortingly. She remained looking down.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked quietly in a voice that belied any real interest in an answer. She was looking increasingly unwell.
A thud of reason nudged me. A hospital. There was one just behind the station, another a mile away in Stratford. Then a hidden part of childhood treacled over me: not being well meant mum’s healing fussiness, the background of which I subliminally saw as my own room where I’d recently painted a night sky and stars on the ceiling, an ancient Egyptian mural on the frieze and pasted a large photo of the Chrysler Building across a wall. I’d managed to buy a black and chrome Art Deco headboard for the bed and found an old Valmier rug and a Diomode light that triple-reflected from a mirror on the figured walnut dressing table I’d got cheap. In an insane way she would complete an adolescent fantasy. The room was behind the parlour. I could sleep upstairs in one of the rooms which had, until recently, been occupied by my father’s sister and her husband. We’d taken over the whole unprepossessing, stone-dashed, Victorian terrace house when they’d left.
I deflected her question, ’You’re not really ill, are you?’
A pale smile, ‘No, well, I hope not, but I need to rest.’
I leant on the matchboarded wall next to her. People were coming up the stairs from a train. It was probably the last one of the day. Nobody looked across at us. She had shoulder pads in her coat, I kept looking at her green and pink scarf. She looked vulnerable. The taxi came. Pushing the guilt away I gave my address. The driver didn’t say a word. Didn’t look, didn’t recognise her.
She spent the journey gazing out of a window. She seemed to trust me. I wondered if she was looking through an imaginary lens, having seen countless cameramen squinting at her through their thumbs and fingers rectangles. This time it wasn’t a lush setting: the natural frame of the window was filled with a wasteland of rubble and bricks where tower blocks were going to be built, empty beer bottles, a remnant of a bonfire, a frame of a bicycle sticking up like an isosceles triangle, then shabby Victorian terraces, rows of them, shut pubs, cafes, a row of grey shops, all lit, still, by turn-of-the century lamps - a couple of youths, at this late hour, playing floodlit footie under one of them with a bald tennis ball. I just looked at her, trying not to split open, to explode inside this taxi, to look relaxed, attempting not to think of real cameras, hidden cameras filming us for a documentary or something, of not wondering whether she was just a remarkable look-alike.
I got out, paid quickly, opened the nearside door for her and, again supporting her elbow but more firmly, walked her across the pavement. I pushed the black scrolled gate, opened the front door - which I’d recently grained - and ushered her in. I closed it gently.
‘Do you live alone here?’ she asked.
‘No, no, it’s my parents place, I thought I’d said, they’ll be upstairs, asleep, it’s late.’
I looked at my watch, surprised at how late it was. ‘It’s almost one. You can have my room.’
We walked softly towards it. ‘The bathroom’s upstairs through the first door if - ‘
‘It’s okay, I’ll go straight to bed.’
She turned, looking weak. She was almost as tall as me.
‘Thank you.’
I opened the door for her, she slid in, closing the door quickly. I went upstairs. I’d spent the last two months after work decorating the whole house. The room I entered was the last one to be finished. It was a sort of workshop: dust sheets, tools, brushes, tins of paint on the floor. I made some space, folded the sheets, laid them down, fell on top of them without undressing and tried to sleep. I didn’t have to go to work tomorrow.
I slept little, thinking of coal mines, tractors, washing whitewash off a ceiling with a double knot distemper brush, anything but thinking of her lying in my bed directly beneath me, perhaps sleeping naked. I waited till it was firmly daylight and went to the bath room, shaved, made myself look respectable. It was still raining. I went downstairs quietly, knocked on the door of my room. She opened it immediately as if she’d been standing there, waiting.
‘Good morning,’ she said with a bright smile. She had no make up, her hair was pinned back. Her dress was dark blue, loose-fitting, her high heeled shoes were indigo.
‘How’d you sleep,’ I asked, ‘you look better.’
‘I am. I slept okay. Your room! it’s wonderful. And that mirror. I love the thirties period too, I’ve got a lot of Lalique glass back home, I guess I’m a collector. I assume it was you who painted the ceiling, how did you do it? You could get a job as a scene painter. What do you do, anyway?’ ‘I’m a painter and decorator.’ I said quickly, ‘Feeling hungry?’
‘Yes. Your parents are here, I assume?’
‘Oh, yeh, they’re having breakfast, let’s go in.’
‘I don’t know your name,’ she said.
‘It’s Keith, Keith Chapman, and yours,’ I heard myself saying, ‘was Margarita
Carmen Cansino before Hollywood changed it.’
She seemed surprised. ‘How d’you know that?’
‘A friend told me, John, he’s film mad, I’ll cook you something if you want.’
We went past the cellar to the back room - another grained door - at the end of the narrow hall, but before I could touch it, it was opened by my mother who had obviously heard our voices. She looked alarmed.
‘Mum,’ I forced myself to say, ‘this is a friend of mine. She slept in my room last night, I was upstairs in the spare room, she wasn’t feeling well.’ I had, obviously, rehearsed this over and over during the night. I could see my father’s head turning from his newspaper, looking up.
‘Hello,’ said mum, eyes looking unusually bright, ‘pleased to meet you I’m sure.’ She held her hand out. It was taken lightly, with a slight squeeze.
My father was standing now.
‘Dad, this is -’
‘Yeh, I heard. ‘ello ducks,’ he said in his best cockney, halfway to his seat again, wanting to get back to his paper. He didn’t know who she was.
‘Come in and sit down,’ said mum, ‘have my chair, I’ll get you something. What would you like?’
‘It’s alright, I’ll do it’, I said. I wanted to do something for her, something she wanted, needed, anything. I was ignored.
‘Well, thank you.’ She looked at the half finished food on their plates. ‘Oh, I love bacon, eggs and tomatoes She pronounced the latter with a slight Brooklyn ‘tamaytas.’
We sat down, she on the nearest chair, me squeezing around the table to my usual place with my back to the small bay window.
‘Well, you look all right this mornin’, I must say,’ said dad gruffly.
‘Can you help me a minute, Keith?’ asked mum from the kitchen, twelve feet away.
I got up, wriggled by, ‘It’s alright, don’t move,’ I said, looking down at the top of her head, at her hair, the parting, wanted to stand there and keep looking. In the kitchen mum slowly closed the door behind me.
‘Is that who I think it is?’ she whispered. ‘It can’t really be, can it? She looks so
like her.’
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to say it actually was her, as if by not confirming it to anyone I could, somehow, keep her to myself.
‘Yes, she does, mum. I won’t have a lot, I’m not hungry.’
‘But... suit yourself.’ she said, moving the bleached broom handle out of her way that she still used for ‘stirring the copper,’ in which she washed bed sheets and clothes and which I used to help her do as a child, hardly being strong enough to push the stick around.
I stepped back into the room. Dad was saying, ‘Where you from, then? You sound a
bit like a Yank.’ I winced.
‘Yes, I am American,’ she smiled, ‘I live in California.’
‘Sunny there, I s’ppose.’
‘Yes it is.’
Mum came through with two plates of fried food and put them down in front of us. She tucked into it healthily. I fidgeted with mine, occasionally watching her. Mum was silent, looking sideways at me and occasionally at her as she ate.
‘Wot d’yer do then, luv? asked my father.
She looked across, stopped chewing, ‘I’m in movies.’
‘Yeh? I don’t go to the pictures much meself. I was a crowd extra once in ‘Beau Geste’ when I was in the army. Took Edie to see it, but they’d cut it out and I wasn’t in it.’ He guffawed, looking briefly at my mother.
‘I know that feeling,’ she grinned. I didn’t believe her. He bent his head, scraping his knife around his plate, capturing the grease, but this time not putting it into his mouth. We sat in silence. I felt that I’d brought home a wax facsimile from Madame Tussaud’s, she wasn’t real. But, there she was, eating food five feet away from me, drinking tea, wiping her firm, beautiful lips with one of the napkins hastily brought out for special occasions. She looked over the top of her teacup, commenting that she really liked the way my mother made tea.
She glanced at her watch, began standing up, ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I really have to get back.’ She turned to my mother. ‘May I use the bathroom?’
‘Certainly dear, you know where it is don’t you.’
She left the room. I could hear her footsteps on the stairs.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ mum asked in a hissing whisper.
‘I only met her last night, she wasn’t well, I thought.’
‘Is she going back to America or what?’
‘I don’t know, I just don’t know.’
‘Seems a nice gel, very friendly.’ said dad, handing his plate to his wife. ‘You’re a big boy now son, you know wot yer doin.’’
She stood at the door, pulling her coat on.’
‘It’s raining,’ I said, ‘I’ll get an umbrella.’
I ran upstairs, put my jacket on, came down again. My mother was listening to her saying how much she loved London, the little alleyways in the city, the Dickensian feel of them, the parks. I don’t think my mother quite understood all of what was being said to her.
‘Guess I’d better go.’ she said, smiling quickly at everyone.
‘I’ll come with you to the station.’
We walked to the front door, to the gate. She turned, raised her handbag - I hadn’t noticed it before, it was the same colour as her shoes - ‘bye then, and thanks for your
hospitality Mrs. Chapman, and you too, Mr Chapman.’
‘Call me Alf, luv. It’s a pity you can’t be here a bit longer, I’m goin’ to the British
Legion tonight, go every Saturday, there’s some good singers there, you’d ‘ave liked it.’
‘Okay... Alf .’ she said sweetly, ‘And I wish you luck... Edie.’ My mother’s eyes were shining, I’d never seen her quite like this.
‘Cheerio Miss Hayward, don’t get wet, mind.’
I nodded to them, and off we went, my umbrella covering us both.
‘I thought you’d ring for a taxi.’ she said with a mock frown.
‘We don’t have a phone, but there’s a phone box round the corner.’
We ran, reached it, neither saying anything. I found the number, I was trembling a little. She was outside holding the umbrella, looking around her. I came out.
‘Anything interesting?’
‘The brick houses. There’s so many. You rarely see them in America, they’re wood and plastic. Sure, there’s the brownstones in New York, redbricks in Chicago, but both sides of the streets around here look like two long houses with lots of doors, it seems so cramped, and there’s so many chimneys.’
She looked suddenly contrite. ‘I’m sorry, I’m being rude.’
‘No, it’s okay. The bricks are called London bricks, yellow stocks. They have names. See the kinda burnt ones? they’re Grey Gaults, and the whitish ones are White Suffolks and, Oh, Christ, I’m boring you to death.’ I lightly touched the back of her waist while I was saying this. My fingers burned.
‘No, no, it’s interesting, it’s all so different.’
The taxi came, we hurried in and went back to the station where I’d met her eight hours previously. Again, she looked silently out of the window.
We scrambled into the station entrance. I shook the umbrella, tried to sound casual.
‘What’s the next film, then?’
‘’Fire Down Below.’ I think we’re starting next week, on location. I forget where.
I can be very vague sometimes.’
‘Are you going back to your hotel.’ She nodded.
‘Where is it?’
‘Just off Sloane Square. Where’s the westbound platform?’
‘I’ll come down with you.’ We descended the stairs, ‘Don’t you mind travelling by train? People looking at you, pointing, whispering’
‘No, I don’t mind. I love subways, the Paris Metro, Rome’s Metropolitana, New York, they’re great.’ I loved the way her lips moved when she said ‘Metropolitana,’ her husky voice.
‘I don’t want you to come with me, really, it’s okay, honestly.’
I felt limp with disappointment. It was visible.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
I wanted to say something that would suggest to her - and myself - that seeing her, talking to her, wasn’t anything special, just an ordinary, friendly, social encounter. I couldn’t, of course, think of anything.
‘I hope you... I dunno, learnt something, other than the names of bricks of course.’
‘Yes, I did. I learnt that there are some good people about, accommodating. Oh, it sounds corny, I’m not expressing myself very well. I’m better with a script.’
‘Do people, the public, know you’re over here? I haven’t read anything.’
‘No. I use dark glasses and a Cansino passport. I’ve learnt’.
She was bending forward, looking back up the rails. A train was coming in. It was a District line. Its clattering seemed so loud.
‘This’ll take you straight there.’ I forced a grin.
‘Thanks for your help, you’ve been kind.’ She took a few steps away from me.
I felt suddenly empty.
‘Have a doctor look at you.’ I said earnestly, ‘Does the hotel have one? You can keep the umbrella.’ I didn’t remember her taking it from me.
She looked at it with mild surprise, then came back to me, gave me a quick kiss on my cheek, an inch from the corner of my mouth.
‘Thanks again.’ She smiled right into me. ’I’ll be alright. Brown eyes.’ and got into a carriage as the doors closed.
I stood there watching the back of the train vanish in the rain and went up the stairs, out of the station. I missed her, I wanted that feeling again when we’d run to the telephone box together. I’d never felt anything like that before. I wanted to be lying awake again, thinking of her asleep just ten feet below me, looking at my stars on the ceiling, wanted to... just look at her. I incongruously wondered what my mother would be saying to my father at this moment. ‘D’you know ‘oo she is Alf, she’s’ -‘Alright, keep yer ‘air on, you’ve told me, but it don’t matter who’ - ‘I dunno what this is about, but I’m gonna get to the bottom of this when he gets home.’ And also who I could tell about it. John, of course, but not the blokes at work; ‘You takin’ the piss?’ ‘’avin’ a larf ain’t yuh?’ ‘You’ll be tellin’ us next yer dad’s dog won.’ ‘Pull the uvver one, it’s got bells on.’
I walked down the hill; the toy factory at the bottom where my mother still worked, wearing her wedge shoes and turban, the Railway Arms opposite, Desmond’s the chemists, Dollond’s the grocers, still using his wire to cut cheese, and Doctor Murphy with his huge red hands and his, ‘tis only indigestion, mother.’ for the amoebic dysentery I had when I was twelve.
But, I was going. I would put in for a charge hand’s job, if turned down I’d go to another firm. I’d saved a fair bit for a deposit and there were plenty of building societies around. I walked quicker, took longer strides, looked up, punched the air, silently mouthed, ‘I met Rita fuckin’ Hayworth!’ It had stopped raining
Patty Somlo
Resistors
Kurt and Marion are as different as can be, even though they’ve been married going on three decades. Kurt is a talker. If there’s the slightest lull in the dinner conversation, you can be sure Kurt will pick up the wine bottle, lift it above the table and ask, “Anyone for more wine?” While he’s pouring, he will start in on a story about the trip he and Marion took last year to Tuscany. Or he’ll talk about the wine and how he and Marion went wine-tasting in the valley and picked up several reds and this one fabulous white. The whole time, Marion, who is completely responsible for the dinner of chicken piccata and homemade linguini, a salad of organic greens tossed with toasted walnuts and gorgonzola cheese, and drizzled with just the right amount of extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, will stay silent. She’ll slip in and out of her chair, without anyone noticing, to check on the crème brulee browning in the broiler and to set cups and the small steaming ceramic ramekins in bold primary colors on a tray and deliver them to the coffee table.
Kurt will be the one to ask. “So, what’s the worst job you’ve ever had?”
By this time, we’ve lost count of how many times he’s filled our wine glasses and don’t care if we’re drinking white or red. There’s a chill to the air, since it’s late October, and Kurt’s got the fire going in the gas unit on the far living room wall. I’m leaning against the armrest on the loveseat closest to the fire. The right half of my body feels too warm, while the left half is cold. Kurt’s brother Daniel lounges to my left and he’s just finished telling another story. I’ve laughed so hard, my jaw aches. Daniel is a flight attendant and likes to amaze us with stories about his passengers’ more egregious demands. Daniel is gay, of course, and after refusing to dispose of a poop-filled, urine-soaked diaper that a woman in First Class has tried to hand him, he will retreat to the galley, where he shares the latest outrage with another flight attendant and then says, "Pa-lease." Daniel repeats it now, rolling his eyes and lifting his half-empty wine glass in the air for dramatic effect.
But it’s my turn and I’m ready with the story I always tell whenever this game is played. Kurt has asked the question again and he looks at me to start.
“Dana,” he says. “Why don’t you start?”
And so I begin.
The summer after my first year of college, there weren’t a lot of summer jobs in our small town. A kid ought to have felt lucky for whatever job she got. Most kids lied, pretending they weren’t going back to school in the fall but instead planning to grow old in that town, marrying their high school sweethearts and having at least two kids, shopping at the A & P, going to all the home football games at the high school, and late on Saturday afternoons, raking the leaves into a pile, shoving the leaves off the curb and setting them on fire.
I can’t remember applying for that job. What I recall is that I didn’t yet know how to drive. I had tried to learn, with my mother’s boyfriend of the moment, whose name I’ve forgotten, trying to stay calm in the front seat of the teal blue Pontiac, as I ran the front end of the car up onto the curb. I’d inherited from my mother an overwhelming sense that at any moment, I was sure to crash the car into an oncoming semi. This caused me to strangle the wheel, making the turning hard.
In any event, my mother had to drive me to and from the job. I must have made my own lunch, since my mother had quit cooking soon after my father left us for good the last time. The lunch didn’t matter because the factory where I worked made me dizzy and nauseated. When noon arrived, I couldn’t eat a single bite.
I want to step out of the story here to say that we’ve all finished our creme brulee, though you can be sure that Kurt and Daniel will each scarf down a second one. Both brothers are watching their weight. They act like women, whispering they shouldn’t, but go ahead anyway. We are all middle-aged, though none of us would use the term to seriously describe ourselves. The food we eat, mostly low-fat, except, as Kurt likes to say, when we’re being bad, the daily workouts at the gym, the walks and hikes and bike rides, the music and high-tech equipment we keep up on, convince us we’re not like our doddering parents, who refuse to use email or leave recorded phone messages when we’re out. But this fixation on our weight, especially amongst the men, reminds us we are no longer young.
The factory was bright inside, from lights that ran all along the ceiling. There wasn’t a window in sight. Men who worked there did whatever it was they did in a room we women never saw. In the space where I worked, we were all girls. Girls is how our supervisor referred to us and it’s what we called ourselves.
We sat on high stools at large rectangular tables. As I get to this part in the story, I can’t recall if the tables were wood or dull gray metal. Each choice has its merits for giving an audience the sense of how dismal the place was. If wood, I’m certain the table was well-worn, with chunks of the surface having peeled off, leaving bare the pale but dull surface underneath. Metal, of course, signifies a coldness, and gray metal the feeling that you’re in prison.
This time, I pick the gray metal but add one new detail. In front of the spot where I sit - and each of us girls takes the same stool every morning - someone has left little stick drawings in red ink. There’s a small house next to a very large tree, with a bright sun above.
At my table, we were a mix of college students working for the summer, with one or two girls I’d known in high school who hadn’t made up their minds where they were headed, and a good number of older ones, who’d worked at the factory as long as they could remember and would work there until they died. When I sat down each morning on my designated stool, a runner - and the runners were all guys - would have already left a box of resistors for me to work on. Interestingly, he never failed to set the box just to the left of the little house and big sun, as if it pained him to cover up the only brightness he saw.
Daniel has finished his second crème brulee and is swirling red wine in a goblet held a short distance away from his eyes. Kurt has poured himself a glass and I see that my glass, sitting on the end table to my right, is also half-full and waiting. I’ve drunk too much wine tonight and if I keep going, I’m going to pay for it in the morning. But the room is warm and, I might say, even throbbing. Everyone is happy and totally tuned in for my story. I can’t help but lift the glass to my lips and take a long slow sip, before I crawl back into the telling.
The details have grown fuzzy, as the wine makes me forget what I’ve already told and what’s yet to be revealed. Have I said that my mother sank that summer further down? I may have forgotten to mention that my dad, sometime the year before, decided to abandon us. We didn’t utter a word about it, my mother and I, but I could see that she was drinking more.
Kurt shoots me a look that suggests I’ve said something wrong. I remind myself that the factory story is what everyone wants, not some sad-sack tale about my life. A story, to be entertaining to a group of dinner guests who feel like they’ve eaten too much and are getting drunker as the night wears on, must be funny. We’ve come together to escape for a little while and not to be reminded that life, after all, is generally too filled with sad moments.
So I bring myself back to the gray metal table. I slide the cardboard box and let it rest in front of me. The container is rectangular, a gray-brown, about the size of a shoe box. It is filled with dark gray cardboard cards, and in each of the narrow slots sits one slender silver resistor.
I’m about to explain to my listeners that in those days when I was not yet twenty-one, resistors were used in the making of radios. But before I do, Kurt jumps up and announces that he’s getting more wine, not bothering to ask if anyone prefers red or white. I turn my eyes to the right and see that I’ve drained my glass and am anxious to have Kurt fill it up.
The room grows quiet after Kurt goes. I picture my mother sitting in the dark, the only light coming from the small television in the corner. It occurs to me then that loneliness is the point of my story. Those women at the factory, me, my mother, that summer, even the hot humid air seemed to suggest that if I wasn’t careful in my choices going forward, I would be swallowed up by a gaping loneliness, no amount of money or talent or friends could dispel.
But Kurt is back and we’ve all got our glasses filled up. It’s time for me to go on. The resistors, I explain, were painted by a machine, just the ends of them. The paint was white.
My job - and I’m getting to the part that lets everyone know why I win the worst jobs contest every time - was to scrape off the millimeter of extra paint the machine had inadvertently left on the metal rod. You must understand, I tell my listeners, the resistor was the size of a sewing machine needle and this bit of white we were required to eliminate was not something the average person would have even noticed. We were each given a sharpened piece of iron for the task. You could slice a layer of flesh off your finger with it, if you weren’t careful.
I let this last part sink in while I swallow more wine. My head feels wooly and no matter how much I drink, my mouth stays dry. Of all the details I recall about the factory job and the many I have forgotten, that piece of iron, a silver-gray with the sharp wedge smooth as a baby’s forehead and shiny, is what most stands out.
This is what we did, I say, sitting at our rectangular gray metal tables. Eight hours a day, with a half-hour for lunch and two fifteen-minute breaks. We scraped this infintesimal amount of white off gray.
We’re all pretty stewed, I can tell from looking around. No one laughs, and I realize I’ve forgotten to include the funny part. One of the girls, Teresa was her name, had spent the previous year in the convent but decided that a silent, celibate life wasn’t her cup of tea. The women in the factory were crude, you have to understand, talking as openly about sex as other people discussed the weather. Some of the women were Catholic and they especially enjoyed talking dirty in front of Teresa. Her being there gave the dirty words an edge, as if the women, sharpened blades in hand, scraping, scraping, scraping, repeating the same mindless motion hour after hour for the rest of their lives, had given the day a little sizzle with that one forbidden naughty act.
Midway through the summer, on a night when the air was humid enough to drip, my mother drank herself into a stupor. The next morning, I couldn’t wake her up to drive me to work.
Kurt is collecting glasses, and though I’ve lost count of how much wine I’ve swallowed, I want more. There’s this mouth I feel inside me that doesn’t seem to have drunk enough.
Marion takes my arm and says that she’s going to drive me home. I’m not sure why this is happening but I pick up my purse and the blue nylon jacket I’ve left hanging over the couch and follow her to the door.
The air is cold and the rain hits me hard. Marion says something about the weather but I’m thinking how sick my mother was that day.
“That sounded like a pretty terrible job,” Marion says to me, once we’re on our way. “Did you manage to make it through the whole summer?”
I want to say yes and be done with it. But stories, like life, don’t usually end in such a neat way.
“I left,” I say, looking out the side window at the lights and smoke rising from factories down by the river. “I left home for good.”
Marion doesn’t ask anymore and I think this is because she’s not used to talking. Normally when we’re together, Kurt is around, hardly giving Marion enough space to say a word.
My mother died that summer while I was gone. I think this to myself, this part of the story I never tell. Swallowed, the doctor explained, her own vomit. Drowned in it.
I have no ending to leave with Marion when she pulls up in front of my house.
“Thanks for the dinner,” I say, the passenger door held open while I lean into the car.
“Thanks for the story,” Marion says, a moment before I close the door.
Robert James Russell
Wet Seed Wild
Ebbie Lee McCaskin was one of them Boon City McCaskins, the clan of Cackalacky McCaskins rarely remembered for anything more than repeated and oft exaggerated run-ins with the po-lice, the ones who, when mentioned by any other McCaskin kin, would be followed with a sigh or a pair of buggered eyes or a swirling finger near the temple.
Who can forget, for instance, when second cousin Hicks over in Colletsville, high on crank, set aflame the Cook Out with a homemade Molotov cocktail fashioned from an empty Pepsi 2-litre, then, shouting to the heavens for the Government to “quit practicin’ voo doo magic on his brain”- his words - was hauled away with a great deal of public display and showmanship...but not before his rant was broadcast all over Channel 3 and later one of the popular national news networks, much to the dismay and keen embarrassment of relations spread all through Appalachia.
Regardless of the goings-on his kin oft took part in, the various misdemeanors and felonies making the McCaskins and their kind (including and not limited to those bastards the Crisps, the Sewells, the Priests, and the Summerlins, even though there was all but a few of them) all sorts of infamous in these parts, Ebbie Lee saw himself as an outsider, not the sort of troublemaker his cousins were, and only obliged to go along with the circus that was his family because he knew no other way.
Now, Ebbie Lee was nothing if not a mindful boy - especially after being adopted through the appropriate channels by his meemaw, his daddy’s ma, after his daddy and ma, Loren and Sarah, were killed in that car crash off Route 181 near Morgantown some eight years prior - but boy did he have a temper, one of them famous McCaskin tempers that Meemaw saw in him almost immediately that reminded her of her long-deceased husband, William Eben, God rest his soul, whom the boy was named after. Ebbie Lee had really only known his meemaw through stories told in passing by his daddy, and the infrequent visits stopped outright sometime after his seventh birthday, for reasons he discovered only after being taken in by the tenacious old woman and brought into the “fold” as she called it, finding himself privy to all the woeful indiscriminancies she often was at the very center of. “Blood is thicker than it ’all,” she would say and say often. She would also on occasion call him philosophical, on account of his great brooding brown eyes and the way in which he would oftentimes just take a seat and stare, thinking and pondering, Meemaw would go on to say, as the world passed him by. This seemed to be in direct contradiction to the frequent scrapes he found himself in, usually in retaliation to some sort of off-colored remark regarding his family, the family he really didn’t find all that family-like, the family that kept him, this outsider, at a distance, only because, truth be told, that’s what you’re supposed to be doing: protecting your kin at all costs.
And it was around his thirteenth birthday - the very measure of manhood, his cousin Josh (one of them Summerlins), a year his junior, would say - when he was made to work for his meemaw, putting all the mysterious pieces of the family operations together, filling in the blanks and seeing why they all seemed so aloof when he was around: a crank business Meemaw had been operating since the midnineties in and around the Blue Ridges, an operation that, nowadays, was supplying most of Western Cackalacky, and her, the leader of the disquietous gang of makeshift hooligans, a woman standing just over five feet but with a demeanor much like a cornered wolverine, one not to be trifled with. Ebbie had always suspected something was afoot, some sort of shady business dealings, and it seemed wise then, in hindsight, that his parents had distanced themselves from them after he was born, moving far enough away so as to develop their own personalities independent of this elderly yet spry dealer who saw her children’s children as nothing more than pushers of the best chicken feed this side of Greensboro, as she would so eloquently put it - and, truthfully, satchling up a small fortune from the great berth of her operations.
So, when the day came, almost two years ago to the day, Ebbie Lee, already a larger-than-average thirteen year-old - built like a sugar maple, he was told - was made to go along with his cousins, the Crisps (Drue, Travis, and Nelson), meant to drive around to various satellite crank operations and make sure that money was being handed over, and that production was indeed moving forward, and on the rare instance when things were not going as smoothly as they could’ve been, to rough up the chefs a bit, in whatever means they felt was most intimidating at that time. Drue’s favorite method (and he was the leader of this little ragtag group of toughs) was to take a tire iron and break one or two fingers on their weak hand, so as not to further slow down production. It would only take an example being made out of one for the rest to get the picture, and along with the Beretta 92 he would tuck in the waistband of his jeans for added effect (which he called Amy-Jo - named after a girlfriend of his years prior who had left a hole in his heart deep as a well), a single infraction was all that most of the labs could afford. Ebbie’s job, then, riding around with the Crisp brothers in their beat-to-hell truck which was, at one point, of the Ford variety, was to stand there and look threatening and imposing and stoic all at the same time, with the hopes that, once he got further along in the ranks, he could travel himself to the labs and make his own fearful noise lest the employees be aching for a whooping to get back in line. For now, though, he was an observer, watching as his cousins delighted in the unrest and anxiety they sowed, learning the intimate details of how Meemaw gets paid, in what denominations that is, and how all matters of business was attended to, ensuring that she would remain the dominant crank producer in, for the time being, Watauga County, but eventually in all of Appalachia.
And it was with this very knowledge that Ebbie Lee - now of fifteen years and who had seen his fair share of backwoods wheeling and dealing since moving to Boon City, all sorts of nasty business that he really did wish he would not have seen or taken part in - robbed his meemaw of almost five thousand dollars, knowing exactly when the cash drop would come, exactly how it would arrive, and how long he would have before the money would be hid away in her “safe” (not a bank, since she couldn’t well be depositing that sort of scratch on a regular basis without drawing a great deal of unwanted attention to herself), the location of which no one but Drue and Meemaw knew of. Ebbie Lee didn’t know why he took the money, and it wasn’t some great and grand plan to do so, just a thought that bubbled up in his brain that swelled and took root, and by the time he had the stack of bills in his hands, he was already en route to meet with Khalil, his best friend and confidant, the only person outside of the great and twisted McCaskin family tree that knew what was really going on. And when he saw the money, the first thought that came to him, and the first thing out of his mouth, was that they should run away, being both equally dissatisfied with their lives. It wasn’t until they had hoofed it through the backwoods of cousin Tommy’s property that their plan began to take shape: they would travel to Fayetteville to see Ebbie Lee’s cousin Burton, a private with the United States Army, and visit the legendary prostitute Cayla Rae, who Burton had gone on about in quite vivid detail one Christmas. And what was to come after that could be decided later on.
It was nothing more than a whim, then, this momentous change in the boys’ fortunes - good or bad, that was yet to be determined, but the heaviness of what they had done sunk in them as they approached Ebbie Lee’s cousin’s house from the end of the woods at dusk (that’s CaraBeth Sewel, Ebbie’s half-Uncle Jim’s oldest, his Granddaddy’s youngest son by way of an affair with Ruth Sewell, who was now shacking up with a local tattoo artist named Jaimisson Crook), and they figured they would stop for a spell and maybe even borrow her car, to put some great distance between them and what they had done. But their minds were running away with them, even as they were greeted cordially and invited in her home, thinking all sorts of ways in which this could end badly for them. And that’s what the boys were doing when CaraBeth came jumping through the bedroom door fifteen minutes later, cordless phone in hand: daydreaming of the endless possibilities in which Drue would take the money out on their hides, her face flushed and her hair pulled back into pigtails as she stood there, framing herself in the doorway so that she looked taller, her belly clearly showing the six-month-old growing inside her. Truthfully, she looked damn surprised.
“Uh...I just got off the phone with Little Bill,” she said.
“And?”
“And you know what. You stole money from Memaw? Why in the hell would you do that?”
“What did Little Bill say... exactly?”
“Well, that everyone knows it was you.” CaraBeth rubbed her belly and pointed at Khalil. "You and your little friend there.”
“Shit,” Ebbie Lee said, lying back on the bed which smelled that moment of perfume.
“Don’t know what y’all thought would happen, retard. This is... just... I dunno, retarded.”
“What else did he say?”
“Drue and them are out looking for ya. Memaw’s still up in Blacksburg for Uncle Linton’s funeral. But Little Bill said she’s coming back early. She’s quite perturbed.”
“Perturbed?”
“His words. It means upset.”
“I know what it means, CaraBeth, I just didn’t know Little Bill had such a big vocabulary is all.”
Khalil, quiet until now, snorted, letting a tiny giggle rupture forth. He quickly covered his mouth with his hands while CaraBeth shot him a deadly glance.
“Yeah, well, neither of ya will be laughing when Drue catches ya.”
“You tell him we were here?”
“Hell yes I did. No offense, I love ya and all that, but I don’t want Memaw thinking I had anything to do with this. That is one mean woman.”
“Shit,” Ebbie said, chewing on his thumbnail.
“You said that already.”
“Well, can we borrow your car?”
“Hell no! Is that some sort of joke? Anyway, Jaimisson’s got the Caprice down at the shop.”
“What about the truck? The... Toyota?”
“I said no, Ebbie. Now, you still have that money on you? Or you spend some of it?”
“No... we still got it.”
“That’s good, then. When Drue gets here, let me talk to him first, all right? Maybe I can calm him down a bit.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.” CaraBeth sat on the bed with the boys, then, after a long and pronounced sigh, looked over to Ebbie. “I got that. Your friend doesn’t say much, huh?”
“He’s just introspective, like me.”
“Introspective, huh?” she said, laughing. “You’re just a smartass, aren’t ya?”
“Naw.”
“You know, I got a year of college all finished up, but I could see how most of our kin would hate being around ya, throwing words like that around. Introspective... shit.”
CaraBeth fell back on the bed, smiling and rubbing her stomach. Her blonde hair rested near where he was sitting, and he reached out his hand as if he were going to touch it, to stroke it between his fingers like he was sampling it for some greater purpose, but resisted and did not do such a thing. CaraBeth suddenly looked to him and smiled.
“You should talk more,” she said. “People might not say what they do about ya, then.”
“He doesn’t give a damn what anyone says about him,” Ebbie Lee said, lying back as well. Khalil, the last one sitting up, laid back and the three of them there, on that twin-sized bed, made a sort of star pattern the way they were fanned out. “Anyway, when do you think Drue is coming?”
“I reckon he’s on his way now. It sounded like he was over at Ziggy’s. He’s probably drunk.”
Ebbie Lee, a resourceful boy from birth, took stock of the situation at that moment. The way he figured, he and Khalil had two choices: stay and become, at best, punching bags for Drue, a horrible drunk, or, worse... well, he didn’t want to imagine what worse it would be. Besides, the irrevocable fraternity of kin that he always went on about was something that should not be tested or broken - a motto that might’ve well as been etched into Meemaw’s front door - and even worse than Drue would be the ramifications with his grandmother, of what she would make of all this. So, Ebbie Lee figured, it was in their best interest to quickly vacate the premises of Boon City and make their way east.
“How’s the baby?” Ebbie Lee asked, his mind racing with schemes.
“He’s fine. Been kickin’ up a storm lately, making it hard as shit to work down at Jo-Anne’s. Had to leave early today.”
“And Jaimisson’s treating you all right?”
“He is. We may even go to Vegas this year. The shop’s doing real good.”
“You going to get married?”
“I think so,” she said, then, sitting up as if it had hit her like a bolt, “I have to pee, don’t you go anywhere, though, all right?”
“Yeah, all right.”
CaraBeth was laughing now, glowing and looking beautiful, her tiny frame waddling out of the room, her long blonde hair the last thing Khalil saw as she disappeared down the hall. And the moment she was gone, Ebbie Lee stood up, all excited.
“We gotta get going... now,” he said, tugging on Khalil’s arm and, in a single motion, pulling him up to his feet. “We only got but a minute before she returns, and I know where she keeps the keys to the Toyota.”
“What?” Khalil said, his own voice sounding foreign to him after listening to their exchange. “Are you sure?”
“We’re going to Fayetteville, right? Where pussy and booze and Burton’s waiting for us, right?”
“Well... yes.”
“Then, unless we want to stay here and be rounded up by Drue, we best be on our way, wouldn’t you say?”
“I suppose so... ”
“Alright, then move.”
In just under a minute the boys had navigated the cluttered house, found the keys to the Toyota attached to a small brass hook in the kitchen underneath a wooden sign that read “God bless our home” stenciled in fancy cursive letters, picked up the backpack they had been transporting the money in, and scrambled out back and got in the muddy black pick-up (Jaimisson did, quite regularly, enjoy muddin’ in that thing, the cause of, surely, most of the wear done to it in the last few years). Ebbie Lee made sure they were buckled in, and, even though he would not admit it, was a bit nervous as he put the truck in gear and sped through the long twisting drive. He had only driven on a few occasions previous, not being of legal age, mostly when gallivantin’ around with the Crisps in the backwoods, and on top of all that, night had come fast and hard. He made sure not to look back at the house, not wanting to see CaraBeth screaming after them, if in fact she would’ve been, not wanting to see any part of the betrayed look she might be giving off between cursed breaths (she was, after all, always kind to Ebbie Lee, even when the rest of the family treated him like a damn leper on account of his pondering nature), and he suddenly felt a bit of guilt wrack his gut for taking off like this, fleeing in the night, but he knew it was the only way to get going, and get going fast, and that CaraBeth would not call the law, on account of her own criminal affiliations, so they would have, in essence, some time before anyone came after them.
At the end of the long driveway right after a row of Pawpaw used to shield the property from the road, Ebbie Lee turned right and they drove in upended silence for nearly fifteen minutes until they reached Highway 221 (that’s the James E. Holshhouser Jr. Highway) and reoriented themselves southeast on the dark road with not a car in sight. And at that instant, the realization of not only what they had done, but also their hasty exodus weighed down on their young shoulders. Khalil sat up stiff, looked at Ebbie Lee and exchanged a wayward smirk, then looked behind them through the rear window at their lives back there buried in all that indiscernible darkness, the humped Blue Ridges nothing but crooked shapes now, and said in a low voice, “I think your cousin is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
Kyle Hemmings
Fly Away
You really should know better than to ask the sun to turn you into a stone Buddha. Forget about Zin. It's 1967 and every girl is a bird with a distinct song. Some unlock you; others cut you at the core. After a thousand good-byes, after losing her in some hazy party where some doper kid screws up the words and sings It never rains in Austin, Zin, like a premature femme fatale sunsetting, goes away to college in an orange Beetle. It's the one with three identical dents along the door, driver's side. Her parents? Nothing but an empty nest made of nail clippings, shreds of yellowed newspaper, pieces of burnt toast. You imagine her mother wondering if Zin will use the pill. Will she date a meth freak and bring home a chatterbox? Will she burn all personal flags? Her father, you think, will laugh for no reason at tea parties, but will continue to dunk buttermilk cookies in milk. For you, it's a sign of hope. At the local college you attend, the soft-eyed freshman sneak hits of acid in the second floor bathroom. While your professors lecture you about the pros and cons of guerrilla warfare, or how Helen of Troy gave a whole city of men some serious blue balls, you stare out the window, wishing to send Zin telepathic flowers, rushed delivery. Without her, everything is turn-down and surface-glide. In the margin of your notebook, you write a poem in iambic silly-ameter how you once rode a horse to the edge of a cliff and you saw everything and it was love. You were that trippy, stains on your underwear, forever under the weather. You almost forget that a war is happening someplace else. Some babies will not survive the morning's first napalm. And Zin is gone. You really should know better than to fall in love with a girl who mistakes a man's shoe size for a code unlocking erogenous secrets. You hold on to ugly thunderclouds. In three to five months, in her letters to you, she'll misspell your name by one consonant. In six to eight months, she'll drop the vowel. You really should know better. You'll marry someone else, a girl with a look of runny hurt, a directory of missed appointments, an excuse for each unpaid bill. You'll continue to look out your back windows. Bury your father's knives under the river. You'll remember that as a child you won every spelling bee in school. They just didn't give away prizes. But you kept hoping.
Texas
Cleaning the dust bunnies from under our lives, Zin says she wants to move to the country, maybe someplace as big as Texas. She claims that lately she's having trouble breathing between bricks or talking to hot chestnut vendors with rubber faces. It's giving her nightmares of beehive tombs, the subway system as a mastaba, too tight a fit for her. Early evening, we're walking down Bleecker, Zin in one of her bipolor phases, talking as if she's about to meet Jackson Pollack giving her his impression of space. I tell Zin that I'm staying in the city, that Texas is too small a space to milk my musical urban cows. Before I can say I take that back, Zin falls through a manhole and I'm left patching a hole in the sky before it rains Noah's favorite plastic animals and Zin is swept away without paying one city token for fare. From under the streets, I can hear the melody of Zin's voice and I suppose this is her way of guiding me to a place where it rains infrequently, a place too far to recall the dry dust of memory, a place like Texas.
S.O.S.
I wake up to a feeling of floating bodies. Zin is not sleeping next to me, which means I might be stranded on Mars without a blanket. A note pinned to the pillow: I'm tired of being your singing cockroach. Bow down before your Queen Bee Diva. I might be home before six, or I might swim to Bali. I'm just that kind of girl. Anyway, you still give me a reverse hard-on. Love, Zin. I look out the window, as if I'm imprisoned inside a tower room. There's a smell of bubblegum, wafting through hot days and porch-less childhoods. Maybe the East Village is burning. I imagine in the building across the street, a girl is locked in a room and thinks it is her lighthouse. She loves the sun but can't stand to look down. She probably doesn't give a damn about pod slurping or car podding. She just wants to be saved from household cleaners and her brother's broken bass lines. He could go on for hours about the social stigma of having a hare lip. I download Zin and her band--Izo and the Dogs of Dissolution--in MPEG-4 and watch them perform in H.264 video. Zin is dressed in a plastic mini-skirt with candy cane stockings that keep twirling, that never end. She's holding a fake water hydrant because behind her the city is burning. The rest of her band are dressed as ANGRY, SLEEK-DOG, AND LUDICROUS. At the computer, I type this message: We're out of leftovers. The cockroaches with no voices got to them. And I promise I won't put my shoes in the oven and set it on Broil. I'm going to lick my A.D.D. and talk to you in simple sentences. You're going to love my new haircut. And I won't hold grudges against girls singing under the radar, their songs without bridges. Remember that old cliché you once sang about? Love is like peanut butter, all gooey and sticks to your cheeks. Please come home before I burn the last two slices of bread. Love, Beatle-Boy. I will send this e-mail to myself.
Unaswered E-mails Over a Cup of Coffee and a Microwaved Danish
Hi Zin,
Really enjoyed seeing you again at Miranda Sinned. Looked like you enjoyed doing the St. Vitus. Don't ask me how but I got rum and coke on my panties. When I got home, I had a craving for tongue and my honey's talking squid, later, some fruit loops without milk. Q. What does all this make me? A. A girl without zippers. How did I ever come to this? Felicity, my ex-piano teacher is now my new mother goddess traveling incognito in hostile territory. She says I feign submission so I can sabotage a relationship and blame it on my victim/mother-clone. But what does that have to do anything? I can still scramble eggs with one hand. I can still make someone turn the color of burned ham. Hey, heard you crashed at Tony's after the club. Is it true? You slept between Chop Chop and Bruce? Did they lasso you in their sleep or are they really gay? Did you listen to each one's dreams and jot down the plotlines? It could be used for future extortion. See you soon. I love my new life. No boys. No broken condoms. No falling arches at rush hour. No Hitlers in my bed.
Love,
The Amazon Chick
Who Likes Her Eggs
Sunny Side UP
Hey Zin,
This is Joey Fisher, the guy you met the other night at Miranda Sinned. Like I said, I saw you singing at Blue Ice a few weeks back. Loved your voice but you need better material. The punks backing you up need some boot camp with Mel Bay. Are they audio-philes or audio-phobics? Just joking. I left you a QR code that when downloaded will take you to my website. Shows you some of the talent I've worked with: Martha Graves and the Fantastics, Mother Gone Mad, Cecily's In Trouble. There are also some hot pics of me while vacationing in CanCun. I really look forward to working with you, I mean, depending if we meet each other's expectations, and I know we will. Your voice is honey and we both like the sound of $$$. But I must warn you. We might have to change your name. Zin doesn't cut it unless you're into astro-house and you'd be a minority of one. Are you into Deep Spike Metal? Do you snort life or exhale it? Did I tell you that you're cute in a broken vase kind of way? I wanted to talk to you longer, but you wandered away into the men's room, instead of veering to your left. You were that drunk. When sober, you must wear men like argyles. Only joking. Please get back to me ASAP.
Joey the Musical Dragon
Hi Zin,
I was passing by your hangout-Miranda Sinned -- and I picked up a plastic girl with all your features. Only her eyes and lips could move. So I felt sorry for her, people passing her on the sidewalk like she was a manikin who needed a life but all she got was stillness, which is a form of nothing. So I tucked Plastic Girl under my arm and walked down East Houston. Plastic Girl said Where are you taking me? I said, I'm not sure, maybe we'll go shopping together, or maybe to Miranda's when it opens, but you can't dance, so nuke that idea. She asked me to put her down. I leaned her up against the wall of an old brick and mortar building that I knew housed a 24 hr. massage parlor and the office of a guy I worked for. He was a Chinese gangster kingpin, who on the side, collected exotic butterflies. He gave each one the name of a love child. With her blue hungry planet-boy eyes, Plastic Girl froze me. She said What are you looking for? Do you think you can find luv with a replica? Polyurethane silence and doll-drop eyes? I said I don't care. I said you remind me of someone who was once there as like inside but I don't know myself anymore. Plastic Girl's hand slowly raised. I stepped back, not sure how to process this. Then, she melted. What was left was a girly space alien with flashing eyes and antennae for ears. She placed me under her arm and we flew over the city. It gives you a different perspective being up here, doesn't it? she asked. Yes, I said, but I'm dizzy at heights. We landed at the same spot, in front of Miranda's, and after a long waxy kiss, she took off. She said she had to return to her planet and her parents were old fashion. I told her I'd keep in touch through virtual thought channeling while keeping Deep Space integrity.
Zin, if you believe this story, then give me a call.
If you don't, then give me a call anyway because I can't seem to reach you.
Love, Beatle-Boy