Sep
15
I don’t know if I’ll keep up this little routine, but I’m enjoying the challenge for now. Thanks for indulging me.
Fiction Friday, take two:
——–
FENCES
The fly gets my attention soon after takeoff. It seems odd, a fly in an airplane. It makes me think of creaking openings in the body of the 747, entrances and exits that no one knows about. It’s stuck down between the rubbery seal of the window and the metal rim, its wings a tiny anxious blur.
I try to flip it out with the pen I’m using for the crossword puzzle but it’s hard to reach across the empty window seat; the fly gets wedged in there tighter. Or maybe I killed it somehow, because now the fly just lays there, silent and still.
Well.
“Do you want anything to drink?” A smiling face appears above me, her teeth practically glowing in the dimmed cabin. She’s offering me a foil packet, some kind of snack. Probably not peanuts, I figure: peanut dust. Anaphylactic reactions, people clawing at their throats.
“Water, please,” I say. I put the packet – I was right, it’s some kind of pretzel mix – in the seat pocket in front of me, and turn back to the crossword, pretending to be engrossed. (I don’t want eye contact: her smile is about to turn pitying, her eyebrows about to crumple in sympathy.)
Two hours until I arrive in San Francisco; it already feels like Denver is a million miles behind me. My house, my job, even my goddamned dog.
The in-flight movie seems garish without the headphones, without the sound to tell me what’s going on. People gesture at each other wildly, their faces contort into cartoonish expressions. A girl stares longingly at a boy; the camera inexplicably pulls back in a long dizzying swoop to show a lush green landscape.
I can’t keep watching, it makes me feel like I’ve been dropped into a dream where everything is just this side of normal and nothing makes any sense.
A man a few rows ahead breaks into a harsh series of barks, it takes me a moment to realize it’s laughter. I noticed the guy earlier: florid, his chest a husky barrel turning to fat. The ghosts of a thousand dead cigarettes coating his voice. His wife wheezing behind him like a Pekinese. Heart attacks waiting to happen.
I think of all the cigarettes I never smoked, all the drinks I’ve waved off. Got an early run planned before work, I’d say. The fucking picture of health. The guy you rolled your eyes at while you finished off a pint. Whatever, man.
The smiling face is back. She hands me a cup of water, asks, “Can I get you anything else?” while bending over slightly, her perfume surrounding me like a friendly little pink cloud. She’s pretty, in a bland California kind of way. Blonde, the right curves, all that.
Yeah, I think.
Get me a bottle of Jim Beam, because tomorrow is going to be just like today. No early morning milk runs, no sunset Copper Mountain runs, no runs. No goddamn runs.
Get me off this plane, drop me at thirty thousand feet so I don’t have to go to Glen Park, so I don’t have to come home to my parents like this, broken and useless.
Get me a do-over. That’s all I want, really. Just one. Lousy. Do-over.
“No,” I say. “Thanks.”
She cocks her head, beams at me and nods. And I see exactly what I didn’t want to see: an expression that clearly reads, that poor son of a bitch.
She moves down the aisle and I watch her. My face feels hot, my teeth are clenched. I allow myself to imagine jumping up, pushing her into the lavatory, one hand on her hip, one in her hair, walking her backwards into the wall, hard. Don’t look at me like that, I’d say. Don’t. Her face all O’s of surprise and shock.
Right.
When the doctor at Centura first talked to me, used the words “catastrophic damage”, I didn’t even think about walking. I asked about skiing, not walking. I remember his set mouth, the slight shake of his head. Later, at the Craig, there were a hundred other sorry sacks of shit just like me, everyone with their own catastrophic damage. Everyone wondering just how long the list was, exactly, of things they would never do again.
Mine includes skiing, walking, riding a unicycle, and chasing down stewardesses into airline lavatories.
I close my eyes and do the trick I learned in physical therapy: I picture a wall of black, which I turn blue, then red, then purple, until I stop thinking. When I open my eyes again my ears feel full, the plane is descending. Soon we’ll be landing, and I’ll wait until everyone else disembarks. Then another smiling face will push a narrow-backed aisle chair towards me, the one that’s got DEN stenciled across the front and collapsed like a broken umbrella to fit perfectly, cruelly, into the overhead compartment.
My parents will be waiting. They’ll look nervous, they’ll look old and tired and scared. My fault, my fault. I know how I’ll look to them: skinny, years of ski bum coloring bleached pale from fluorescent lighting, shadow-crescents beneath my eyes. They’ll take me home to their house in the southern edge of the city’s hills. Until you’re better, my mother said, back at Craig. I had laughed: better?
I pull my seat upright and fold up the Post – the crossword grid almost entirely empty – and my pen falls to the floor, rolling into the aisle. I reach for it but I can’t quite get there, I need to rise up on my legs a little and of course I can’t. I feel like a dog who’s abruptly reached the end of his chain, surprised anew at my boundaries.
I wonder when these tiny frustrations will finally become familiar to me.
“Here you go, buddy,” says a gravelly voice over my left ear. I look up and it’s the heart attack guy, returning back to his seat. He stoops with a grunt, then straightens up and holds out my pen. For a minute I can only look back at him, how he’s just standing there like it’s no big deal.
Everything is just this side of normal. Nothing makes sense. I am going to have to learn everything all over again.
“Here you go,” he says again, impatiently. I reach out my hand and take the pen. I tell him thank you. There is the tiniest of movements to my right that catches my gaze: it’s the fly, no longer trapped, no longer dead. I watch it walk along the edge of the window, and then it takes off. Inside the confining metal tube that makes up its world, it soars away, out of view.
Sep
14
September 14, 2006
The rains arrived at some point last night, pattering insistently onto the roof and whispering Remember ussss? I don’t necessarily mind the gloom (since it’s been one whole day; ask me again in a couple months and I’ll probably grip onto your pantleg and sob incoherently about mushrooms and moss and melancholiness and please, for the love of god, take me to Arizona), but when JB let Dog back inside this morning and she gleefully tracked wet pawprints all over the floor, I heaved a sigh for the death of summer, and dug out the pile of gross towels that will live next to the back door for the next eight months.
Soon it will be as dark as my stingray-joking, bicyclist-generalizing heart in the mornings, and won’t that be a treat? Stupid daylight savings.
(Speaking of bicyclists, a few of you may be happy to hear that karma reared up and bit my Milano-padded ass yesterday. I got in my car after work, started it, and rolled backwards – just an inch or two! – before looking back and seeing a horrified man standing directly behind me, holding a small child in his arms. In my feeble defense it’s a crappy area to walk [it’s a narrow parking area that’s open to a high-traffic street] and he should have been across the way where there is a nice safe sidewalk, but uh…yeah, not so much with the stellar driving skills, there. I’ll just gather up these stones in order to store them in the basement of my glass house, shall I?)
I’m glad for the cooler temperatures in a way, because now I can totally shake up my wardrobe: instead of t-shirts and capris, now I can wear t-shirts and jeans…with hoodies. JUMP BACK. Also, I’m weirdly fond of that burning-dust smell the heater gives off when it hasn’t been run in a while. I also really like the smell of gasoline so it’s possible I have Issues.
Oh, and here’s something else that helps me welcome the onset of chilly, damp weather: we now have heated floor tiles in the new bathroom. When JB first proposed adding that, I gave him a big thumbs down; too expensive, too frivolous, how great could they really be, etc.
As it turns out, the answer is: really, really fucking great.
Our tile guy installed the wiring, which looked like this:
(Now would be a good time to share a photo of the finished tiles, but I don’t have one right handy. They’re sort of a warm beigey color, large squares with darker “cafe au lait” colored grout.)
The heating elements are on a timer, which we have set to warm up the tiles in the morning, and late in the evening. They feel pretty damn awesome, especially after padding around the house barefoot on cold wood floors. Last night, I noticed that Dog went shuffling in there to sleep, which she has never done before. Gah, the pets are going to make it into a lair.
The cost wasn’t too bad overall, or maybe it’s just that it’s frighteningly easy to justify all kinds of things when you invest in a house remodel. Having one thing be New & Improved makes everything else look shabby and in dire need of upgrading. You ask yourself, what’s one more expense in the horrifying financial grand scheme of things? This is a slippery slope of DANGER, and can probably eventually lead to liposuction.
::
Man, there sure are a lot of creepy, depressing stories in the news lately. Like this. And this. And jesus christ, this. I’m not sure the whole world-of-information-at-our-fingertips thing is really good for us, you know? Then again, some stories just put a smile on your face.
-
My product review site:
[