A, gesticulating at topless women on cover of rock album: Just look at this. They sold their souls to make that cover.
M: You know, I don’t think they did.
(A looks indignant.)
M: You don’t have to look closely to see that they’ve clearly been praying at the altar of one of the Infinite Lesser Demons of Spray-Tans, and it’s even more obvious that they must have done something to displease him. Looks like a punishment to me.
After work today, the husband and I spent four hours scurrying about helping a friend move. She’s actually the very first friend I made here, which made it pretty important to me to be helpful and cool. Of course, since it’s me, helpful coolness was in deeply short supply. I nearly put my knee through a painting, destroyed my new coat falling out of the truck, and yammered pointlessly at her capable, prettier-than-me friends. We’d also taken a moonlit run the night before and, predictably, injured ourselves. But we managed a few truckloads before calling it a night.
Sweaty, chagrined, and exhausted, we were leaning on each other as we stumbled back to the car. I tried desperately to tell myself I wasn’t a complete and total asshole, and was unconvinced. We passed a middle-aged couple exiting their house, the man’s iPod glowing in his hand.
“Excuse me?” he asked, in a hesitant, Eastern European accent. “Do you know how to make the music on the iPod go louder?”
Happily, I jumped to demonstrating the clickwheel’s controls. The man’s wife smiled at my husband as he told us how he’d just traded in his Zune for an iPod, and the two of them were going to “share their music together with each other.”
Together, my husband-wife-technophobia-fighting team helped these strangers understand file conversion and wished them well. They waved sweetly as we left, both pairs walking arm in arm.
It was hard to wait until we got in the car before exclaiming how much better it made us both feel to help people with something we’re actually good at.
This random encounter is a lot cuter if you know that my husband works for Apple.
When you wrap yourself in a blanket the warmth is never immediate. In fact, sometimes it makes you colder than you were, but you sit there knowing that if you stay in one spot your body will eventually generate enough heat and it’ll be trapped inside that blanket and make you warm. That’s what I imagine being a cat is like, it’s like always having a blanket.
Griffiths works primarily with calligraphy ink, graphite and liquids, such as tea brandy, vodka and whisky he draws and then manipulates the drawn line. The above image was painted with ink and tea.
[These days, if it weren’t for writearound prompts, I wouldn’t ever get a story out. Please note that while the first sentence probably contains a factual error, I don’t give a crap because I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew about cribbage.]
The last time he saw her, she beat him by almost four hundred points. This wasn’t particularly unusual; after three years he still barely understood the rules of cribbage. It wouldn’t be unlike her to have deliberately forgotten to teach him, or to have made up rules of her own. Every time he complained about it, she’d grin up at him through bright, heavy-lidded eyes and say, “Unlucky at cards….”
And whenever she said it, he’d feel a little bit worse.
Their weekly card game was only possible because a knot of lies she had carefully tied so she could see him. She’d told Max that she’d managed to get an extra shift washing dishes at the pub, and had gotten the lead bartender, whose girlish laughter was barely controllable, to cover for her by explaining that she was taking pole dancing classes as an elaborate surprise for him. Whenever she began to complain that Ollie’s clamoring for a demonstration was practically driving her to take the classes for real, he knew that her friend had a new boyfriend. He often wondered how she got out of that situation, as Ollie could be really, um, insistent. Then he would spend several minutes trying very, very hard not to wonder anymore, and had trouble making eye contact with her.
The weekly games weren’t quite so weekly anymore, either. More and more often, she’d call him from the bar to cancel, teasing him that she had to spare his dignity for a little while. When she did come, the brown of her eyes looked faded, and she always said she couldn’t stay for long. She stopped drawing cartoons on napkins, and drank only weak tea. The day she showed up with her hair chopped raggedly short, he couldn’t breathe for a minute. She caught him staring, silently voicing his concern, and chuckled, running a hand through the uneven ash-brown locks.
“It’s harder to grab onto this way.”
The next time she joined him at the coffee house, he saw fresh burn scars on her arms. He tried so hard not to look at them that it gave him a headache.
She must have seen the tension in his jaw, because she rolled down her sleeves before reaching for the draw pile.
“So,” she said, at first with the barest of quivers in her voice, “I’m thinking of trying to get Max to stop smoking. How’d you manage to quit?”
He’d been forming the words, had nearly gotten them right in his mind. Stopped dead by the light conversation and even more buoyant smile, he choked a little on the aborted sentence before replying, “Um, pneumonia. Was out sick for two weeks, and couldn’t smoke the whole damned time. I guess I figured that I’d suffered without it for that long, I might as well continue bearing the burden of being cancer-free.”
“Yeah. I can see how that might be rough for you.” She moved her peg, rabbiting along the little wooden racetrack.
“The only question is, how do we inject Max with a disease that’ll knock him out long enough?”
She smiled at him, clearly aware of what he had been thinking. She always looked away too quickly. “Oh, we’d never get there. He’s descended from a long line of conspiracy-sniffers. I’m pretty sure his great-great-aunt predicted the assassination of JFK before he was even born.”
The words came out before he’d realized it, leaping out of his head like Athena. “We could just leave instead.”
This time she was the one staring, sunken eyes stopped still.
“I mean it. We wouldn’t— we could go anywhere you wanted, and nobody would have to know.”
Her hands were stopped between shuffles, and he saw a sudden twitch in one little finger.
“We could leave tonight, right now. I have a little money saved; I can buy us new clothes and everything. We can go to—- I don’t know— Florida or something.”
One long, slow blink, and her face went soft, softer than the wryness of her voice, which was always mocking him, infuriating and enveloping. “What would we do, farm oranges?”
“Hell yeah, we would. We’ll run the best little grove they’ve ever seen. Make a mimosa that’ll knock your brain out.” Now that the words had started to come out, they ran him over, stampeding out his mouth and swimming in his eyes. “I just… I can’t stand around and watch this anymore. I have to take care of you.”
“Yeah. But you can’t.” When her eyes fell to the table, his words collapsed, limpid and fruitless, dying as quickly as they’d come to him. He reached for them, frantically, acid rising in his throat.
Before he could swallow it down again, she raised her shaggy head. “I never really liked champagne anyway. The fizzies make my nose tingle.”
She rose, touched his hair for a second and left. She probably made some excuse about getting home to Max before he worried, but she didn’t hear it. All he would remember was her fingertips warming his scalp, and a nauseated silence. He wasn’t thinking that it would be the last time he saw her. He was too busy calling himself an idiot for blowing it.
Days later, he found out that she’d died. An overdose of alcohol and some potent pill, while Max was out with his friends. Even though the coroner had found a fractured cheekbone under the fresh bruises on her face, her death was ruled a suicide.
He didn’t speak for days afterward. Their cribbage board became the bar at which he held her nightly and continuous wake. All he could think was that he could have saved her.
When he passed out, which was often, he dreamed that he did. He woke up with tears on his cheeks and the taste of citrus on his lips.
Sometimes he’d imagine that she was alive, and that death was another of her circuitous lies. Maybe she knew just the right drugs to take to appear dead, like they do in the movies. Maybe she knew the ambulance driver— wasn’t one of Ollie’s more lasting conquests an EMT? She could have gotten him to lie for her, just like Ollie did. After all, didn’t she already use lies to escape and see him? And someday, she’d appear before him with a deck of cards and laugh her ass off because he was stupid enough to believe she couldn’t cheat death.
It comforted him, for short bursts of time. But he’d invariably come down from the high with the knowledge that no Bondian twist could change the fact that he had failed her.
He had no conception of how much time was passing, only that it was moving, like sludge seeping down a wall. He began to forget her voice, but not her eyes. In his memory, her lips would be redder, her breasts higher, and her laugh louder. He invented the way her skin felt instead of remembering it, and the drunken storm in which he lived began to fade into a misty greyness.
One day, he turned to see her face in a crowd. He’d practically walked past her before the yellow of her shirt caught his notice. He snapped to attention, caught a flash of brown eyes and she was gone. A handful of irritated businesspeople jostled him roughly as he watched her small figure retreat from him.
It had to be. It was impossible. It must’ve been. His stomach churned as he continued down the sidewalk, trying to trace her features in stop-motion with his mind. The hair was black, not brown, and gelled into a pixielike disarray. She’d been carrying a backpack filled with something that clumped metallically as she bounded past, and she’d been humming his favorite song.
He’d already been running a few blocks before he realized he’d turned in pursuit, and narrowly missed knocking down a food cart as he came back to himself. He followed her though he was blind to where she’d gone, and though he was even less certain where the hell he was going. Tasting bile in his throat, he wondered desperately if it had been she he’d seen, or if he’d finally pickled his own brain. A few turns later, he caught a flash of yellow and lighted for an alley behind the worst steakhouse in town. He remembered how hard she’d laughed when retelling how Max took her there once to apologize, and how blithely she’d changed the subject to undercooked baked potatoes when he’d asked what for.
He stopped short at the end of the alley, trapped by a brick wall and a dumpster that smelled of Bacon Bits. On the wall beside him was a large mural, a brightly spray-painted orange tree against a swirling yellow sky. The silhouette of a woman leaned against the multicolored trunk. A pale blue ribbon scrolled beneath the scene, bearing the legend, “Nothing was ever your fault.”
It is the beginning of rush hour, or the beginning of the middle. The sky is cloudy in that excessive, fitful way that means Something is brewing. Passing drivers are largely unaware of the impending Event as they cruise down the highway at four miles per hour above the speed limit. Empty drink containers and bent straws like the stems of crushed flowers litter the roads as liberally as their seats.
Being in a car is like being in a private universe. One can control so many minutiae of the immediate environs, from temperature and sound to scent and color, that it can make the rest of the world seem less real. An insulating bubble appears to exist around each vehicle, keeping each bee-buzz hum and singular whoosh distinct from its fellows. This utopia of dimensional separation is, of course, only disrupted when drivers honk at each other, or when an accident occurs.
The tension in the air above the highway is almost electric, but even the pedestrians don’t notice. An almost standoffishly rotund woman in blue handwarmers cut from old socks is intent on her phone conversation, which is joyless and unfulfilling, but she still rings right back when she gets disconnected. There is a doctor in scrubs almost exactly the same shade who is proudly skateboarding to the nearby clinic, confident that he will arrive four minutes sooner than a mortal who is merely walking.
Another man with enough scruff to mask both his age and expression walks a dappled grey-and-black dog whose body is too big for his countenance. A pretty, familiar-looking Asian girl flicks her dark hair out of her eyes and waggles her fingers out the open passenger window to disentangle loose strands from them.
All around are the smells of sugarfree bubble-gum, motor oil, and well-groomed but tired feet. Every person is concerned with getting home, or somewhere else; with getting one thing or accomplishing another; with repeating and scoffing at some crap that a mutual, backstabbing friend spouted off behind our backs.
This makes the ever-roiling highway a transient, turbulent, and deeply inconsequential area. It’s the same as those pockets of reality that insulate cars from one another; half-imagined, inconstant creations that, hardly existing, are no less real.
The grey of the clouds grows not darker, but thicker. The wind seems wetter, and the exhaust-fumigated trees shudder in response. There is another scent here, amongst the everyday teeming of thoughtless trivia and life, rising subtly as leaves turn over in the late afternoon. It’s not terribly distinct. In fact, even the most imaginative nose could appreciate it, but would feel foolish attempting a diagnosis.
The building Something brews and bides its time. The scent rises some more, swirls, and goes unnoticed. It’s a little bit like the smell of death.
.
It’s actually the second day of our journey West. Day One was exhausting, with exquisitely bad weather everywhere we went. The pathologically big storms were wonderful— I took a video of the rain sliding down my window— but the spaces in between were too hot, and flooding isn’t fun. The full moon rose, huge and red-orange, and last night, we slept in an actual bed for the first time since Monday. 
Not much to tell.
My family insisted that we drive to Mount Rushmore this morning, which is Saturday. Of course, the only item of interest there was that Doug and I reminisced about how cheesy a movie North by Northwest was— and then we arrived at the top of the [is it a mountain?] to find that it would cost $22 for both of our cars to park, get out, and take a single photo. So we just left.
That’s American.
1:18, Saturday: We have entered Montana. My computer turned into a pad of paper, and I am actually sending this tweet via carrier pigeon.
2:36: Somehow we’ve ended up at a stop light on 212 that changes perhaps once in an hour. Staring down the long line of cars that stretched in both directions, I watch a woman park her car in order to dig a can of soda out of her trunk and realize I’ve stepped into the Godard’s Weekend.
Now we’re traveling at perhaps seven miles per hour down a gravel road, and I want a fucking pony.
When you both can sit together and can say absolutely nothing to one another. You both are comfortable around each other and even though there might be words that can be spoken, you both agree that at this moment in time, just enjoying the silence together means more right now than any sentence…
