"Meijering" part 2

“Excuse me, sir,” I say. The man on the stool looks up. “There’s a mess in the next aisle.” He looks at the wall of cans, mouth agape. I note that some of his teeth are artificial. I can tell because they are a slightly different hue than the rest. He stares at the cans as if trying to look through them.

“What kind of mess?” he asks me. I suppose this is a pertinent question.

“It’s pretty horrible. There’re boxes everywhere, and a broken jar of jelly,” I tell him.

“What happened?” he asks me. He’s just full of questions.

“A man and a woman got into a fight, I think,” I say. “Or, the fight was in the man, and the woman got in its way. I don’t know. She’s still there.”

I think he’s waking up as we talk, coming out of his hypnotic state. It’s likely the only way he can get through the night, finding that happy place and just living in it.

“Well, is she all right?”

“I didn’t ask her.”

“Well…does she look alright?”

“Who’s to judge?”

“Well…what’s your best guess?”

I considered this for a moment. If I were in that position, would I be alright? I supposed not, but it really depends on whether or not she’s still bleeding or actively bleeding. “I don’t think so.”

The paramedics are very loud. They constantly chatter back and forth like two hens. “Pulse-“ this or that, “B.P.-“ yadda yadda yadda. I suppose that that is their job, though. The policemen asked me questions just a moment ago. “Who did you see?” “What did you see?” “When did you see it?” “How did you react?” “Why didn’t you do anything?” That last one is particularly irksome. “I did do something!” I say to the one policeman. She is a lady. “I told that guy.”

“He’s says that you didn’t mention the body until he asked,” the lady policeman says. I assume he’s a lady because he has breasts and wears a broach, but everything else about him sings out in glorious androgyny. I wonder if they have androgynous pageants in some part of the world and all sorts of people compete to see who is the least discernable. This lady would place fairly high, I’m sure, though I doubt he’d take the crown.

“I only sought to present him the aspects of the situation that directly affected his job,” I say. This lady policeman likely sees dead bodies all that time, I think he’d find the broken jar of raspberry jelly, or was it jam? The details are getting hazy, to be much more remarkable, and not so much a woman in a dress.

The lady police officer gives me an incredulous look. For someone whose entire existence seems to be straddling the line between different things, he doesn’t really seem to have any trouble being very explicit with his emotions. His partner walks up. There is no androgyny about the other policeman. He wears a suit, has very manly proportions and jowls, the gray hint of a beard on his jowly, jowly cheeks, and suffers from male pattern baldness, giving him a developing bald patch in the back. “Sir, are you aware if anyone has touched this crime scene?”

I don’t like the way he talks. Everything about him screams half-ass; except his ass. It is working overtime. At least it’s taking up enough space that it should be. I wonder if he ever has any paranoid fears about his toilet breaking when he’s on it reading the sports pages after dinner. I’m fairly certain the sports pages are the only reason anybody even gets a newspaper anymore.

“Sir?” The other one repeats this in a testier voice that makes his partner flinch.

“Yes. I saw two people man-handling the body.”

“Body?” The man policeman asks me.

“The lady’s body, in the yellow dress.”

“You mean the victim?” the lady policeman asks me, growing testier. It’s strange. I’d never presume to know another person’s mind, but I can’t help but assign feelings to this lady policeman. He expresses his emotions so fully on his face and with his body language. But then again, maybe a lifetime of being androgynous has given him the skills to present whatever emotions the society driving him to identify with one sex or the other deems necessary.

“I don’t know that she’s a victim,” I say. “Either way, the ‘lady’ possesses the body, not the other way around. The two in blue can’t affect the ‘lady,’ only her body.”

“The two people you saw handling the body were the paramedics?” he – the lady – asks me.

“Yes,” I say.

His face is beginning to show what he must perceive as the appropriate emotion, which is strange because I’ve never felt that anger was an appropriate emotion in any given situation except professional wrestling.

“Klein,” the man policeman says, putting his hand on the non-sexual-harassment area of the body (elbow) and putting his other arm in front of him (the lady, that is), “why don’t you go see if we can get a status update on the vic, I’ll get this guy’s statement, alright?”

“Klein,” the lady policeman, backs away from me, turns to the side and sidles a step, and then hesitantly turns his back on me.

The man policeman turns to face me full on, now. He looks like he’s resigned himself to some unpleasant task, but otherwise his emotions are blank. I wonder what task it might be. “Is there some special caretaker you have that we should be calling, sir?”

I think about this for a second. Finally I achieve my best answer. “Officer…policeman, I have not slept in two days.”

He sighs. It seems like a well practiced, comfortable sigh. “Let’s start at the beginning. What did you hear?”

"Meijering" part 1

The door greeter doesn’t speak English. “That is a very ineffective strategy for greeting people.” That’s the first thought that hits me. I’m too tired to think and not speak. “Unless the bulk of the store’s foot traffic at 3:18 in the morning speaks Spanish as a first language. That’s possible.” My tour through the grocery department seems to indicate that the majority of the people working in the store also speak Spanish, though. Of course, the fact that I’m not actually looking for anything at this particular moment is advantageous in two ways with regard to my relationship with these “valued store employees.” Firstly, I don’t need to ask them where anything is, so the language barrier isn’t an issue. Secondly, they are floor cleaners, so chances are they don’t know where it is anyway.
Remember this, kids! America is the land of opportunity; just not the best opportunities. People complain about immigrants taking jobs, but if they want to clean floors for six dollars an hour under the table, they’re welcome to it.
Grocery, as a department, holds no joy for me. Even the ethnic foods aisle, otherwise known as the “international foods” aisle, even though they have a section specially marked for southern and soul food, is a humdrum venture. I love this aisle because it allows me to laugh at characters on children’s foods who are not beloved childhood friends. A quick trip down the cereal aisle to visit those same old friends reveals that most of them have been replaced by younger, less charismatic characters.
Canned vegetables and fruits has to be the most mind-numbing section of the store. Nobody even pretends preserved food is exciting. There is a man sitting on a stool when I walk down. Theoretically, he is pricing cans, though his rate is comparable to a man putting down puppies. It seems almost as if his need for work could barely face off against his lack of will and the gravity of a much larger heavenly body than that on which he currently resided.
Resode? I suppose not, though it is more aesthetically pleasing.
Strangely, this is the aisle where my night becomes intriguing. Just around the corner I hear two voices. I don’t really know what they’re saying; the verbiage blends in with the muzak to create a sort of background noise similar to that of a refrigerator. But unlike the aforementioned appliance, the silence that follows this hum is not one brought on suddenly; it is punctuated with a sharp sound of skin colliding with skin. And, much like a child playing with a synthesizer set on sound effects mode, two other sounds quickly follow: an aluminum can striking the ground (I don’t believe this store gives a discount for dented cans, though) and a glass jar breaking. I assume that it’s pickles. This is where my mind is at 3:40 in the morning. I realize, as I clock on my phone, that I’ve been walking around this damn store for twenty minutes for no reason other than I can’t sleep, and suddenly here I am. Present at the beginnings of a pickle jar massacre, I’m sure.
The sounds that followed came in short, frenzied bursts: A woman’s grunt, followed by boxes of whatever they sell in the next aisle falling to the ground or being knocked into each other. I hear a tennis shoe skid on the ground every now and then, and occasionally another smacking sound. Is that a fight? It sounds like a fight. I hope they don’t break anything I am going to decide I need.
It’s 3:41 and the fight has ended. I hear heavy breathing and then more sounds of tennis shoes skidding. Whoever he is, he runs past the end of my aisle. All I know is that he’s white, he’s about my height, and he’s wearing a blue windbreaker. I hear the Spanish speaking cleaning crew yelling at him in fragments of English and their native tongue. It all blends together. I start walking. Instead of two distinct turns to go between the aisles I use a sweeping arc, as a painter laying down the first stroke of his masterpiece. In the next aisle, which has cleaning products at the far end but at this end plastic sandwich bags and Tupperware, I see a young lady in a yellow dress lying on the ground. There’s blood all around her and her face is wet with it. Boxes of bags lay about her: collateral damage.
I pull my phone out of my pocket. I can’t see the time because it wants me to know that there’s no service. I’ll have to walk all the way back to the aisle before this one to tell someone that there is a broken jar of raspberry jelly here.
And a body.

Other blog

Hey guys. So, I have to follow the muse, so I advise you to grit your teeth, open your mind, and check out the OTHER blog I've got running on this service at http://tinqpch.blogspot.com . I'm hoping that the fact that I can't see the post is a temporary thing, but if not I'll break it up. It clocked in at over 2,800 words, though, so I'm very excited. And as always, please spread the word! Tell everybody to check it out!

The other one might get a little Blue, I'm just warning, but it's all in the spirit of art and creativity, and I appreciate all the support I can get.

P.S. New post coming up on top of this one, so :p
P.P.S. My html is SO bad I can't remember how to do a link in the post. BAH. Ctrl-C Ctrl-V, people!

The first word

"The first step in a journey is often one of the hardest," the old lady prof said, walking between our desks toward the front of the room. She paced. A lot. "So it's understandable that the first page in your short-story is going to be hard to start. However, unlike that first step that leads the bastard to that fake-titted tramp in Saginaw, you can rewrite your first page as much as you need. Who knows, it might fill out the last few pages that you're aching to get." She wrote something down in the notebook she kept open on the desk at the front of the room. She looked up at us, folded her hands in front of her faded and patterned green blouse, and smiled. "So, five to seven pages, fiction, due in two weeks, and remember: your audience can tell if you did the whole thing the night before. Go home and just start writing, don't worry about page count or grammar. Then go over it, rewrite it, whatever you have to do." She looked at her watch. "We can leave fifteen minutes early today. That should encourage you all to get started early."

So I did, I went home and started writing. I did three pages about a guy who gets hit by a car and then falls in love with his nurse. Later that night, I read it, highlighted all the text and deleted it. I decided to write instead about a man who has a one night stand, gets hit by a car and then finds out his doctor is married to the woman he slept with.

Eight full deletes later I decided on a story about a man who hits a nurse with his car and fears taking her into the hospital because someone will recognize her and he'll get arrested, or so he thinks.

The story never works. As I write, the dialogue starts to suck more and more. I can't finish it. The whole thing becomes a constant stream about how this guy is impotent in his life.

Before I know it, it's been two weeks. I'm sitting in class with the printed out versions of my story, doing last minute edits, scratching, scribbling, throwing in commas, trying to salvage two weeks work.

Time's up. We distribute our stories to each other. Soon I have a stack of eight stories to read for our next class period. I start going through them as the old lady prof goes on about sentence structure. She acts as if we don't know how to use proper punctuation; who does she think we are.

The first story is an erotic tale about two Japanese girls who have to stay with a big, fat, hairy man and decide that, for fun, they're going to fuck him. It's five pages of poorly described impossible sex acts climaxing in, well, a climax. The second is a non-fiction story about a woman's first hunting trip. the third consists mainly of run on sentences with no capitalization and obviously no thought given to weather or not the authour splld ne of the word rite. It goes on like this.

I realize something. The biggest challenge I'll ever face as a writer is getting a good story out. Something that makes people think. The rest of these suckers? They're lucky to be coherent. There is one truly amazing tale given to me about a woman who falls in love with her dog. It's strangely compelling. Still, her dog?

A week later we get back a graded version of our paper. Mine is an A-.