Bored in the Breakroom Page 4

whatever-church-she-goes-to and the efficacy of spiritual devotion.

  Through the layers of expertly-plastered corpse paint, crusted blood, and tattered clothes – and even through the unseen armor of prudish religiosity – there was something deeply sexualized about her. The deadened eyes sparkled with untamed aqua, the mussed hair was still lustrously thick, a tattered and soiled silk blouse was held up by two ample mounds.

  I coughed to cover up a quick glance around the area. John was being verbally pummeled by a porker in a ripped sundress, Chris was held in submission by a guy in a smudged blazer who looked old and big enough to be bouncing at Diesel (probably the youth leader), and Jesse was nowhere in sight. All were locked in battle. I was on my own, like everyone else.

  The girl recited her rehearsed lines with an alarming degree of sincerity and I just couldn’t feign interest for protocol’s sake. I blanked out and imagined all the carnal wisdom I could impart as her elder: that vampires would be a more apt literary creature to adopt for their purposes, that the mind-numb of religion is too farcically suited to their current brain-consuming costumes, that her parents want to divorce in the near future because of her, that she would most likely abandon her idyllic mores the second she hits the soil for freshman year abroad (or when the next horny asshole convinces her he loves her). But her glaring innocence – those sky-colored eyes projecting total vulnerability and somehow successfully masking the living, functioning mind behind them – killed the urge, the fact that I may very well have misjudged the character of her fanaticism notwithstanding.

  Now here she was, the square pamphlet stuck rudely under my nose, with its stylized rounded corners and minimalist orange-flecked design aesthetic. The church’s address was crudely dot-matrixed on a rectangular sticker, nonparallel to the bottom edge of the paper. She certainly was a looker; perhaps more so under the rotting facade and outmoded belief system.

  I took it from her and pocketed it. We exchanged smiles. Maybe I will take her up on the offer.

  Light Up Night, Part 2

  Roger’s personality description on the site labeled him as “down to earth” but the minuscule photo threw up red flags in my head as to its veracity. I didn’t have high hopes for our meeting so I gussied myself up unflattering on purpose – I don’t consider myself top drawer but I’m also not one to throw pearls to swine.

  We met after I had texted him with full intentions of implying stupidity on my part (he would think a conspicuous landmark near my apartment passed by my attention). The affected turtleneck and the haughty downturn of his cold gray eyes sealed the deal, prejudicially, for me. If he didn’t mean to come across as arrogant in his profile he was certainly that way in real life.

  There was one way to easily dissuade a pretentious deep-thinker like this specimen: public disingratiation. This would not be difficult. I think I impressed upon him unfavorably, which was my aim, judging by the quick flickers of disdain that often ran across his stubbled cheek. I wanted to make this as quick and painless for me as possible.

  I bugged him without mercy to go with me back to PPG place so I could skate. I actually had already gotten my fill the night before as I returned to a routine I used to do in high school – with surprisingly good results. He agreed to come with me but refused to accompany me onto the ice. It was of no consequence.

  My plan would still see its end, because once on the ice I did all that one could do to loudly embarrass someone in a crowd from ten or so feet away.

  After perhaps ten minutes of forced, raucous un-skillfulness, I noticed that he was gone, overpriced cigarettes and all. “Good riddance,” I thought. I did a few victory laps and finished with a rather flawless double axel.

  Returning to my apartment overlooking the rink and the Crystal Palace – the first building I really noticed in the city after going the wrong way on 3rd (or was it 4th?) – I made some tea. With a random new book purchase in hand I sat at the frozen window in my bathroom and kept intermittent watch over the teeming crowd well past the midnight hour.

  Eating Trash

  Jim, beckoned by emphatic winds, often sought out signs of intelligence from inanimate objects hiding in the untried paths of the city’s in-between streets. The smoky swirl of newspaper pages around his knees spoke to the chaotic nature of last-minute journalism and the stress veins on the foreheads of grizzled copy editors.

  Once in a while an orphaned page would fly straight for his face. It would annoy him for obvious reasons, but the sense was augmented by his awareness that the pages’ enumerations were two sets of two consecutive numbers and not one set of four. He wished his breath was fire so he could make ashes of the mental discomfort.

  One time this happened, he could read the headline and subhead as it approached his face, hovering and creeping closer like a cold, slow slap. It told him something he didn’t know. He relished the quite literal act of knowledge chasing after him for a change.

  God of Fire

  She stood before the comatose building, armed with a red canister and a back catalog of scenes gleaned from recurring dreams. Those images tucked themselves away in the conscious parts of her brain and fell into slots of their own volition. They formed a narrative, disturbing yet coherent, that sought fulfillment in the material world.

  The unfolding of those scenes into sense-localities made her tense. The crickets chorused their encouragement. She wanted to shut them up with a daggered scream (she fancied knife-throwing as a satisfying release). She was afraid they would obey her: silence under the stars was an ill-omen.

  Her mind crept past the decrepit front door. Twenty feet, ten feet.

  It’s right behind her. There she would see the faceless men in suits, gesticulating frantically with ringed hands and bumping into each other, deformed dogs, walls of blood...the whole typology. Then the rotted stairs and the well-lit kitchen and clothy table arrayed with the stock elaborate foodstuffs. Her mother would be there, picture-perfect smile, whisking blissfully, unaware of the nightmarish goings-on in the other rooms. It would make the girl cringe, not because of its phantasmagoria but because of the overwrought imagery. She thought her mind to be made of more singular stuff.

  One element would finally break her into a smile. In the blowy atrium sat the stacks of greenish candy-like blocks, one side of which bore a babbling-nonsense mouth that appeared as though it met mere minutes ago with a sizable ham-fist, several times. Her father is there with a suit jacket covered in crosses made of beef jerky. He would be urinating without end. His sloppy aim would alternate between a corner of the room and the tongue of the stack of blocks, which would stop its declarations of nothingness to lap up the golden stream with abandon: an apt analog of her sizable trust fund.

  The “Uni” above the door was worn away, leaving only the “tarian” as a dead giveaway of its most recent use. This was another dream, her father’s. They were all always full of it, more her father than anyone else, which was more than what she needed to simply walk away. He still held out hope for the building’s reanimation, and tonight’s vulcanized proceedings would script a nice ending to his tragic-comedy.

  But something stayed her arms and the lighter in her back pocket. A useful revelation. Images of teetotalling men in suits and their wide-hipped wives in ankle-length skirts, speaking in tongues, giving mock birth to the Spirit in near-pornographic displays of their clothed crotches. The ritual plate passing with grace and calm as if none of former chaos broke into their bodies.

  These were those “others” that her father swore against; a mutual enemy she could purchase into her unspoken service. She knew those people and how they would gladly take the blood money. What better revenge than constructing what your enemy hated the most in the place of his dead vision?

  Her smirk turned her heels around. The decision soldered the new revenge into her joints. Her accountant’s number was on her cell’s speed dial (voice command: “moneyed asshole”). Less than a month, tops. She would make this happen.

  She concl
uded that God existed after all, and she was the willing consort. It was Hephaestus, and He was about to flick the embers of His Most Flavorful Cigarette right onto kerosene of her perfect plan.

  Divine Right

  “‘My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions.’”

  -1 Kings 12:11b

  The cafe next to our hotel handed out weapons with every order. The proprietor was a short bowling ball of a man with an unpronounceable name and a drooping pushbroom mustache – the only spot of hair above his neck.

  The cafe tables were standing-height. Most customers were dine-in and stood around silently with the morning paper and, like mercenaries awaiting deployment, their weapon hung on their belts, slung on their purses, or sitting right on the tabletop. When they left they deposited their weapons in a basket near the counter.

  The busboy would fetch the basket and dump its clattering contents into some unseen bin behind the counter. We saw him do this when we entered and we tried our best overlay our surprise with nonchalance. Martha almost turned right back outside if it weren’t for my firm yank on her sleeve.

  The man in front of us purchased a small cappuccino with a shot of something, and with it on the saucer came a pair of previously used brass knuckles. They clinked dangerously