Consequences Tomorrow

Consequences Tomorrow

     Ages and ages hence – a sigh.

     I was bored at my college graduation. I couldn’t breathe under the stupid nylon gown, and the frat brothers around me were drunk before the soloist hit her first flat note in “The Star Spangled Banner.” I had felt inclined to be patriotic at this momentous occasion and was more than slightly annoyed in a bored way. The secretary of a state representative was giving the old JFK speech about seeing what you could do for your country, but I’d heard it before, and by the time I crossed the stage to get my diploma, I cared just about as much as the other five thousand people there. I left the stadium thinking, “What now?”
     My parents swept around me with their cameras, and I smiled broadly holding my fake diploma and praying that somehow things might hurry up.
     We did the celebratory meal thing, and finally they left in a whirl of perfumed kisses and snapshots. I tossed the cap and gown into my cluttered backseat and drove back to my apartment. I tripped walking up the crumbly stairs, and I cursed as I tugged at the swollen old door pretending not to want to let me in. I walked through the kitchen full of teacups holding moldy chai and went straight into the living room. I hit the light switch and was rewarded a flickering and hissing florescent flood of light. I pushed a stack of notebooks to the end of the futon and sat wondering what to do next.

     I sat and they sat and we were all very good at silent stares.

     An unmarried husband wondering why why why he is alone and lonely and never to be married and cousins sad sad even though we were never close. The cat mrrows so I know she is there but I knew it before she spoke and she is not enough anyway. Is she? The teacher will mourn the essay I wrote yesterday, a good one all about Gatsby and the futility of the dream. Written with insight beyond my years. That understanding of Gatsby’s pink suit. All in a blue book, the good thoughts that is. With only one spelling error crossed out. The forecast is sunny and clear and I want it to rain. It should rain. You have to do things when you’re young and it’s too late. Not old but too old anyway. I watch the cat watch me and I swallow and I wait.

     I couldn’t help but start thinking about the peach in my refrigerator. There were much more important issues to be dealing with – like the competition of white society in Invisible Man but all I coulde think about was that peach. I wasn’t even hungry, and this wasn’t a craving. I just had to have the peach – like unconsciously lighting a cigarette having just snuffed the last out.
     There is really no reason to want that peach. I was massacring my coffee breath with potent mint gum – not flavors complimentary to peach.
     But as much as I felt that I needed the chilled warm fuzziness of peach, I didn’t want it. I could not find any logical reason to eat the peach. Yet as long as I denied myself the peach, I knew that when I got home, I would eat it.

Hired Help

This exercise is to write from a first-person point of view, while only using a first-person pronoun (referring to the narrator) twice in the entire story, which must be 600 words or less. Details can be found in The 3 a.m. Epiphany by Brian Kiteley.

“Unbelievable,” she snarled, as she flung the door open. “Late? Again? Good Lord, I should fire your sorry ass.” She paused in the doorway. “Well? What the hell are you waiting for? The house looks like shit, and I’ve got a guest coming in twenty minutes.”

“I’m sorry.” These were wasted words, as she had already flung herself back onto the flawless leather couch and was continuing a pointless conversation on her cell.

“Seriously. I know. I know. When you try so hard. You’re telling me. Mmhmm. It’s like, you know, like that one time. Yes. I know.”

The benefit of cleaning a 4,500 square foot house is that it allots plenty of places to hide from such inanity, and it seemed that the furthest corner of the house from where she sat always ended up the cleanest.

“ISaBELla,” she screeched, and no amount of speed could get me into her presence quickly enough. She carelessly tossed an envelope over, not even noticing when it landed in the bucket of water that had just been used to clean the Jacuzzi she used for nothing but the collection of dust. “I’ve docked you three hours of pay,” she hissed. “Perhaps next time, you’ll be on time. And no more excuses about the car breaking down, k?”

Three hours of pay? For four hours of work? It wasn’t enough to pay the electric bill, much less the rent. There was no point in arguing, even over the disparity between the five minutes of being late as opposed to the three hours she claimed.

The doorbell rang, and she breezed past. The nastiness had evaporated from her voice, and a murmured, sultry hello floated into the room.

It was the perfect opportunity to hastily clean the living room before she’d want to use it again. There was nothing worse than trying to please her critical eye. The one day, her wedding picture had to be readjusted ever so minutely no less than thirteen times before she’d concede that, well, it wasn’t perfect but it would have to do.

She was such a waste, really. It was hard to avoid bitterness towards the compassionless woman. The dwindling paychecks were never enough to deal with her degradations. She had nothing over me – the same level of education, similar looks, a comparable upbringing – but she’d married rich. That was apparently enough.

Muffled giggling drifted downstairs. The last task of the day required returning the clean, hand-monogrammed towels to the master bath, so there was no avoiding another potential encounter with her.

“Oh God, I love you so much,” she simpered from inside the bedroom. Had he come home?

An unfamiliar voice murmured sweet nothings and answered that question.
A towel slipped from the top of the stack, and it was just enough to draw her attention to the doorway. Clad in black lacy nothings, she looked up from the man she straddled on the freshly-made bed, suddenly speechless. He whirled to see what was distracting her.

“Babe,” he worried, “shit.”

She laughed – perhaps nervously – and pushed her foil-highlighted hair back. She didn’t seem to notice her almost-nudity. “It’s only the cleaning woman, Jack.”

He rolled away from her, much more aware of his own state of undress. He pulled his grease-stained coveralls back on, pleaded that he had to get back to work and disappeared from the room.

“Good thing you don’t speak English,” she smirked in his absence.

Funny how things work out. Only the cleaning woman had an important call to make that evening.

“Babe? It’s me. I’ve got something to tell you.”

*annoying screech*

This is a test.

This is only a test.

If this were an actual post, there would be a title at the top, as well as an italicized explanation of what I am trying to do with that particular writing exercise.

This concludes this test of the Top-Secret Blogging System.