Study Hour

I'd been studying all night. My big test is less than a week away, and I still can't remember how to find the inverse of a function. My eyes had become strained to the point that the computer screen was beginning to swirl into an unrecognizable eddy of misshapen coefficients and variables.

I stretch and yawn, but I don't rub my eyelids, because that can cause wrinkles, and if I suddenly develop wrinkles, people might start to suspect that I'm somebody's grandmother.

Reaching for the eye drops seems like a chore. The nightstand is a little too far away. I have to adjust my position, but still, I can't reach it.

The lizard that hops onto my hand is a bit of a shock. It is light and quick. I slap it away, but it is more determined than I. It hits the floor mid-leap and comes right back to me, attaching itself to the front of my shirt. Holy Crap! I smack and slap and push, but with every contact, the lizard becomes heavier and blacker and meaner. It grins at me with an evil intent in its eyes.

I'll trap it, I think to myself. Looking around, I see that I'm in a noisy cafeteria somewhere. There are people around me, but they don't seem to notice my dilemma. I grab somebody's tupperware bowl, slap the lizard to the floor. With a fierce leap, I slam the bowl over it.

A short-lived sense of smug victory runs though me, until the vile creature begins to outgrow its prison, pushing me upward until it seems that I am riding it like a horse. There was a moment I thought it might grow wings and carry me away. Another dragon dream?

Instead, it disintegrates into a pool of black ooze under a cloud of  thick, sticky smoke. I fall away from the mess, horrified that I've been poisoned by the noxious fumes.

I land safely in a landfill atop the world's largest pile of dirty laundry. My hand scrapes against a mess of caked-on food and grime. Gross.

I stand and view my circumstances. There is nothing on the horizon but more laundry.Endless hills and valleys full of stinky socks and boxer shorts.

Not a bathroom in sight.

Not a dream.

One of my friends called me up and asked why I blocked this blog from public view.

I had no idea.

Glitch, I guess.

I fixed it.

Read on, Marisol!

Two Seconds

"This doesn't seem safe," I murmured to the girl with the blue streak in her hair. She shrugged one shoulder and ignored me and the Laws of Gravity with one giant leap into the abyss.

I cringed and closed my eyes, expecting to hear the crunch/splat of flesh and bone as it collided with bottom of the pit. No such sound resonated there. Only the faraway giggle of that rebellious child echoed back to me.

"Crap on a cracker," I muttered when I spotted her blue streak shining in the darkness like a firefly. She flitted from here to there and back again.

The dragons paid her no attention. They swarmed upward and then forward, intent on my destruction. I turned and ran from the hoard.The flapping wings and fiery breath drowned all other noises. I couldn't hear my sobbing.

Into the field of corn seemed to be the best bet for my safety.

But, as it turns out, corn burns.

Power Outage

I was supposed to be working or studying, or something else equally mundane and demanding, but I had been distracted by the power outage. My computer was still glowing on battery back-up, but the room had settled into an uncomfortable, dark silence. I realized then that I had no idea how long it had been that way. I had been so immersed in my studies, I hadn't bothered to acknowledge the world around me. I grabbed my giant, silver flashlight and headed toward the front of the building.

The regular noises were gone. The fans overhead had stopped their roars; bones did not screech against the power of the saw blade; knives did not thunk against the chopping block with each slice of meaty flesh. The silence had grown so loud, the only noise I could hear was the trickle of blood pooling from the cutting board onto the slippery floor.

My co-workers had disappeared. They weren't prowling around, using their cellphones as flashlights as they had done before. Nobody cheered for the break in labor. It seemed that I'd been abandoned, but that extra sense I sometimes get told me the others were simply hiding. From what, I had no idea.
I was determined to find them. Why wouldn't they have warned me of the impending doom? Did nobody think I was important enough to save?

I flicked my light into corners and crevices, searching for familiar faces, but none were found. I moved through the building alone. It had changed since I had sat down at the desk. The sales floor was gone, replaced by more work tables, more machines, more storage shelves. The customers had disappeared as well, I suppose because there was nothing set up on display for them to buy.

I was in the bakery when I heard the first murmurs from the women. I followed the sounds past the big mixers, around the walk-in ovens, beyond the freezer. All things here were covered with a thin coat of flour. My fingers reached out to the baker's block and etched the algebra problem I'd been working on before. Find f(g(-3)) if f(x)=4x-9 and g(x)=3x^2. It looked simple enough, but it might as well have been written in Chinese, because the numbers and letters were just swirling together in one big doughy mess. I grunted and smeared the problem away with a swipe of my hand. It was silly to be standing there working out math problems when I should have been looking for the others.

I found them in a bigger storage room I had never known was there. All the women from all the departments had gathered here. I saw Deadra from Bakery holding hands with Angie the POS clerk. Linda from Fuel was halfway hidden by Dominique from Deli. Janet from the Hot Bar sat in a chair in the center of the room, glaring at me. Each of them cringed away from my beam of light like scared children, except for Janet.

Sweet Janet with the long blond braid and the big smile was hissing at me. She reached forward and knocked the torch from my grasp. My light bounced and rolled into a corner, where it flickered and died. I felt the hot sting of a flesh wound on the back of my hand. I pressed it into my shirt and blinked into the darkness.

We were now shrouded, not just by the darkness, but by a heavy, frightening presence that we could not see. I felt it move past me, an invisible, slippery creature that preys on fear. And it had us. We were frightened. I must have screamed or made some kind of demand for explanation because Janet swung her claw at me again, this time across the face. She told me to shut up, and I was getting pissed at her. When the lights came back on, I was going to kick her ass!

I dropped to the cold concrete floor and began to feel around for the flashlight. The creature, which I couldn't have seen even in the light, ripped me away from myself. It had my body pressed up against the wall, about to tear me to bits, but my spirit remained on the floor looking up. Now that I was no longer confine to the physical laws, I could see the hollow, ugly thing shredding me to pieces, and I knew that the same fate awaited the other women there. I was powerless to stop it. I wondered briefly what had happened to all the men?

I searched the faces of the women, and all I could see was fear and hopelessness. I felt the pain of heartache, although I had no heart. It was then I decided I didn't like being dead. I pulled my body back around me, pushed my fear away and told myself to ...

wake up...

Lunch Date

Those bubbly white tree blossoms that stink "like ass" (as Desiree once remarked) have all blown away with the Amarillo wind. Once in a while as we sit on the patio for lunch, a gust will kick up some remaining petals and swirl them around until they land in our food or our hair. We'll swat them away, unconcerned until we realize we've bitten into one. They taste like ass, too. It is a quick way to lose your appetite.

The crossword is first business at this time of day. I have my copy, and Green Eyes has his. I start from the bottom of the list. He diligently works from the top. We meet somewhere in the middle and that's where we always start to peek at the other's answers. 

I nibble on my fries, and he hides a cigarette under the table. It's a non-smoking patio, but I don't mind. Somehow, I feel like his partner in crime just knowing about it. Rebels, we.

Usually we are accompanied by a couple of meat-heads and a milkman, but not today. This day it is only he and I and the breeze. 

I wonder what has he got for 24 across? He always knows the sports clues. I'm better with literature. Glancing across the table, I realize he's not really doing the crossword at all. He's concentrating on dividing polynomials with binomials. What's really shocking is he's getting the answers right.

It doesn't escape my notice that he's chosen variables that happen to be our first initials. I don't know why I reach for his hand, but as soon as I feel the warmth of his skin against mine, he turns my hand over and scribbles in my palm, "s+n=♥". It's  such a silly gesture, something that high school kids do, but it makes me smile. His eyes twinkle and the lines around his eyes crease in that way that makes him look so distinguished and handsome. I like his smile as much as his beautiful olive green eyes.

The wind kicks up. Flower petals and smoke eddy around us, and I wake with the undeniable feeling that this was the sexiest dream I've ever had.

Come See Me

My mother's call left me worried. "Come see me," she'd pleaded. "I miss you." I scribbled down the new address and checked the map. She was fourteen hours away.

Funny, how we do that- measure trips in hours instead of distance, as if we plan to drive straight through, dismissing the sights. 

That's how my father always did it. The shortest distance between two points, and all that nonsense. He was pissed with me when I was twelve years old. I'd pointed out to him that, factoring in the curvature of the earth and the fact that road builders rarely construct straight paths between cities, the shortest distance between two points might actually be an arc. 

He told me to shutthehellup and let him do the driving. 

Maybe that's why my mother divorced him. 

Or maybe not. She told me once that she was tired of playing Caroline to his Charles. I was astonished that she could ever say such a thing, but it rang true. My father had always pictured himself building a cabin, praising God and living off the land. 

My mom, on the other hand, was more of a Hot Lips Houlihand. I never saw her any other way.

She's been calling out to  me for several nights in a row. Sometimes she's still with my father. Sometimes it's my Poppy or James. Sometimes it's a new man altogether. Never mind that she passed away four and a half years ago. That issue never seems to come up when I see her in my dreams. 

I wonder what she's up to that she should need to call out to me so often. It doesn't matter. I can never reach her. There's always a flood or a fire or maybe the roads wear away into impassable rivers of mud and sludge. I get bogged down in the muck. No matter what vehicle I take, car, boat, bicycle, Radio Flyer, I can't seem to remember until I wake up that I know how to fly...

Severed

I'd been past that street so many times, aware of the house where I'd lived as a teenager, that last house  I'd lived in with my parents before we all went our separate ways. I'd looked for the shape of it, suspecting after all this time somebody might have painted it a different color. Pink, maybe.

That doesn't make sense. Pink would clash with the red brick pillars on either side of the front porch. But maybe they had painted those too, or torn them down altogether. I'm sure they weren't holding anything together anyway. That is the place where everything seemed to finally fall apart. Maybe the house had fallen apart as well.

Nonetheless, I was still searching for it. I'm not sure why. Something in my subconscious thinks there is something left there, so every time I passed that street, I would turn my head ever so slightly to see if I could spot it.

Nothing doing.

Just a row of boring white houses with manicured lawns and children playing football in the street. Smile. Wave. Move on.

But it's there! It had been trying to hide from me, but I finally saw it! From the periphery, I witnessed it folding into itself. The dilapidated front porch flipped over into the door, pillars and all. Out flipped the newly poured cement porch with the pink ballasts. The dull, dirty facing of the house brightened into the whitest, most cheerful wooden planks. I swear it smiled. It was so much better than it had ever been when I was there.

But not really. You can change the way a house looks from the outside. You can make people believe everything is wonderful, but it's what's going on inside that makes a house what it really is.

I skirted the perimeter with my cat-like ninja skills. The front lawn was a beautiful, lush, welcoming green, but the back yard was a treacherous pit that seemed to want to suck me down, burn me up. I avoided the edge of the pit completely. My fear of falling overpowered my fear of burning alive. You fall, you wake up. I had searched for this place far too long to wake up now.

On the far side of the house, I found the rusty, old baker's rack with all of my mother's plastic containers. Each one had been clearly labelled. Each one had been placed neatly in its designated spot for all eternity. The overgrowth had all but consumed the entire presentation. Nobody had ever bothered to open these containers to see what was so all-fired important about them. My mother's worst fear; to be neglected and unremembered. Poor Mom.

I could hear Banks through the window. He was talking in that annoyingly loud voice of his, and not saying anything of consequence, as he often does. He is young, and he still thinks that just because he is louder than everybody else, everybody else must be listening. Usually, if he starts talking we try to find the nearest exit. Every man for himself.

He also has anger issues. He likes to slam things around and make unreasonable demands. He is better than I am in every aspect of life. He is a harder worker. He is smarter. He is better looking, and surely, once he has children, he will be a much better parent than I.

I know this about him because he told me. It's a good thing he did. If he hadn't told me, I might have never known. He's the next Big Thing.

He is nonchalantly chucking several, bloody severed heads into the open top of the meat grinder. I can see the faces of the heads, and I am horrified. It's like a a bomb going off in my heart when I recognize the faces of our co-workers, my friends. He is smiling and going about his work as if this is no big deal. It's cool guys. Just trying out new ideas.

He starts the rotator before it's time, but it's okay, because Banks, as we all know, is indestructible and immortal.

But not really.

He can boast all he wants, but we all know he's just a punk kid with a loud mouth and no concern for anybody but himself.

His arm is caught in the spokes. The grinder pulls him in. He struggles and emerges with a bloody stump. Blood is pouring and he is staring disbelievingly at the thin air where his arm once was.

I am on the inside now. I am the only person here with my body completely intact. I can help him, and now I only have to decide whether or not I will.

Note: Names have been changed simply because people from work often read my blog. But realistically, they'll most likely know exactly who I'm talking about anyway.