~ Tom Stoppard
I'm fifteen minutes outside of the city, thinking about what a complete load of horseshit the day has been. The lights of the dashboard flicker with every bump I hit, and the pulsing glow of the USB thumb drive is illuminating the interior of the Jeep in a flashing blue. The urge to drink kicks in.
"Fuck," I say aloud to no one. I'm a lot like my mother.
***
"I'm not trying to ruin your day,"I say in a voice that has no patience left in it. "I'm trying to brighten mine. Don't you understand..." My voice starts to sound like "Blah, blah, blah, blah," and I'm suddenly looking out from within, trapped in this body that is acting of it's own accord. Though it is fully functioning, and having one hell of an argument, the real me is watching from within, wondering how I ended up living someone else's life. I see her mouth start moving, but I don't hear anything.
***
The alarm is going off. I realize somewhere in the back of my mind that I've started associating that sound with the fact that I have to start doing things that I don't want to do. That can mean only one thing....
***
It's about an hour after the alarm went off. It would appear that I have slept through it. I'm two hours until work, five minutes from a shower and six years late for deciding what to do with my life. I cannot be the calm little candy coating of someone else's world when I can't even...
"Hey, honey," I beam. I find that if I pretend to enjoy the way the day is going, I can trick myself into living it.
***
It' hot in here. It's so goddamned hot in here. I mean, it doesn't help that I'm standing over a grill and a 350 degree flat top, but add the open windows, humidity, 80 degree weather and the fact that there are fans that are specifically designed to suck all of the air out of a room, and that makes for one hell of an experience. Oh, yeah...and this fucking coat.
As per par, we're busy as shit. It's that kind of busy that makes taking the business end of a plunger first seem like a slightly less painful idea, and because of that, the tensions are running high. I look over at Andrew and...
***
"Fuck," I say aloud to no one. I'm a lot like my mother.
As you know I'm a great fan of linked vignettes. These taken all together definitely create a larger vignette, a picture put together like a mosaic from fragments.
ReplyDeleteI particularly like the recursions--the repeats. Takes writerly confidence I'm glad you have your quotient of. It's justified.
What bothers me after a while are the ellipses. They are effective at conveying a sort of world-weary mood or at pointing at life's ambiguities and uncertainties, and I certainly am addicted to them. But you use them to the extent that the reader begins to suspect that they are just writing tics or signs of an unwillingness to push the material a little harder.