AM/PM (7 page)

“Not as long as you keep up that tit lipo,” Missy said, mostly for the benefit of Chet, who hadn’t stopped staring since Chastity unbuttoned her blouse and hauled it out.

Missy plunged her fork into the last square of her french toast, swirling it around and thinking of all the opportunities for pain she had missed in her life. “Frances is so fat,” she said, satisfied.

They found Tess in the center of her living room with her legs folded neatly under her. The pose suggested that she had received sudden and shocking news, and had to sit down immediately to allow her body to catch up with the emotional significance.

The rope hung loose from the rafters, still on her neck, its frayed ends spun out behind her like a child’s toy. The shoe on the table, five feet from the girl, suggested that she swung about eight horizontal feet before the rope broke. You could imagine the look on her face.

One day, everyone stopped over-thinking. We started thinking just as much as we should, and not any more than necessary. There were no more misunderstandings whatsoever. Minor disagreements were forgotten, not turned into proof of larger things. Trivial errors of speech or judgment were just as important as items on the breakfast menu: you chose waffles and I chose eggs and it was a god damn miracle.

Carla stepped out of the dressing room and took a modest turn. “How do I look?” she asked.

Hazel looked at her mother with a critical eye. The knot halter cut of the gown revealed her slender shoulders. The vibrant pink, which had looked a little young on the rack, added color to the woman’s face. Carla looked in the mirror, put one bare foot forward, wiggled her hips a little.

“Mom,” Hazel said, “you look like a brand new bitch.”

“Well that’s fine,” her mother said. “I somewhat feel like a brand new bitch.”

Charles was painting the ceiling red after the landlord specifically told him not to paint anything at all.

From the door, Doreen looked up at him. “It must take a special kind of stubborn,” she said, “to live your life.”

“It will look incredible,” he said, stretching his arms overhead. He winced in the stretch.

“You should get off that ladder.”

“It all has to be done at once, or it won’t appear even.”

“You’ll pull a muscle in your back and we’ll starve.”

“You want to do it?” he asked, waving the roller at her. Red paint dripped to the drop cloth below. At least he had the foresight to put down the drop cloth, she thought.

“I don’t want you to do it,” she said. “The landlord doesn’t want you to do it. Nobody wants you to do what you’re doing right now.”

“It will look incredible. The baby will love it.”

“What baby?”

He looked at her, exasperated. “For God’s sake, woman. I’m simply thinking ahead.”

Olivia couldn’t bear to watch them take the rest of the tree. The men propped ladders up against the trunks and climbed up to stand at eye-level with her office. She shut the blinds and shuddered as branches fell against the walls and windows. When she opened the blinds again, she saw that the tree central to her viewing area had been compromised, swarms of gnats attending to sap glistening on the cut trunk. The tree bent back unnaturally from the window, as if shamed. She realized the hatred she felt for the people and things over which she had no control.

They sniped at each other quietly outside the changing room at the department store. “Everything makes sense if you think about it long enough,” Missy said. “That’s your problem.”

“Now, that makes sense,” said Chet. “I bet you thought about that for a long time.”

“Does this make me look fat?”

Chet looked appraisingly at his wife. “You gained half a pound this week.”

“For Christ’s sake.”

“Maybe a quarter pound,” he lied.

“You make all that stuff up anyway. I can’t understand why those scientists call you amazing.”

She flounced back into the changing room. Chet took a seat by the doorway.

“Terrence,” Charles said. “Friend.”

“Charles?”

Charles mumbled something, but Terrence could barely hear Charles’s voice from the other side of the box.

Terrence leaned forward. “What’s that?”

“Infants are smarter than we think,” Charles said, faintly.

“Infants?”

“Infants,” Charles said, “are smarter than we think.”

“You’re all right, Charles?”

“They’re smarter,” Charles said.

Wallace’s concept of honor ensured he would never go to sleep satisfied. His concept of God was that a being that creates bread from bread is to be feared. Love is intensity with less spectrum, sadness is spectrum with less intensity. Wallace believed in the horizontal nature of pain and the verticality of love.

The children found the cube, and shrieked over it as children do. The adults couldn’t be pulled away from the picnic at first, and assumed that the children had found a shed snakeskin or a gopher hole during their exploration of the causeway. Only when the kid touched the monolith and burned his hand did the parents come running, attracted by the screams.

It was an iron cube, ten feet high and wavering like a mirage. The Thurber kid wept bitterly, his hand already swelling with the blister.

Nobody knew what to make of the thing. It was too big to have been carted in on a pickup truck. It might have fit on the open bed of an eighteen-wheeler, but there were no tire marks in the area, no damaged vegetation and not even a road nearby wide enough for a load that size. It was as if the block had been cast in its spot and destined to remain. And then there was the issue of the inscription.

They didn’t notice it at first, between the screaming kid and Betty Thurber’s wailing panic, hustling him back to the car for ice, and the pandemonium of parents finding their own children and clasping them to their chests and lifting them up at once. The object in question itself received little scrutiny. Only when the women took the children back for calamine lotion and jelly beans did the men notice the printed text, sized no larger than a half inch, on the shady side of the block:

 

EVERYTHING MUST EVENTUALLY SINK.

The tour bus slowed to a halt and the occupants took up their cameras, craning their necks.

The young, pretty tour guide switched on her microphone. “On your left,” she said, gesturing to a modest brownstone,

“you will find where the philosopher lives.”

An audible gasp rose among the crowd. Shutters clicked and mothers hauled their children up to see.

“He lives there,” an older woman said in a daze. “He solves our problems there.”

The pretty tour guide recited her memorized notes with reverence. “The philosopher is the wellspring from which our lives flow. Without him, there would be no heaven and hell, no love or feeling or meaning. The philosopher toils in silence, alone, a thankless life. Perhaps we will catch a glimpse of him today.”

The crowd leaned forward, eagerly scanning the windows for movement. Perhaps the philosopher would peer out the window as he drank his morning coffee, or sit on the stoop and have a cigarette.

They watched. Nothing happened. The driver released the air brakes with a hiss and continued down the street.

Try not to fill yourself with anxiety. Take your pills on time. Consider the proper way of doing things. Parcel your week into a series of days, your day into a series of hours, your hour into a series of thoughts. Know when to push yourself and others. Congratulate yourself for small successes to mask the other growing pile. There has been a ladder in your office for weeks now, and you’re trying to be polite about it.

June believed in spells that could be broken, and in making the final push. She wrote letters to congressmen and companies and strangers. Her life’s goal was that people understand her, and each other, and themselves. It was the only kind thing she did.

Olivia coughed when she heard him pick up the line. “Reginald,” she said.

“You’re drunk.”

“You took all my money, Reginald.”

“We talked about this. Jesus Christ, we had an arrangement. I was going to work it out.”

“
Your
Jesus Christ,” she said, examining with one eye the contents of her wine glass. “You took my friends’ money, too. You relied on my connections to ruin my God-dammed standing among my own friends.”

“Wash your face and take a shower.”

“Why would I take a shower when I could take a
bath
?” He sat right down on the floor. “I’m not playing a game with you.”

She tossed her glass overhand and it smashed merrily against the wall. “You always play the game,” she said. “We’re not playing any more games.”

“Got it,” he said.

“I don’t think you do,” she said, hanging up.

This funny-smelling couch is a symbol of my love for you.

This mechanical litterbox is a symbol of my love for you.

This interesting pen is a symbol of my love for you.

This wooden floor is a symbol of my love for you.

This year of loneliness is a symbol of my love for you.

This concert tee is a symbol of my love for you.

This glass of water is a symbol of my love for you.

Emily picked up the violin and played. Her back pained her, had pained her all day, and now Martha’s violin only made it worse. She felt the sweet strains of paranoia drifting back. They told her to look over her shoulder, and when she did, they told her to check the lock on the door, and when she did that, they told her that her fears had meaning and depth, and that she was right to feel them. Each shadow meant something different and strange, an unfamiliar animal or a line of weapons. These visions were terrifying, but after they went away, she felt a strange kind of peace that those things existed in the world, that her world was powerful enough to conjure them.
My world
, she thought.

Many thanks are owed to Sam Axelrod, Justin Boyle, Zach Dodson, Jonathan Messinger, Stacey Swann, Michael Wolfe, and my parents. Grateful acknowledgment is additionally made to the editors of the publications in which these stories first appeared:
American Short Fiction
,
Jettison Quarterly
,
The M Review, Take The Handle
, and
Wigleaf
.

Amelia Gray is a writer living in Austin, TX. Her writing has appeared in
The Onion
,
American Short Fiction
,
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
,
DIAGRAM
, and
Caketrain
, among others. Her work has been chosen as the finalist for
McSweeney’s
Amanda Davis Highwire Contest and the
DIAGRAM
Innovative Fiction Contest. She received an MFA from Texas State University in San Marcos.