April and Aaron Write 12 Stories

JUNK MAIL (Part 2 by April) - Day 4/12

It was a difference that the two of us never expressed often, either because it was it was ignored or because it was simply taken as a given. Mostly we dwelt one our sameness, our worries about our present lives, our carefully worded hopes for the future.  It was almost enough to make us believe that were no differences at all. But there were small reminders. It was in the way she was careless with her valuables. She had a habit of leaving pearl earrings on table tops and forgetting about them, finding them later scattered on the floor. 

We finished up cleaning and settled into our quiet routine. She put on a old record she had bought at the swap meet and we told each other stories that we both already knew. She was particularly fond of recalling how we had met, it was a long string of small, compounded coincidences, all unrelated, but some how fitting together to make sense. I did not remember the event so well, and took her retelling as fact, never mentioning how she changed the details slightly every single time.  

We retired to bed and fell asleep tracing the lines on each other’s palms. 

I woke up early and shrugged off the covers slowly to avoid waking her. The sun was bright and unexpectedly high in the sky and the tombstones cast long shadows over dry grass. I whistled as I walked out of the cemetery, looking at the plots again, some were adorned with fresh flowers, some were shabby and dusty, long forgotten. That morning I was content, swelled with happiness, fully confident that this all was more than just a simple give and take, a mutual act of charity before dying.  

HIVES (Part 2 by Aaron) - Day 4/12

“I’ve got a better idea,” said Alice.  She’d been to the abandoned orphanage before.   She obediently sat in the crib room alone for five minutes (the standard dare) and said the name of the Virgin Mary to the mirrors of the nursing hall.  Repeated thrills weren’t thrills at all.

“There’s somewhere else we could go,” she said to the head boy.

“Shut up, Alice.  You go through the bars first.  You’re the skinniest.

“No.  I said, let’s go somewhere else.”  

“Fine.  Go home.”

Alice gave up.  She went home and rubbed chamomile on her arms and legs.  The next day when she didn’t hear from the others, she walked around by herself.  She stayed to the path and not a blade of grass touched her bare, glowing skin.  In an empty lot, she choreographed a dance for one.

It was only that evening when police questioned Alice that they knew to search the old building.  A part of the scaffolding had collapsed in the nursing hall.  The children were found on the bottom floor among the debris.  The paper thin shrubs that had managed to thrive in the damp had not broken their fall.

HIVES (Part 1 by April) - Day 3/12

They all had started off the night playing chicken in the parking lot with shopping carts until they were shooed away by supermarket employees. Next, they lit M80s and dropped them into street cones they had found on the side of the road. The noise from the explosions set off car alarms and they fled the scene. They were afraid of neighbors coming out of their houses, sleep-eyed and in bathrobes, threatening to call their parents. No one ever did. After that, they ran up the grassy hills between the housing developments, then rolling down the sides, not caring about scrapes or bruises on their knees and elbows, the dirt in their hair. When they went home, they would change their clothes, climb back into bed, and pretend nothing had ever happened.

` Alice didn’t tumble down the hills and play in the grass. She had allergies, and if she did, enormous red welts would swell up on her arms and her legs and around her eyes. Alice wouldn’t mind so much, if it didn’t itch. She liked running her fingertips over the bumps, feeling out her skin’s sudden topography.

She sat on the curb instead, tying and untying her shoelaces. She thought about how it was springtime now, and pretty soon, during the day, swallows would come to the field and do loop-de-loops in the air. Alice figured that they learned their stunt tricks from the air force base nearby. No one came to watch them with her anymore, though. They all thought it was a stupid thing to do. She had known everybody since their mouths were still full of baby teeth (which seemed longer than it was), but even then Alice knew that this would not last.

“I’ve got an idea,” one of the boys said, after they had stopped tumbling. From where she was, Alice couldn’t hear what the actual idea was, but heard the whispers of the others, in agreement. They all got up and one of the girls told Alice what their next destination was. They would have to find another way to get in. All of them were too big to shimmy though the gate’s bars.

JUNK MAIL (Part 1 by Aaron) - Day 3/12

Carole found an old apartment across from the new town cemetery, the one with the known gas leak. I wasn’t going to be the one to stop her. Her life was too perfect to be touched then, in the between. Stalwart graves in august light served as strong medicine to her lackadaisical thinking. A morning cup and the freedom to open a window shade and never look away. She never actively developed the sense of humor that I would have found surrounded by still, subterranean bodies - the humor found her instead: especially on the weekends, funeral attendees found refuge in approaching her front door which hovered singularly over the cemetery grounds and on which still hung a previous tenant’s holiday wreath. They needed to borrow the restroom, the phone, a kleenex. They always use that word, she reported. To borrow something of mine. She excused herself to a notepad and wrote a few words leaned over a stack of junk mail, glossy and cheap. She was a poet when she wanted to be, when she encountered life. I later read her scribblings while she was cooking a light summer meal. Four words: borrow, burrow, burnt, benign. I took a walk along the cemetary. A mixed crowd of stones: family plots, an occasional name written in triumphant font. Returning, a cloud of cardamom and anise led my senses back up to her kitchen window. I offered to do, and did do, the dishes.

This is when we thought that we had to live apart to remain ordinary and successful. I lived not far, between us sat a block of warehouses full of remodeled cars that sparked up at night - but far enough. To live together was setting the bar too close to something essential to our futures. We would have to work for our evenings on the porch. We would have to work for our chances to decide. We consciously believed in the common mantra of generations who live in times of economic downturn: the restrictions we placed on ourselves limited the chances for disappointment.

But when I said it, I felt wet, dank city alleys at my back. When she said it, we both thought of her family and of Marilana who came twice a week to clean her apartment. Old money. When I even thought it, through the phrase I felt brick stone and smoking rooms.

SPANIARDS (Part 2 by April) - Day 2/12

She ignores them and wordlessly shifts to the side to hide the jar from their view. For some reason, she feels strangely protective of it. The Spaniards do not press the issue, too impressed with their shared cleverness to bother her any longer. The two make a few more jokes to each other before their conversation resumes. There is more talk about their parallel histories and what a funny thing it was that they met in this place, of all places, rather than many other times before. One calls the other hermano in turn. She is both annoyed and relieved at their predictability.

Meanwhile, still clutching the glass to her stomach, she brainstorms about what she knows about cockroaches. The jar should have been an expected surprise. Entomology was the latest preoccupation in her son’s life. The week before it was astronomy, before that, archaeology, and before that, geology. Often she asks him how school is, only to be answered with some fact about the Greek god of blacksmiths or a far-flung comet beyond Pluto. With him, everything is indirect, if indeed it means anything at all.

Cockroaches could survive a nuclear war. They can survive three days without their heads. Praying mantises ate their mates. Despite her relationship with the boy’s father, she is pretty sure that did not have anything to do with it. Did they devour their young, too? She can’t remember. After a few more moments of turning ideas in her head and gazing at landed planes through the window, she chooses to take the gesture simply. It is his strange way of saying ‘have a good trip, I love you and I miss you.’ She pays no attention to the fact that there is nothing good about the trip, and how she is never quite so sure about his affections. It is easier to think so.

The shuttle lurched into the stop, and all the passengers slowly gather their things. Maneuvering her suitcase, her bag, and the jar is a bit more difficult than she anticipated, but she does not put the jar back to its original pocket. It requires a bit of juggling, as she switches the jar from one hand to the other, while hoisting her bag on the other shoulder. Perhaps she shouldn’t have packed so much. Who knows how long she’d even be here. She hoped that it wouldn’t not take too much time, even though she could never admit so out loud.

Neither Spaniard offers assistance, instead concentrating on, surprise surprise, another happy coincidence. They have rented their cars from the same place. She has rented her car from a different place, across from theirs, but through the sliding door glass that the line is about fifteen people, each wearing the same mix of boredom and impatience on their faces.

She is thankful for the delay in her plans. Rather than stand in the same line and wear the same face, she stacks her luggage on a bench outside. She buys an ice cream bar from a nearby vending machine, her lunch for the day, and sits down, watching the bugs crawl inside the jar. The cockroaches circle the jar, feeling around with their whisker-long antennae. She wonders if they know that they are trapped or if the surface of the glass continually becomes new for them. Goldfish have 25-second memories, what about insects? Or do they have a memory of all their days seen through their funhouse mirror eyes?

As she finishes the ice cream bar, she notices that the cockroaches’ movements are getting more labored. Her hand dips into her bag to find the pen she previously denied to the Spaniards. There is nothing else unexpected in the pocket. Maybe it’s sharp enough, she thinks. She tries to push the tip of the pen through the soft white plastic lid. Its material is too thick at first, so she uses both hands, holding the jar between her thighs. People coming from different shuttles and even small children with her families walk by and whisper about her oddness. She doesn’t mind and keeps pressing, until finally she forces the pen through, making a small hole outlined in blue ink. She repeats the process four more times until she is satisfied.

Afterwards, the cockroaches, to her, look livelier, their reddish brown bodies scampering more energetically across the bottom, attempting to walk up the sides. She even thinks that the praying mantis shows a small quiver of life, slight and barely noticeable. She might have even imagined it.

The Spaniards walk outside the sliding door, side by side, perfectly in synch. But it is time for them to part. They clasp each other’s shoulders with their hands, saying that they might meet again some day. Maybe even on the plane back. Of course! The other one says. As they walk away in separate directions, different cars waiting for them, it does not matter whether they meet again or not. What they know of each other is perfect, always to be looked upon with fondness, a funny story to tell. Such is the easy affection between strangers.