April and Aaron Write 12 Stories

I visited a school today in Mexico. We will never be finishing...

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 22:49:52 -0400

I visited a school today in Mexico. We will never be finishing this project.

Old School SimCity (April).

Thu, 22 May 2008 23:59:00 -0400

Old School SimCity (April).

GREAT MOMENTS IN THE COMPUTING LIFE OF MY FAMILY (Part 2 by April) - Day 6/12

Thu, 22 May 2008 23:58:00 -0400

Aug 1987: Mom comes home from the hospital, so have a big party at the house using our settlement money. I make invitations on Pagemaker with confetti clipart and send them out to the neighborhood. Everybody comes.

Oct 1987: I start volunteering at the library’s computer lab, because Mom says I’m going to need community service for my college resume. Stacy Bixler leans on my desk asks me if I can do that trick that Andrew McCarthy does in “Pretty in Pink.” I don’t know what she’s talking about, but I say I can anyway. She laughs when I try and says maybe I need to go see more movies. I answer, “maybe,” and she stands there a little afterward, like she’s waiting for something.

Jan 1988: After another doctor’s visit, Dad mentions that maybe we should get an IBM, too. The next day, he goes around and buys one, and tinker with MS-DOS together. Later, Phil Ascher comes over and gives me the demo for Nightbomber and Kingdom of Kroz and we play all afternoon.

Mar 1988: Dad’s prognosis gets worse. Sometimes he goes into the bedroom with the home video recorder, taping things that he says we can watch later.

May 1988: I finally get SimCity for the IBM. I spend all my time after school building up my town with extra police, extra firemen, and extra roads for escape routes, just in case.

NIGHT SHIFT AT THE LIGHT BULB SHOP (Part 2 by Aaron) - Day 6/12

Thu, 22 May 2008 23:57:00 -0400

So then a bunch of things happened that would take a novel to explain. I eventually left the light bulb store, but not before encountering my maker, a girl by the name of April M____. The experiments in the backroom were all in an effort to contact her. She had, for some unknown reason, taken a liking to me (perhaps my laidback way of speech or the way I anticipate events far in advance) and paid me a visit one evening after all the frizzy haired galoots had left for the evening. I recognized her immediately in the one shadowy, unilluminated corner of the store, like you would a storm, when I realized that the only real electric presence in the room was her. April sat down in a lawn chair embroidered in neon light tubing and looked at me, reticent and unwanting. I stood dumbfounded behind the cashier counter. I knew her name, I knew the contents of her closets, I knew her most cherished memories, I knew her future joys and nadirs - and still a void remained. In the core of her, there remained a hard impenetrable nugget of nothing that constituted her present. She knew what was going to happen to me, yet she wouldn’t tell me a thing. It was the most disturbing thing I encountered during my employment at the light bulb shop.

The first result for “cop out” in a Google image...

Thu, 22 May 2008 23:57:00 -0400

The first result for “cop out” in a Google image search.

Apparently this is from a store in Austin, Texas. (April)

Wed, 21 May 2008 23:59:00 -0400

Apparently this is from a store in Austin, Texas. (April)

NIGHT SHIFT AT THE LIGHT BULB SHOP (Part 1 by April) - Day 5/12

Wed, 21 May 2008 23:58:00 -0400

I was in graduate school, without a thesis, when I took a job at the light bulb shop downtown. My research on my original topic, on the habits and culture of urban Vampire-Americans, had not resulted in anything interesting, besides a newfound fear of hepatitis and more than a few late night dinners at the local greasy spoon. I was in desperate need of inspiration. One night, I while was out brooding, and looked up to see a gigantic bust of man sitting on top of a building, with a too-toothy grin and a light bulb attached to his head via cartoon bubble. A small piece of paper in the window said, “Help Wanted for Night Shift” and I took it as sign, albeit a completely literal one. I had gotten used to being awake at those hours and had a hard time readjusting to a regular schedule. I didn’t have anything better to do.

I know what you’re thinking: “Why would a small mom n’ pop light bulb shop need a night shift?” At the time I didn’t know either, but I was curious. I didn’t expect anything too exciting, though maybe I should have. And I know, I know, cultural relativism and all that, how we’re all supposed to take each group of people and judge them on their own terms without our own biases, etc etc. During my time at the light bulb shop I found it incredibly difficult to keep up my professional anthropological attitude, despite five years of being taught to do so. In other words, I saw some pretty weird shit.

Perhaps I should have guessed when I entered that it was not just a light bulb shop. Sure, there were light bulbs of all sorts, arranged according to color, white lights, black lights, red lights, blue lights, but that was all that they sold. No lamps, lava or otherwise; nothing cheerfully neon, just light bulbs. The boy at the counter seemed genuinely surprised that I was there, and even more surprised that I had come to ask for employment. He didn’t even know there was a position available. “I’ve only been here a couple days,” he said. “I’ll ask the manager.”

The boy walked over to the back room and knocked on a large metallic door. After a few moments, the door opened, and the manager slid out of it, shutting it firmly behind him. He was kind of a strange sort of fellow, no more than five and a half feet in height, with a triangle-shaped goatee that might have been used to offset the complete roundness of his bald head.

“Hm. You look like you don’t ask a lot of questions,” he said. I was a little insulted. What was that supposed to mean? But I nodded anyway. “And I don’t like to ask a lot of questions. I only have one. When can you start?”

My shift was from midnight to four a.m. I only had two duties 1) to man the register when someone had a craving for late night light bulbs and the less obvious 2) to direct all other customers to the back room. Of course I wanted to know what was in there and thought up little schemes. My best idea was to simply open the door, yelling “Fire!” but part of me wanted to figure it out first. I wanted to have an idea of what I was getting into. I wondered if there was some freaky Frankenstein-like happenings there, because every once in awhile, the power would surge, and all the light bulbs would dim for a few seconds before returning to their original brightness.

The first night, I tried to piece everything together by examining the similarities shared by the clientele, but there wasn’t any recognizable pattern. There were only a few of them each shift, but they were all different types of people, except for some thing: everyone’s hair was frizzy, sticking up at odd angles. At the time it seemed like a stupid thing to notice. There was also one other, more troubling thing. No one seemed to leave that room and no one ever seemed to come back.

The fifteenth result for “Helen Slater” in Google...

Wed, 21 May 2008 16:36:00 -0400

The fifteenth result for “Helen Slater” in Google image search. (Aaron)

GREAT MOMENTS IN THE COMPUTING LIFE OF MY FAMILY (Part 1 by Aaron) - Day 5/12

Wed, 21 May 2008 16:35:00 -0400

Jan 1984: During a lull in the Super Bowl, we watch enraptured as Anya Major pivets on her brazen, tanned thighs and shotputs a sledgehammer into a TV screen ten times the size of ours, officially introducing the Macintosh line. It is the first time I place a pillow over my lap in the TV room. Dad immediately calls his engineering friends in New Jersey to send him trade magazines.

Jun 1984: Mom quits her practice to take care of me full time. We wait for Dad to leave on a business trip to take a road trip up the coast. I navigate shot-gun with nothing but a stack of AAA maps, a ruler, and my mother’s talent to add and subtract integrals while going seventy.

Dec 1984: Dad is diagnosed with nasal cancer. Mom cries so hard on the way home that when he suggests we all go watch 2010, I don’t even mention that I have been waiting for months to see Supergirl. In the theater, Dad suddenly gasps and brings his hands to his face. Mom tries to pry his hands off his nose to see what’s wrong. He lets them down and we look to the screen. Roy Schneider is planning the mission to Jupiter on a flatscreen Apple IIc computer while lying on the beach.

Feb 1985: Mom forgets her purse in the car and I calculate how much it would be to buy our groceries on my solar powered calculator watch. We have enough change in our pockets to make the purchase.

July 1985: Returning from the oncologist, Dad finds an Apple IIc giftwrapped in the dining room. Mom tells him repeatedly not to put his face so close to the screen. He’s getting enough radiation already. While he’s wrangling with floppy disks, we find and throw away the last of his cigarettes. Through the beeps and the boops of the computer, we can tell he will forgive us.

Sep 1985: Helen Slater now haunts my daydreams on VHS. I spend an entire weekend at Phil Ascher’s painstakingly pausing and recording all of Supergirl’s flying sequences. I become fluent with the slo-mo tracking pad during the scene when Supergirl emerges from innerspace through a lake and does a stoic, mid-air ballet.

Oct 1985: I render Helen Slater in 3-bit pixels on the computer.

Feb 1986: Dad catches me watching my Slater tape. He comments that Helen Slater’s profile looks a lot like Mom’s when they were in college. I let Phil Ascher borrow the mix tape permanently. Dad’s charcoal colored layer inside his nose is receding and he lets me record its progress with measuring tape. We’re charting his progress on floppy.

July 1987: I stay home to play King’s Quest and see Dad install Apple Works instead of grocery shopping with my mom. A man fumbles while flipping a cassette in his tape deck (“Success in Stocks: How to Break the Rules and Survive” Tape 2 of 6) and hits Mom’s car on the driver’s side.

I got this by Googling “cemetery + morning.” (April)...

Tue, 20 May 2008 23:59:00 -0400

I got this by Googling “cemetery + morning.” (April)

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

Tue, 20 May 2008 23:58:00 -0400

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.

The seventh result for “empty lot” on Google image...

Tue, 20 May 2008 11:32:00 -0400

The seventh result for “empty lot” on Google image search. (Aaron)

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

Tue, 20 May 2008 11:28:00 -0400

“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.

I only picked this picture because I liked the name. Max Pop...

Mon, 19 May 2008 23:58:00 -0400

I only picked this picture because I liked the name. Max Pop almost sounds like a person, don’t you think? (April)

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

Mon, 19 May 2008 23:57:00 -0400

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.

Eleventh result for “dead wreath” in Flickr. (Aaron)

Mon, 19 May 2008 23:21:00 -0400

Eleventh result for “dead wreath” in Flickr. (Aaron)

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

Mon, 19 May 2008 23:20:00 -0400

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.

Video

Sat, 17 May 2008 14:40:48 -0400

I was going to put up a picture of a man in a cockroach suit,...

Fri, 16 May 2008 23:57:00 -0400

I was going to put up a picture of a man in a cockroach suit, but then I found out it was a Wii ad. (April)

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

Fri, 16 May 2008 23:55:00 -0400

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.