Fire and Ice
The literary contradictory attempts of a sometime writer.Archive for Story
(Almost) Exactly How it Happened
For R, with embellishments. This is the way I remember it, and this is the way I’m going to tell it, and besides this is a more interesting way to to tell it than what actually happened, which means it mustn’t have been that remarkable a story in the first place.
I was the first one to wake up. The sun had just risen. It was the country alright, there was a quietness in the air that you wouldn’t get in the city around this time. Even the chirping of the birds sounded distant and hushed somehow. Like they’re showing polite respect to the painter in the sky making the pretty colors so early in the morning.
The others were still asleep in various places around the rented summer house. I went to the raised jacuzzi attached to the to the end of the pool. It had a great view of the valley and the mountain beyond. I sat down on one of the wooden lounge chairs. I tried to think of nothing at all, and failed miserably.
Then you came out. I didn’t know where you slept last night, where you found a place to lie down in the house. As far as I could tell, everyone crashed at around three in the morning, when the ice ran out. I myself stopped drinking after my customary two beer limit, just hanging around laughing and singing with the rest of them. I wasn’t the first nor the last one to sleep, but I vaguely remember you still being up and about as I stood up and told them all that I was going to sleep. I crashed on an empty couch.
You nodded at me as you approached the pool, and you sat on the other lounge chair. We looked at the view together. I had no idea what you were thinking. If we were the type of people who smoked we’d both have been lighting up by then.
It should have been weird, but it wasn’t. We just sat and stayed silent. I was wondering by then if maybe you were still half-asleep. But then suddenly, out of the blue, you spoke.
“Are you happy?”
It was a loaded question. I looked over at you, and you were still concentrating on the mountains, and I thought that it was very smart of you not to be looking at me as you asked that because things would have gotten really weird really fast, but you didn’t, so I feigned fascination with the mountains as well while my mind worked out how to answer such a deceivingly simple three word question.
“Are you?” was what I came up with. Really lame in my opinion. But the voices in my head told me that if I was talking to someone I liked I would have said something much worse, so that wasn’t so bad.
“I think I am,” you said.
“Which is actually quite sad, if you think about it,” I couldn’t help saying. “Are you really, truly happy if you’re not even sure that you’re happy? Is contentment the same as happiness? What does it mean to be truly happy anyway?”
You were smiling at me by then. I knew you liked it when we have this kind of conversation, and you were one of the few people I could let myself go with like this in this way.
“So are you happy or not?” I asked you again, and by this time, somehow, it became a very important question. I wanted you to say yes, you were happy, very happy in fact. We were just friends, not even close friends, just classmates for most of our years in university. I wasn’t into you in that way, and you weren’t into me. But I wanted you to say that yes, indeed, you were happy, because if you were happy, then I should also be, because, well, I didn’t have an opinion one way or another at that very moment, so I would just take the cue from you. If you were happy, then I would also be happy. Never mind that we haven’t even defined what level of happiness we were talking about, or that the question was so maddeningly vague and broad, or that we had totally different situations in life. You were around my age, we had the same level of education more or less, and we were both intelligent people, and that means if you were happy, or could be happy, then so could I.
“Yes I’m happy,” you answered, still smiling. But I knew that you really didn’t think about the question very well, but I didn’t mind. The split second of urgency that I felt when I asked the all-important question was gone now. Now it was just a silly question again, just something to pass the time with, to joke around with. Nothing important.
“Really now?” I asked, pretending to believe you but smiling as well. It’s all good, we were just having fun now, anticipating the delicious conversation ahead, knowing we could have fun with this topic because we were both smart and witty and were such a perfect match for smart and witty banter. Or rather, I knew it. I bet you don’t know until now just how much you enjoy talking to me.
“How happy then?” was my follow up question. “Convince me, make it fun,” was what I meant but didn’t say out loud.
“I’m so happy it hurts!” You suddenly said, the words blurting out of you with triple exclamation points spiking the air, and I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. The timing was perfect. I told you to prove it further, to shout it out loud, and you did. I joined you then, and we declared to the mountains, to the skies, to the valley below that we were both happy, so very happy, so very happy it hurts!
Other people were also coming out by then, and we must have been a funny sight, sitting beside that pool laughing so hard we were holding on to the chairs, shouting about how happy we were, and not being able to explain why. Even now I can’t even explain it as clearly as I want. It was over ten years ago when that happened.
You probably don’t remember any of this. Or you do, but you don’t remember as much detail about it as I do. It’s not important. It’s just something that happened, among a thousand, no a million, other things that have happened to me before and since then.
And then this could segue into how the speaker wants to kill himself or herself, and that this turned out to be either an email or a suicide letter. But I’m too lazy to turn it into a real story. Besides, this really happened, almost exactly the way I told it right now, and I don’t want R to find out that I wrote about it and have to explain myself. Because it doesn’t really mean anything, it just happened, so I’m writing about it. And that’s that.
Part 1 (just to get it out of draft)
Sylvia knew she was going to read something that she didn’t like, yet she did it anyway. It was stupid she knew, but she did it anyway. She didn’t like herself for doing it, but she did it anyway.
She opened Eric’s laptop, logged in to his account, using his birthday numbers in reverse, interspersed with the name of his first dog. He had told her this technique before, and she just assumed that he also uses it, and she was correct. Only she had to guess that it was the name of his first dog that he would use, instead of his first cat, which was what he had instructed her to do. Also, she kind of stumbled upon reversing his birthdays numbers instead of using them in the correct order, because it didn’t work the first ten times she tried it.
The familiar Windows logo came up, and she was presented with his wallpaper. It was a birchwood floored room bathed in light, with two armchairs, one white and one orange. The armchairs were the kind she knew he liked, unconventional works of art which looked uncomfortable to sit on, yet looked really good on photographs.
She clicked on the Yahoo messenger icon from his quicklaunch bar. It came up immediately. He has a fast laptop.
The username and password were already filled in. Username ericdemesa. Password **********. How convenient.
Contacts > Message Archives.
She knew as a Yahoo user that the first folder that came up is the folder of the person that he last chatted with on the messenger. The name of the folder was also the username of the person. The initial view is the start of the conversation, with timestamps shown by default.
The name of this particular folder is lonelyhart08.
The timestamp showed that they had started chatting last night at around 9PM. Right around the time they were text messaging each other about what time to have dinner tonight (around seven-ish), and where (that new pasta place on the Upper West side, so that they could meet up as his place before and go back and watch a movie after).
She scrolled down to the bottom, emoticons strewn here and there, trying to ignore some of the redder emoticons, and noted the timestamp of when they ended. 1AM.
She took a deep breath, and clicked on Save, gave it a filename in the dialog box that showed up, and opened up Gmail to send herself the transcript. She knew the emoticons wouldn’t show up in the saved text file, but she didn’t have time to make a screenshot and save a proper copy of the transcript. Eric was going to come out of the shower soon, and she didn’t really want him to know that she was snooping around in his computer. She didn’t want to get caught.
The middle of something
This will never work she thought, as she slipped a hand through his fine hair, noting the clean non-greasy feel of each strand her fingers brushed aside. Which completely underlined her point. He was too clean, too… fine. She slid her palm a little lower and let her thumb graze his lower lip, the softness of it making her think of slick satin pillowslips. She tried to avoid his gaze, focusing instead on a point just below the corner of his mouth, where there was a slight dip in his creamy flesh that deepened every time he smiled, which he often did. Too often, in fact. She had always been of the opinion that men like that were those who knew exactly what the effect their smiles had on women. And she had always prided herself on her measure of control in the selection of people whom she chose to let herself get close to.
“I usually don’t date guys like you.”
“What was that?” he asked softly, smiling a little and lightly touching her arm.
She reddened as she realized that she had somehow said that out loud.
I’ll just pretend I said something else.
“I said I usually don’t date guys like you.”
Dammit.
His smile widened and he drew away from her a bit, and she realized that what she just said suddenly concentrated all the tension in the room in their corner.
Trickery
Excerpt from “Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus, and Other Tales of Horror and Science Fiction”
The other night I kissed him on the cheek and he said I was falling in love with him.
Exact words: “I think you’re falling in love with me.”
Shocker. Of course I wasn’t falling in love with him. I very quickly said I wasn’t.
Verbatim: “No I’m not.”
He looked at me closely and asked if I was sure. I said I was, absolutely.
Around half an hour later I kissed him on the cheek again, and once more he said I was falling love with him. And again I denied it, a bit more vehemently this time. For me at least.
He said: “You’re really falling in love with me.”
I said: “Nope.”
I was having suspicions about what was bringing this on and to test my theory, I kissed him on the cheek again, near his jawline, very lightly. He looked at me funny, and before he could ask, I told him what he was going to say. I said he was going to say that I was falling in love with him again, and I pointed out that he kept thinking and saying that every time I kissed him on the cheek.
Specifically: “You keep saying that every time I kiss you.”
He thought about it, really concentrated. When he thinks a bit more deeply than usual he blanks out. He looks at a point a bit lower than his normal line of sight, his mouth opens ever so slightly, and his lower lip kind of juts out. After a little while he acknowledges that I was right, and that I was brilliant. I feigned humility and said that I wasn’t, just observant is all.
Him: “You’re right. You’re so smart.”
Me: “Not really, I just notice things more.”
But of course I was. Really bright I mean. Brilliant even. And cunning like a cat.
Ends excerpt.
A Baby Named Fred
Fred is a very contrary baby.
Well, that’s not quite right. Fred is not a baby anymore. A two and a half year old is very nearly three years old, halfway there in fact. And three years old is so very close to five years old, and five year olds are definitely not babies anymore. Most assuredly not.
So, to ammend, Fred is a very contrary two-year-old. Very contrary and very smart. Read the rest of this entry »
Wall Climbing for Fun and Profit
“I’m warning you, don’t ever do, those crazy mixed up things that you do.”
This is a line from one of her favorite Barenaked Ladies song, Call and Answer. She wishes she had brought her MP3 player today. Nothing like some good light rock music during an easy climb. It runs through her mind now as she begins the final adjustments to the hardest wall she’s ever had to climb in her life. Read the rest of this entry »
STD TYP 8175506 NEG, or My Very Own Shoebox
What Happened First
The funny thing about it was that even if the intruder had gotten in, he would probably have just scoffed at how little there was to steal. He would probably have committed a little gratuitous vandalism to make up for his poor choice of apartment to break into. Read the rest of this entry »
I am woman, hear me bitch
Two weeks ago I decided to replace the dimming lightbulb in my room with a round flourescent one which my roommate Hannah swore was brighter and better. I bought one from Ace hardware and tried to install it the minute I got home, feeling like such a capable little do-it-yourselfer. I got up on a plastic stool to take out the old bulb, whispering lefty-loosy righty-tighty as I went, and wouldn’t you know it, something snapped in my hand as the bulb came out. Apparently, I had snapped off the thin metal thingy in the light fixture that holds in the lightbulb. Or something. Crap. Hannah said I turned it too hard, but I’m just a short little girl, how could I have turned it that strongly? And besides, weren’t these houseware electronic type things suppsed to be extra durable and heavy duty cause they’re built for men with big strong arms? Well, a bit bigger and stronger than mine anyways. Whatever, it is just so very badly designed. I had to make do with a study table lamp as a bedroom light. Read the rest of this entry »
Hungry. Famished. Starving.
Mary Divine Garcia Espinoza woke up one fine Monday morning and decided to become fabulously, gloriously, terrifically fat.
She wasn’t model thin in the first place, but she wasn’t plump either. She was slim in the right places, and round in the proper ones. She wasn’t tall enough to be particularly noticeable as a slender woman, but wasn’t short enough to be called petite either. She felt she had a stable enough metabolism so that everything she eats doesn’t go immediately to her thighs, as some girls claim theirs does. The first place she gains weight has always been her in her middle, but never really enough to be asked if she’s having a baby or anything hideous like that. When she’s wearing a tight blouse, she just sucks it in, and it has always worked for her. Besides, she has naturally perky breasts, and people, especially, men people, never really got past that once their eyes travel down her body when they’re giving her a once over, and she knew it. She’s satisfied with the way her body looks, and has had no issues with it whatsoever. Read the rest of this entry »
