FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #2

All the trouble began when my grandfather died and my grandmother - my father's mother - came to live with us. Her main asset had always been her intelligence, until old age pushed her sanity to the far, inaccessible reaches of her mind. She wandered our house late at night and ate all my favorite potato chips, even the ones I hid from her. I was anxious to get her into a nursing home but my wife felt differently. It seemed a premonition of the darker days to follow.
My wife, Janine, liked the idea of mother staying with us for a number of reasons, the main one being that it kept me too occupied to notice her affair. I say notice sarcastically, as it had been evident since last Thanksgiving, when she drunkenly sent a message meant for him to me. It was a politely tolerated secret. I was too enamored with hope for us to walk away from what could one second turn around. I held inside me the rushing sensation of love, both practical and visceral, her clenching my palms, her sweaty body held tightly against my own, and then later, her breathing slowed to a near sleep, painting the outlines of our future with those gorgeous strange lips before drifting off to sleep in my arms. My obsession for our past clouded my present, and future. Deep down I knew the letter had been signed and delivered. Our conversations were of good-nature and one might think, had the dialogue been transcribed and then read aloud by a stranger, that we were a happy joyous couple bound for eternity, but one would be incapable of detecting from the neat black print that our tone was hollow, our cadence uninterested, my importance to her diminished. The face she wore on our evenings out, manicured and glowing, was never for me. My validation of her meant nothing. She had long since given up on lover’s colloquialisms.
“I love you honey” shrank into a disenchanting “Have a good one, Todd.”
It seemed another fated knock against me as a narcissist and struggling novelist, sometimes one in the same, and I assumed it would be good fodder for my first prize-winning novel. To everyone else, it had become a depressing but endlessly funny joke that I was constantly on the brink of failure.
“Almost done with your novel?” my wife enjoyed saying at dinner parties, signaling a period of laughter and back-slapping. Me, the good sport.

The alarm sounded and I woke quickly, startled. It was Thursday and I would have five glorious days away from mother and the wife. I usually had Thursdays off but my coworker had the flu.
“Where are you going?” asked Janine, peering from the bathroom, brushing her hair.
“Work.”
“You don’t work Thursdays.” she said, confused. She probably had a date planned.
“I know. Someone’s sick.”
“And I bet you gladly offered up your time, huh?”
“I’m sure they would have done it for me.”
“You’re such a fucking pushover, Todd,” she said before rushing out of the room, shaking her head.
I worked part time at a magazine stand downtown and often found myself looking forward to those eight hours shifts. I found the anonymity of the job invigorating. It was my balance. Come Tuesday and I would crave, sometimes desperately, the lack of attention. The lack of negative attention. I am just the aloof face one saw while waiting for their change. I am a collection of moods one might witness during subsequent visits, if they care to notice, yet my details remain a mystery. I am whatever face I wear, attached to whatever judgment one has regarding the band on the shirt I’m wearing. The Cure: sad. Metallica: white trash. The Misfits: monsters. The Beatles: good. Bob Marley: hippie. Jimi Hendrix: drugged hippie. The Smiths: sad. Pink Floyd: boring. It was all they had to go off of and it was a brilliant feeling. I was no longer the forgotten son, the husband, once removed. And I had a sidekick that made me feel at least worthy on some level. Hollis. The deliciously dark and brooding Hollis.

She was standing at the counter when I got back from my lunch break, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, full of youthful neurotic energy. Her face was buried in Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea. I rang up a young man’s magazine, a special on Dirt Biking, all the while feeling her eyes follow my movements. She was chewing on her bottom lip. By the time I had finished she was reading her book again.
“Hello Hollis,” I greeted her.
“Todd,” she answered, without bothering to look up from her reading. I had known her for over a year and was beginning to notice subtle transformations in her appearance, cadence, and general posture. The adult Hollis was in a battle over the teenage Hollis. Not a month ago she wore pink sneakers, her hair in braided pigtails. Today she is wearing an alarming shade of red lipstick and what appears to be a push-up bra. She is seventeen years old but looks younger. Her lankiness takes her down a year or two, she is curveless and has bad posture, probably to disguise her height. She seldom smiles. And although she looks young, she has this silence that seems to follow her around. It is a deep probing look that surfaces randomly, a way of maintaining eye contact for unnecessary lengths of time that makes me consider everything I have said or done for the last week, wondering what could have been so awful. It is all the more uncomfortable coming from the face of a child, that makes me feel sinful, wrong, as only being judged by a being of pure innocence could make one feel.

Hollis suddenly closes her book.
“I’m going to see a show tonight, do you want to come?” she says nicely.
“Only if you’re buying me drinks,” I tease.
“It’s an all ages show, perv.”
“I know I know. Yeah, that could be fun, what bands are playing?”
Just as she starts to open her mouth the phone begins to ring. It would be one of two people, well three actually. It will be my mother, looking for me, having forgotten where she is within the house. It will be my boss, wanting to know if we’re making money, or it will be my wife, wanting to weasel her way out of her matrimonial duties for the night.

I pick up the receiver. Door Number Three.

"Hello Janine."
“Todd, please, I have some work to do tonight. I’m going to be here pretty late. I need to make sure you’ll be home to cook your mother supper.”
Hollis shoots me a dirty look. She has a sixth sense for knowing exactly what is happening in my phone conversations. I imagine my wife at work, in her highbrow design office looming from atop a skyscraper across town. She could probably see me from her window, down here, on my stool. She would be wearing her favorite sweater, a v-neck cashmere, tight, dark blue, one that I bought for her birthday two years ago. She would be flirting obscenely over the coffee maker.
“I take it black.”
I have exaggerated ideas of her at work, I try to stop my mind but it’s created this persona, someone between the actual green-eyed woman I married ten years ago and a hedonistic seducer-at-large, a racecar of hormones, towering in patent leather heels, always in some breast revealing lean or ass bearing bend to reach for things far across the desk and fallen on the floor. Constantly glancing longingly into intern’s eyes as those beady, unprofessional eyes wander over her milky skin, across the coffee-stain birthmark that I worship near her clavicle. They roam her unceremoniously, and she continues reaching for unnecessary items, liking it.
“Are you sure you have to…” I began.
“Todd, really. Really? Are you going to start this? Who pays the bills? I have to stay late. You think I want to work late today? No, I’m tired.”
“Alright, alright. I will be home to do this for you.”
Click.
“Hollis, I’m sorry that was my wife and…”
“You’re such a fucking pushover.”

back to Contest #2