Tag: short story

too bad: part three

The third of a short story in three parts.

“The night of Cassidy & Arthur’s dinner ‘date’ & its aftermath, and the story ends.”
Click Here for Part One & Part Two.

x

“Arthur? Is that you?“

Cassidy was confused to see him. She hopped on twenty minutes in to his bus ride, knapsack in-tow, to see him sitting near the front of the bus on one of the benches parallel to the aisle, wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up. She recognized his stubble. There wasn’t a spot next to him, so she hovered, still sporting her knapsack, holding on to the grip bar with clammy palms.

“Hm?“

She reached for his hood and flipped it off his head. He had some very noticeable scratches at the base of his nose and along his eyebrow line, but it was him, “What are you doing taking the bus?”

“Oh hi.”

“What are you doing taking the bus?”

“I couldn’t get my car started.”

“Oh.”

“…What are you doing taking the bus?”

“Somebody said they were driving later.”

“Oh. You couldn’t get a ride?”

“I didn’t think I needed one.”

“Oh. I had figured I’d just drive us wherever from the restaurant and then take us back to your car.”

“Never mind. I’m over it.”

“…We’re still going out after though, right?”

“How am I getting home?”

“…The bus?“

“Heh, you’re funny.” He wasn’t.

“I’m sorry, Cassidy. It kind of threw me for a loop, too. You’re on my route, though, so I guess we can just come back the same way together, when we’re done.”

“Sure.” They puttered silently for a minute as the bus rolled along, “How much longer does it take?”

“Only, like, ten more minutes.”

“That close, huh?”

“Yeah, it just rips by when you’re driving yourself. You don’t get all the little detours.”

“Actually, I usually have to take the long way around on the highway. If I could take the one-way roads like a bus, I’d never be late for a shift.” She snorted. Arthur grimaced.

The bus went over a bump, and Cassidy lost her balance and stepped backward, smooshing her knapsack against the face of someone sitting on the chair behind her, “Get off of me!”

Cassidy looked behind her, “Oh, I’m so sorry!” She took her bag off and put it on the floor next to her. She started to think of another one of those absurd porn videos she’d seen in those brief, intimate exposures online, where it looked like the Japanese schoolgirl was getting raped on a public bus full of salarymen. But those would-be idiots had better watch out this time! She had pepper spray ready! She just had to kneel down, reach into her knapsack after she took it off, and fish for it – in the meantime, her ass would be sticking out. She’d be a sitting duck.

Arthur started to stand, “Did you want to sit down?”

“…No. No, thanks, I’m fine. It’s not much longer anyway.” He could have offered earlier, “So what happened to your face?”

“What about my face?”

“Your face! You have scratches all under here.” She motioned around her nose with her finger. Arthur flipped his hood back up.

“I just cut myself a few times while I was shaving. It’s no big deal.” They didn’t say anything else for the rest of the ride. Both justified the silence by being comfortable enough with one another to share the moments when neither had to speak. Or something.

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too bad: part two

The second of a short story in three parts.

“A flashback to the year before their encounter, when Cassidy was pining & unemployed, and Arthur wasn’t single but still wasn’t happy.”
Click Here for Part One.

v

Cassidy was nineteen. That she was on the Principal’s List her Senior year meant nothing now she had graduated.

But if strangers didn’t have a hard time ignoring her giant, six-foot-five-inch stature, then her double-d breasts were the deal-breaker, which she tried to offset from an otherwise tiny frame by only ever wearing dark tops.

She had ash-brown hair that fell to her waist, which she never combed as much as the time she spent considering she should, and as a result the ends were split and messy. Her mother offered to comb it for her, but it took too long when Mom did it, and it was painful, in more ways than one: Cassidy was at the age now that, if mother & daughter sat together too long, then the younger would get interrogated about all the maternal standards, like what it was Cassidy wanted to do now that it was approaching a full year that she was out of high school – motherly bundled with a few other unsolicited suggestions.

Cassidy’s jeans were two sizes too big for her athletic core, and today’s pair wasn’t any different. But that was her prerogative: if they were any tighter, they would accentuate her hips, and a lower body toned from taking PE class seriously. She didn’t need anything else on her person to stand out. She looked down at her belt: it didn’t feel so tight on her, but it was too tight for the pant, as the loose waistline hung all scrunched-up below the buckle at the front.

Did she lose weight? Again? She loosened the belt by a notch, grabbed the pant by the button, and pulled the baggy garment back up over the buckle, resting the space between her pant and the button on the top rung of the buckle, like a shelf.

She liked the way working out made her feel, and she loved the camaraderie of a friend group who all enjoyed spending time outside and away from their phones, unlike a majority of their peers. This afternoon, as she looked at her reflection in her family’s rose-trimmed bathroom mirror while wearing a simple black t-shirt, Cassidy grabbed her hair by its tuft and guided it through a tie and into a bun, stuffing its true heft within itself. She leaned forward and checked again for acne, in the small, inflamed clusters of blackheads that lingered near the caves of her eyes. She straightened up, and standing tall her eyes met the top edge of the mirror. It was like that for two years and counting, and she still wasn’t used to it.

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too bad: part one

The first of a short story in three parts. A dramedy for mature readers.

“In a post-COVID world, a naive & lonely nineteen-year-old waitress crosses paths with a middle-aged, misanthropic line-cook.”

The following is dedicated to two special ladies – neither I introduced myself properly to, but from what I assumed formed the basis of the character of Cassidy; and to my wonderful wife, for whom if I ever were to leave, or her leave I, this story would stand as prognostication.

i

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

Arthur heard what she said, and the tremble behind it, “What did you say?”

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

“I don’t like people.” He intended that as a period and went back to work, but since he bothered to reply, it was an invitation.

“You can say ‘hi’.”

“Hi, huh?”

“Yeah. You know, saying hi probably takes less than a second. We have been here all night together.”

“Okay, thanks.” He went back to scrubbing the inside of one of the fryers.

It was after-hours one regular Saturday night in November. Arthur & Cassidy were scheduled the closing shift: they had both done it before, just not together yet. Cassidy saw it as an opportunity to get to know Arthur better, but, as was his norm now, all Arthur wanted to do was fight back his discomfort with stoicism, finish the job, and go home. He was bone-tired, and attacking a hard, crunchy bit of caked-on residue with a steel wool brush. He still had two more fryers to clean, and he had ten minutes until their scheduled shift ended at 10PM. These things were shit: no wonder management had to keep replacing them.

Cassidy had more-or-less finished everything in the dining room and was sweeping up in the vestibule, slowly and cautiously approaching the kitchen as she completed the spots before it. There were only the two of them left in the building, and she had the keys to lock up. Faintly, on the worn-out, twenty-year-old Phillips stereo that sat perched high on a shelf in the vestibule played the soft reverberations of Top-40 radio.

“…That’s it?”

“What else do you want me to say, Cassidy? I’m trying to scrub this shit off the fryer. I’m busy.”

“You know, just some soap and water would do the trick.”

“…Really?“

“Hey, if you want to stay here all night to win the war on dirt & grime, be my guest. But I’d like to go home at some point, and I’m all done, so…”

“Did you do the bathrooms yet?”

“Yes I did the bathrooms. I told you I was done. You don’t think I don’t want to go home, too?”

“You want to clean this too? Be my guest.” He rudely threw the brush down and stepped back, handing the reigns to her. She filled a red bucket with soapy water from the sink, took a rag, and wiped the spot. Even when hunched over, she still towered almost a foot above him. The crud began to break up, leaving the scratched surface from the wool brush underneath, “Okay, okay, okay, thank you so much.”

“See? You don’t have to be so rough with everything.”

“Listen, if you’re done, why don’t you go dust off the stereo speakers so I can actually hear something back here.”

“I would, if we had any dusters.”

“Then, I don’t know, go find the step-ladder and wipe off the little shelf it sits on. Oh wait, you don’t need that.”

“Har-dee-har-har.”

“I can be bratty, too.”

“Who’s being bratty?”

“You! You’re bratty. You’re a bratty girl.”

“…Is that some porn thing?” She was having fun with him, now.

“Whatever. Do whatever you want to do. That’s what you do anyway.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just leave me alone, okay?”

“No, what did you said?”

“I said you kids are going to do whatever it is you’re going to do anyway, so who gives a shit what I tell you, hm? You’re probably not even listening.”

“What’s this all about, Arthur?” It was the first time he had ever heard her say his name out-loud.

“Nothing!”

“You’re such a liar.”

“Fine, it’s you. You and all the other dumb White girls that get hired. Okay? You’re a bunch of entitled snowflakes who don’t know anything about putting in a real day’s work. Tell me I’m wrong! You all have your fucking hacks online to make shit easier for yourselves, while guys like me get shit on, even though I’m breaking my fucking back. It’s bullshit and I’m fucking sick of it.”

“Is that why you haven’t been talking to me? Because you think I’m a bad co-worker? Listen buddy, you don’t even know me. We’ve said more to each other tonight than we have in the whole three months we’ve been working together. You don’t say hi, you don’t look at me, you ignore me when I talk to you over the counter…”

[cont’d]

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the damned can’t send dimes

A short story for mature readers.

“A dead egoist is sentenced to Hell and, in one all-in effort, tries to send a message of support to the family he left behind. It doesn’t end well, not that it would.”

Lukas Hassic was an asshole in life, and when he died, he went to Hell. One afternoon, when he was all by himself, he suffered a massive heart attack in his office gym. A soothing voice recited affirmations from his portable speaker, as he lay on his back on the cold hardwood floor next to his weight bench, exacerbating the chills he felt through the sweat that had seeped through his t-shirt.

It was not Luke’s intention to damn his soul – so could say anyone – and his first thoughts out-loud in front of Saint Peter weren’t to ask of the wife and two children left behind in his wake, but why he needed to be reviewed for entry at all. He hooted & hollered and raised a stink at the front of the line before the closed doors of Heaven and its gatekeeper, making sure everyone behind him could hear: he prayed every night with his family; he made sure to work hard in his thirty-four years of painting homes for a corporation; he consciously attempted to remain nonjudgmental, pushing up the people around him; and he canvassed every year for Jeans Day. There was more, but it just didn’t make any sense to him why there was any question he shouldn’t be sanctified.

Lately, Peter had been binging “Judy Justice” on Paradise’s on-demand service – which contained every episode of every court show ever – and he was curt and to-the-point with Luke: he was fake.

“Well that’s not fair.”

“Be quiet! I’m speaking!” The ground in the four-feet around them began to shake under the tremor of Peter’s voice. As quickly as they were needed, flashes of moments Luke had fogged with his own narcissism played before him as clearly as if they had just happened: moments that, when they are reflected on for what they are, temporarily break a man’s defences in their afterglow.

The brief silence that followed was disrupted by Peter, who enjoyed the privilege of calling Luke “a piece of shit” without repercussion, said goodbye, and then pulled a wooden lever to his side that disappeared into the clouds underneath him, triggering a mechanical system which opened a trap door beneath where the answerable stood, sending Luke plummeting towards the depths of the non-denominational Underworld, where the likes of Adolph Hitler, Robert Pickton, and the child molester down the street from you, all reside.

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hold

A short story for mature readers.

“A Filipino student overthinks taking her life back from her borderline-abusive boyfriend.”

“Put it down, put it DOWN!”
Samuel screamed, and Camilla dropped her corner of the set onto the soft, damp grass. It didn’t even make a sound, immediately sinking more than an inch into the front lawn. The look he gave her was homicidal, “I said PUT it down, not DROP it!”
“I DID put it down, fucker!”
“Look at what you did! You probably damaged it!”
“It was FREE, Sam! Why are you making such a big deal about this?” She wiped her sticky, chest-length black hair with faded pink tips away from the sweaty, exposed skin of her neck & bosom, “I just don’t GET it.”
“You don’t have to GET it. It’s not FOR you.”
“Yes, but it’s in OUR space. THAT’S what you don’t get.” She pulled a crushed, almost-empty pack of cheap cigarettes out of her jacket pocket with a lighter, and sparked up. Between her & her boyfriend, the laminate wood-paneled television sat wedged in the ground like a cheap student sculpture.
“Give me one of those.” She reluctantly handed him the pack & lighter, and he pocketed them himself in the back of his pants after he lit one, “You know I love you, but fuck.”
“At least it’s not raining anymore.”
He rasped at her.
He thought his behavior was completely justifiable. He wanted to point out all the furniture Camilla had been buying lately from strangers off social, and exactly how many of his items graced each: none. Not a single one of his possessions lined the shelves of what she so adamantly insisted were their recent acquisitions. He never expected them to – since the sum total of her things compared to his was astronomically larger – but with all her talk of “them” & “ours'”, he guessed he thought he wouldn’t have to fight so hard to bring anything he wanted into the house anymore. That’s how he thought he was justified, as Camilla understood him. And she understood him well.

She couldn’t hear him now from the front yard, but she was sure the couple who owned the house could hear him from upstairs: whimpering from behind his duct-taped mouth, slamming each corner of the bedframe against the ground over-and-over. What did he think? No, what did he really think of her? The clear, full moon beamed bright as she opened the damaged, brittle cigarette packaging: there were only three smokes left, and two were mangled from being in Samuel’s back pocket. Those could be his later.
While she smoked, she thought. She couldn’t help herself. She thought about Samuel & her. She thought about what was going to happen when she went back inside. Would she torture him a bit more? Probably not: the thrill was gone now. The tingling she felt was just an aftershock – she’d probably just untie him and put up with his hostile stoicism. She thought about class on Monday – but only for a moment. She really didn’t have to put up with Samuel anymore if she didn’t want to, did she? She felt the onus was on her this time. She took a nice, big drag, that filled her bare, goose-pimpled chest with the chemical relief she so desperately believed she needed, to help her take the next step.
She was inhaling filter. She coughed, and flicked the butt to the curb. She was prepared to light one of the broken ones too, when a light came on in the upstairs curtain wall. She was cold anyway. Of that, she could decide on.

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