Month: January 2012

fiction by Jason Edwards

Lester sits in his rocking chair on his porch smoking a cheroot. Well, almost. The rocking chair doesn’t really rock very much, because it’s more of an overstuffed easy chair, had it longer than his oldest child (42, a complete waste of space). And the porch is more like a den, since it’s really a den, something the real-estate bitches call a “bonus room.” Bonus, my ass, Lester likes to say to himself. And the cheroot is really just an old ball-point pen he found lying around. One of his wife’s. The ones she used to do the crossword puzzles with. She used to be pretty damned good at them.

Actually, come to think of it, Lester isn’t really sure what a cheroot is. He knows cowboys smoke them on occasion, out on the prairie. Or out in the Badlands, wherever those are. Lester likes to think he had a pretty good life once, idle, sitting around in his rocking chair, reading westerns, sipping on coffee so bitter it would stain your socks. But he’s never really ever read a western. Go up to him some time and say “just washed my hair with some Zane Grey” and he’d chalk that up to the fancy way those Madison avenue assholes advertise shampoo.

It’s not dark in the den, but it soon will be. Lester decided, when his wife died, he’d stick it out in the house as long as there was one bulb still burning. Then he waited for that pop in each room. The bedrooms went first. When the bathroom went, he barely noticed. When the bulbs in the kitchen went, there was some trouble, but then he started opening the refrigerator to see things if he needed to. Then he had a bad thought– does the refrigerator bulb count? Because those never go out. And then one day it did go out and he decided that was that and now, four years later, the only bulb left was here in the den. And so he waited.

He waits under the bulb, which now burns twenty-four hours a day, in his overstuffed chair, a gift from his wife. Anniversary. His gift to her was that damned baby, which she discovered was inside her a month or so later. Then they had another one. A girl, not much use to anyone. Then one more boy, a sickly thing, liked rock n’ roll and voted democrat and Lester sometimes forgot his name. He hadn’t spoken to any of them since the wife died.

He waits under the bulb, pretends he’s in a rocking chair, pretends he’s on the porch, smoking a cheroot and sipping really bad coffee, waiting for his wife to come back from some damn charity thing or another. She was always doing that, volunteering down at the church or taking baked goods to the old folks in that home they had on Park. Well, sort of. She never actually volunteered for anything, was sort of a bitter woman, and a cynic, and died of heart failure one night in their bed. It had been years since he’d touched her, and when he did, and she was cold, he wasn’t sure if that meant she was dead, or if that was just what old women felt like. But after he’d shouted in her ear a few times and threatened to burn his own toast if she didn’t wake up, and she didn’t wake up, he called the paramedics.

Sits in that chair and sometimes gets up to eat a cold can of soup or maybe some bread that those volunteer bitches bring over now and again. Real soup, not pretend soup this time. Real bread. He barely tastes it. Drinks water from a glass he never washes, never needs to, water right out of the tap. Did you know they sell bottled water to people these days? Small little bottles if you want them, even for people who have plumbing? Waste of space.

Sometimes he falls asleep in the chair, and every so often he wakes up and thinks about it and goes to clean himself and change his clothes. Somebody washes them every once in a while. He never turns on the TV. Sometimes, if he’s feeling frisky, he pretends to turn on the TV. But then he realizes it’s pretty stupid to keep a TV on the porch, so he pretends to turn it off and then unpretends it away.

Lester had led an unremarkable life, he knows it, and he also knows that he’ll be dead soon, which is fine. Not that he’s looking forward to it, anticipating it. More like death is a Wednesday and who complains about Wednesdays? Just a day like any other. He’s pretty sure he’ll be dead when this last bulb burns out. Knows it like he knows he doesn’t know what a cheroot is.

Once, when he was asleep, that girl, his daughter, came over. She flipped the switch off so he could sleep in the dark, and the darn thing went pop, so she changed it. Climbed right up on top of him and changed it. Actually, that happened more than once. The bulbs he keeps in the garage are pretty damned cheap.

fiction by Jason Edwards

My wife had one of her fits again and kicked me out of the house again and once again I ended up in a random location to wait it out. This time the gym. Maybe it’s because her condition manifests in “fits,” a word that reminded me of “fitness,” and my gym has that word in its name. I wish more establishments were this straightforward in their naming. I get so tired of clever names for places, like “A Stitch in Thyme” for a combination yarn and spice store. I wonder sometimes if the owners of such places think of the name first and only then try to start a business that fits. Madness. Probably one of the things that drives my wife occasionally bonkers. Fortunately I keep a bag in the trunk of my car with spare clothes, and my gym provides towels and shower soaps.

I was on that sort of cut-away second-floor that gyms have, an overlarge balcony, or loft you could call it I suppose. I had, much to my dismay, forgotten to snag my iPad before running out of the house ahead of a hail of thrown teacups, so I was stuck on the elliptical machine with nothing to watch except the distant glass-walled basketball court. Therein a young Asian man and what I could only assume was his grandmother were playing one-on-one. Maybe it was his mother. Maybe an aunt. Maybe a family friend. Certainly not a friend in the traditional sense of it. I mean, can you imagine, this Asian kid, Japanese maybe, into video games and manga and hentai and bukkaki and other such things, texting this septuagenarian and asking if she felt like getting in a game of 21 and then maybe some pearl tea at the nearby joint. Rapping about local politics, his college choices, her bursitis. Do old Japanese women even get bursitis? Or is that only old Jewish women? Of course they must, but I wonder what they call it.

And then Mila Kunis walked over and got on the elliptical machine next to mine. Not the Mila Kunis, of course. I mean, I assume it was not the actual Mila Kunis. Why would she be in this town, at this gym, this time of year, this time of day? I’m pretty sure she doesn’t live in the area. Hollywood or New York or someplace exciting. Not here. So, no, not the famous Mila Kunis, but a young woman who looked so much like her I was compelled to say “Hi Mila” as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Hi,” she said back, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. As if we really did know each other. Just like the receptionist at the building where I work. Most mornings she’s there when I walk in, and I say “Hi Mila,” (I don’t know her name, but she’s the spitting image of Mila Kunis too) and she says “Hello Mr. Shoeshine” which is our little joke since my name isn’t Shoeshine but it does sort of sound like Shoeshine. We’ve been doing this exchange for years, and I’m fairly certain the receptionist would like to sleep with me. But I know she’s married to a little wimp of a man, and I’d hate to break his spirit by bedding his wife. Not that I’d mind otherwise. She’s a plump little thing, the kind considered ravishing in the 50s, and I often wonder what kind of strong elastic must be holding up the stocking on those wonderfully thick thighs of hers.

And that was how this Mila said hello back to me there in the gym, and I was so struck by the familiarity, I asked her “how’s things?” as if that’s how we usually start our conversations. “Oh, you know. Busy, but not too busy to sweat a little I guess.” I was already sweaty myself, so I said “You’re telling me” and we laughed the way old friends laugh. We worked-out or workouts next to each other like that and the Asian kid and his grandmother finished their basketball game. He more or less kicked her ass, but she still gave him a kiss when they were done.

After a while Mila started to slow down on her elliptical and I was nearing the end of my own lengthy routine as well. I asked her what the rest of the day had in store for her and she said not much, really, then asked if I’d like to go back to her motel with her. And that’s when I was certain this was not the real Mila Kunis for sure, since the real one, surely, would never stay in a cheap motel. I agreed to go back with her, of course, and so we went there, in separate cars, and had incredibly bad sex before taking an uncomfortable shower together. But as awful as the sex was, and as awkward as the shower was, there was that sense of familiarity about it, like the disappointment of it all was somehow comforting. We got dressed and watched some TV and then I said I should get home to my wife and she said yes I should. So I left.

I drove home, and my wife was not there, so I swept up the broken tea cups and straightened the crooked pictures on the wall and eventually my wife came home. She handed me the credit card receipt for the motel room, complained of a headache, said she’d see me when I got to work the next morning, and went up to bed. So I went out into the backyard to eat bugs because I’ve been told that’s what insane people do.