AM/PM Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  AM:1

  2:PM

  AM:3

  4:PM

  AM:5

  6:PM

  AM:7

  8:PM

  AM:9

  10:PM

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  Acknowledgements

  about the author

  The stories in AM/PM have ruined me as a reader of shorts. I will no longer be satisfied by the merely beautiful, the singularly clever, or the one big thought purely rendered. I want all those things in a two-hundred-word package. I want to be highly amused and deeply sad at the exact same time. Amelia Gray packs more power in a paragraph than I thought possible.

  —Stacey Swann, Editor of American Short Fiction

  Copyright © 2009 by Amelia Gray

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of short passages quoted in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Where the names of actual celebrities or corporate entities appear, they are used for fictional purposes and do not constitute assertions of fact. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Illustration: bleachedwhale.com

  Published by

  featherproof books

  Chicago, Illinois

  www.featherproof.com

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2008940498

  ISBN: 0-9771992-7-4

  eISBN : 97-8-098-25808-5

  ISBN 13: 978-0-9771992-7-3

  Set in Archer

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Jon: this book is a symbol.

  AM:1

  Terrence cannot think of a job position with more weight in the title than lifeguard. “Firefighter” simply describes. “Pastor” makes little sense, outside of a treatment for meat in Mexico. Usually pork. However, “lifeguard” carries with it a great deal of gravity which many might consider unearned by the lanky youths typically found atop most lifeguard stands. Terrence offers himself as a humble exception to the rule: out of shape and in full awareness of the importance of his position.

  Three bathers prepare to enter the water. Terrence watches very closely from his stand, his red rescue buoy strapped across his lap. They are three women in thick one-piece suits. The pocked texture on their upper thighs is visible from fifty feet. They hold hands like girls and jump, shrieking, and Terrence holds his breath with them until all three surface, blissfully unaware of the risks they take when they place their blind faith in that water.

  2:PM

  There is a poetry to the wasted life, but little beauty. The poetry to an empty bed is beauty, Charles recognizes, and there is a poetry to the second hand on a clock, which is a kind of beauty, but the only beauty in the wasted life is of efficiency, and grace, and a complete knowledge of a small portion of the world. Charles recognizes the grace of a trip to the store. He feels the efficiency in slipping the same type of milk into the same place in the refrigerator door, between the pickles and the mayonnaise. Charles accepts the knowledge of the second hand.

  AM:3

  Remain Healthy All Day: Drink a spoonful of oil every morning. Reach up with your arms and extend your body to its full height. Use a warm towel to dry the cat. Consider a philosophical idea larger than your area of expertise. Avoid getting cancer. Chalk up bad decisions to outside influences. Don’t take your father too seriously. Play a game where you close your eyes very tightly, and when you open your eyes, you have amnesia and you must draw the details of your life from your surroundings. Give up smoking, drinking, and poetic verse. Remind yourself how important you are to your friends or at least your animals. Wax the floor in socks. Enter into a healthy, monogamous relationship. Consider briefly the idea of a soulmate. Light an entire box of matches and throw it into the sink. Hold a metal rod to the heavens and beg for whatever comes next.

  4:PM

  In the event that Reginald caught her on her way out, Olivia had prepared a speech:

  Don’t think for an instant that you’ve escaped detection. I saw you looking at those advertisements for used bookshelves like we had in college. I saw you examining the bottom shelf at the liquor store for scotch in a plastic jug. You will not get us ejected from the theater with your rowdiness. You will not shave your beard and hide my brassieres. You will not cause mischief at the furniture store, and come home worried that they’ll take your job. You’re the owner, for heaven’s sake. If you would like to reclaim your youth, sleep with a sales girl and buy another car. It pains me to see you this way, and it makes me tired.

  He slept through her exit. When she returned, he was still asleep. She woke him and helped him prepare for his bath.

  AM:5

  Charles knew what that look meant. It meant that Doreen disapproved and was playing at being offended, but if the line of inquiry continued, she would actually be offended. She had leveled that look at him in kitchens, crowded bars, in the game rooms of friends’ houses. Charles couldn’t
get away from it. He could charter a plane, fly to an empty continent and wade ashore, only to find Doreen standing there, holding the guts of his plane’s navigational system like some righteous nun, giving him that look.

  6:PM

  Hazel and Tess each bought a flavored water and sat on the stoop in front of the market.

  Tess was talking about the previous night, her first date with a man named Wallace. “We talked about flying,” she said.

  “And he’s afraid of it, too?”

  “Not at all. And his parents were both in crashes.”

  “That doesn’t bother him?”

  “They called and said, ‘Hey, buddy, we’re in Costa Rica, and guess what just happened.’”

  Hazel took a long drink of water. “Weird,” she said.

  “He loves his parents, of course.”

  “That’s a good sign.”

  “He made sure to mention that he loves his parents. They called from Costa Rica, and he wouldn’t have known otherwise, since it wasn’t on the news. Everyone was okay.”

  “You mean, everyone survived? No fatalities?”

  “Everyone walked away, except one stewardess who burned her foot on the fuselage.”

  “That’s different, then.”

  Tess got up and tossed her empty bottle into the garbage. “It was a crash,” she said. “People could have perished. Sorry to disappoint.”

  “Don’t take that tone,” Hazel said, standing.

  AM:7

  Good morning, John Mayer Concert Tee! I’m happy to see you survived the night. I know that I said my vespers before I pulled the covers up over my lips and nose to minimize the mosquito exposure. I looked to my dresser in the dark and added a silent refrain that you, John Mayer Concert Tee, would emerge, unscathed, from that land of broken windows. That your soft-pilled black poly blend, proudly emblazoned with the two-tone visage of Mr. Mayer himself, would not be spirited away. It is morning, John Mayer Concert Tee. I have a series of problems that cannot be solved.

  8:PM

  The neighbors were fighting in the street again, really screaming this time, and Simon was writing it all down.

  “I’m worried they’ll wake the baby,” Betty said. “You think you’re the next Carver.”

  “Yes, that’s what I think.” He was lying belly-down on the bed with his head halfway out the window like he was about to take a flying leap, like he was Superman.

  “Superman would go out and save them. Carver, too.”

  “Carver wouldn’t get up to sharpen a pencil,” Simon said. “He’d get a good woman to do it. And Superman would recognize that that girl out there is holding her own well enough and doesn’t require saving.”

  “He’s screaming at her.”

  “She’s translating his language.”

  “I’d call the police if you started screaming at me.”

  Simon shrugged, writing. “Different language,” he said. “Lost in translation.”

  “Bill Murray’d save her, too.”

  The neighbors stopped fighting so abruptly that Simon and Betty both leaned toward the window.

  From the silence, Simon: “Bill Murray’d save her eight bucks and tell her how Superman ends.”

  AM:9

  June was the kind of woman who not only talked to her cats, but consulted them seriously about world affairs and life changes. Mister Pickles, she would say in that adorable voice women reserve for their cats and when they want a large favor performed, Mister Pickles, what is your opinion on the recent World Bank shake-up? Do you feel that man should be fired? All he wanted to do was to make his girlfriend happy. The cat would look up at her, thinking for one wild moment that the tendrils of hair around her face were lizard tails.

  10:PM

  The girls, for all their tea-time advice, were each unhappy in their own relationships. Missy and her new husband fought constantly, and Chastity had left the father of her child to go on a spiritual journey. Frances had no prospects and a house full of fleas. She scratched a flea bite on her ankle with the heel of her shoe.

  “They’re all intimidated by you,” Missy said. “They’re intimidated by the fact that a girl as young as you, excuse me, could be so sophisticated and beautiful and great.”

  “They’re not sophisticated,” Chastity said.

  Having a flea bite made Frances feel fleas everywhere. She dug her hands into her hair, scratching her scalp. She had said a few months ago that she’d never had a flea bite, which was how these things happened.

  “Not at that age,” Missy said. “They don’t even know how to fake it until at least thirty.”

  “Men begin at thirty,” Chastity said, raising her glass.

  “Life starts the day after thirty-five,” Frances said. She felt like there was a flea under her arm, where she couldn’t look without being conspicuous. Instead, she scratched under her arm.

  Missy was watching her. “Are you okay? You look itchy.”

  “I am itchy,” Frances said. Her heel had worked its way to her mid-calf. She couldn’t say anything about fleas while they were eating. “I’m itching to find a man!”

  A couple at another table turned to look. Frances reached under her shirt, scratching her belly.

  “That’s no way to find a man,” the woman said.

  Frances glared at the woman. “You stay out of it!”

  AM:11

  Hazel and Tess were spending an excellent Sunday afternoon trying to decide the best way to die.

  “Old age?” Tess suggested.

  “Old age is a cop-out,” Hazel said. “It’s a nice way of saying your organs have sunk so low that you can’t summon the strength to reach them. Dying of old age is like being crucified.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Think on it for a while.”

  Tess didn’t like it when Hazel told her to think on things. “Exposure,” she said.

  “That’s a good one, in theory, but what is one truly exposed to, in those last moments?”

  “A blizzard, usually.”

  Hazel gave Tess a look that meant Tess was a few steps behind in the conversation again.

  12:PM

  Carla switched off the hair dryer. “It’s easy to forget how much around us is flammable,” she said.

  Andrew didn’t look up from his dress shirt. “I believe I have a stain,” he said.

  “We could all go up at any moment.”

  “The human body is ninety-five percent water.”

  “That’s just the blood,” she said, pulling her hair up into a rhinestone-studded clip.

  “You’re being morbid.”

  “I’m telling the truth. Bone is only twenty-two percent. Give that a couple days to dry out and you’ve got yourself a nice little blaze.”

  He looked at her. “Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  AM:13

  The landscape men trimmed the trees outside Olivia’s office window. It was necessary, because the branches were providing easy access for squirrels to the roof.

  She watched them remove a series of ash branches, working up to a large one near the top. When the workers cut it, it didn’t fall. The remaining branches were thick enough to hold it up and it hung there, suspended, the cut section swinging slowly with the movements of the tree.

  14:PM

  The man sitting alone smiles when his phone rings. The couple smiles at one another and the woman covers her mouth. A father walks hunched through the parking lot, a newspaper under his arm. He reaches for the child’s wrist. The girl touches the car’s headlight to hold herself up. Inside, a college student writes in her day planner with a purple pen. A young man takes pictures of himself next to the door. Tess feels that at any moment her heart could stop.

  AM:15

  The truck, advertising FISH and MEAT and GOURMET BRANDS, got stuck on the hump between the parking lot and the road in front of the deli next door to our apartment. We went outside because we wanted to count the wheels still touching the ground but the dri
ver waved us away. So we went back inside, where we could only see the back of the truck from the window, and just barely the cars in the street, swerving to avoid it. Somebody said, What would happen if the back end disconnected from the front end, and rolled in through the window and into our home? Killing us all? And causing thousands of dollars of structural damage for our landlord? And somebody else said, I think you have sufficiently answered your own question.

  16:PM

  Imagine if you could call up all your exes, and bring them together on a basketball court to play a pickup game. Maybe you could also call all the girls you’ve ever loved, split them into the Girls You Had a Chance With and the Girls You Never Had a Chance With. Have them play shirts and skins. It won’t be for your honor, though you’ll be the only one watching. You will promise pizza and beer to the winners. The girls you never had a chance with will spit and glare, and the girls you still may have a chance with will snivel and look at you when they make jump shots.

  The winners will take your wallet and invite the losers out. Everyone will forget to give you directions, and you’ll be left sitting in the gym parking lot.

  You’ll go home and watch basketball movies. You’ll build a makeshift court from scrap lumber in your backyard, and leave messages on all of their answering machines, inviting them back. You’ll go out back every night and play H-O-R-S-E, waiting for them to return. You will wear your shirt when you are shirts and you will remove your shirt when you are skins.

  AM:17

  It was still dark, but Terrence’s eyes adjusted enough that he could sense the movement of his hand before his face. “Charles,” he said. “I believe we are in a small box.”