He’s searching through his papers, rifling under the desk. His glass of scotch tilts and sprays droplets on his work. His hands shake. His coworkers tell him he needs rest, he needs to drink some water and eat something. He’s been doing nothing but drinking for days, while working. A car pulls up and they usher him into the backseat. “Rehab,” they said. As the cross a bridge and stall in traffic, he jumps out, mounts the railing and leaps into space in a split second. Except that the river he was expecting underneath is not there, but another highway. He falls so far and lands brokenly on the roof of a passing van, which doesn’t even slow down. He knows he is mortally wounded but, using his still working hand, lifts his other arm across his body to appear more comfortable. The van disappears around the bend. Someone is videotaping their drive and as they come around the corner, they find traffic veering out of the fast lane to avoid the man’s crushed body.
The river is choked with floating concrete that rushes fast. You can drive a car on the river and get to where you need to go five times faster than on a highway. But it’s tricky navigation — hit a snag and sink and you have absolutely no chance of rising above the surface again.
It would have been easier to dig shallow graves to hide the bodies, but papermache-ing them into hollowed-out, still-standing trees was effectively gruesome.
We’ve just tied up the boat in the marina when the zombies attack. Before panicking, the ladies decide to sing a rousing selection of tunes from “The Music Man.” I decide to take my chances with the zombies and run out to face them. Curiously, they do not try to bite/kill me and I realize they are not zombies, but in fact are lepers. I thank them for not biting/killing me and raise my hand to shake the stump of the man closest to me. He laughs and refuses but I insist I’ve had all my shots. He shakes his head and turns, the rest of the lepers following him away. I go back on board the ship to hear my father talking about how men are debating whether or not they should stop the burning of women for the sake of the environment.
Picnicking at dusk in Central Park. I have a remote control that turns the lights of the surrounding skyline off and on. People think aliens are coming.
That was one of the more awkward blind double dates of my life. Turns out we’d all been on a blind double date with each other just a day earlier… and we’d all gone home with each other. I excused myself and crept out of the restaurant. Feeling ashamed, I called my mother to tell her about the date. Found myself in front of a friend’s apartment building and thought I’d stop in to say hello. My friend was on her way out and didn’t have time to chat and my mother, who occasionally astral-projects herself wherever I am, started to follow her out until I reminded her that her body was still in Pennsylvania and she should probably get back to it.
I was about to ask my friend if I could crash at her place since I was exhausted but now things were awkward, what with my mom’s astral projection wandering around in just a t-shirt, so I walked off and ran into another friend, D, in a big empty warehouse. D tells me he’s off to meet up with our mutual friend A, who is cooking a large meal and that I should come with him. I’m pretty tired and D reminds me that it’s Friday night and tomorrow is New Year’s Eve. I decline anyway and continue my walk home when a busload of teenage tourists pull up next to me and start catcalling at me. I duck down a side alley and find myself in Chinatown. I start climbing up the huge hill of dirt in front of me and when the dirt suddenly crumbles away, leaving me clinging to the top, certain I’m about to fall to my death, an old Chinese woman catches my hands. She starts to pull me up while telling me a joke and then stops because she can’t get the punchline right. I realize I’m probably going to die unless she remembers the goddamn punchline.
Dad harrumphed into the room as I lay sleeping on the pullout couch. I knew he was looking for the half-and-half and as he poked around under a chair, I surreptitiously removed it from the side-table and hid it under my pillow.
Across the rolling prairie I could see craggy mountain rising under thunderous-looking clouds. As I got closer, I could make out a large cave at the foot of the mountain and stopped dead. Bears. Sure enough, I could see the enormous creatures milling about in front of the cave. I turned to get away before they saw me and realized I’d already been spotted by the bears I hadn’t noticed on either side of me. They came lumbering at me and I flung myself on the ground on my stomach. Heavy paws thumped me meatily in the head and back and tore my shirt. I lay still as death, hoping they’d lose interest. But then I felt a claw flip up my bra clasp and another slid the straps off my shoulder. I felt my jeans tugged down. Paws gripped my hips and jerked them up into the air. And… I was okay with this.
I found it impossibly awkward to carry two buckets up a ladder. One bucket filled with asphalt, the other with granulated sweat. Somehow, I reached the top and poured the buckets out into the bin. An angry voice yelled behind me, “DON’T MIX THEM!” Too late.
How in the world am I supposed to escort my date carefully home to Brooklyn with this bag full of used lightbulbs and still make it back to work by 5:30 a.m.?
