A Short Story

A Short Story, by Katie Williams: 

No work, no Skype dates or lunch meetings, no phone calls to make or errands to run; the whole afternoon was wide open.  Just her and the sun in the clear blue sky with nothing to do... except salvage the remains of a relationship she’d shattered into a thousand tiny pieces the day before with just one fist.

It wasn’t a punch but rather the unclenching of her hand that did it.  When she released her grip on a bouquet of flowers and let them fall to the sidewalk, a silent mushroom cloud rose from where they struck the ground filling the air with a gas so toxic that the only thing left to do was walk away before tears started falling.  And that’s what she did.  She walked away.  He had intended them as a gift and she, in her childish pride in an act of defiance, abandoned them on the side of the road as if they were a smoldering bomb spewing poisonous fumes.

She didn't throw them down, she simply refrained from intervening with gravity.  It was typical of her to be so blameless and detached, merely allowing nature to take its destructive course while shrugging her shoulders and claiming uninvolvement.  The worst enemies are the ones that do not fight.  You cannot wrestle a dove.

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The key to productivity is finding something you want to do even less than all the other things you have to do, thus rendering the To Do list a selection of relatively appealing procrastination alternatives.  In her nothing-to-do afternoon, she managed to bus across town, leave her business card with several potential clients, sit in the park, listen to an entire Pink Floyd album and write a poem on the back of a napkin.   Every time she reached for her cellphone to make The Call she would remember that email she had to send or the garbage that hadn’t been taken out or that granola bar she’d been wanting to eat.  The entire day slipped though the cracks of a chain of distractions.  She leapt from one to the next like stepping stones in quicksand. 

She decided she couldn’t just call.  She needed to think, to plan, to organize.  She needed a five-section outline with bullet points, a flow chart with arrows and boxes to make sense out of the scrambled Rubik’s cube that was her brain: the red angry squares next to the orange guilty square; the self-righteous green squares lined up on the same side as the blue regretful ones; the white apathy square appearing randomly and inconsistently on all sides. 

So she took out a piece of paper and a pen and started to write.  Then she crossed out what she had written and started over.  Then she traced over the word “Stressed” until it was too ominously bold and black and she had to scratch it out and write it again normally.   She eventually reached the edge of the page and declared it good enough.  

She dialed.
"Hello?"

“Hi.”
"Hi."

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry about yesterday.”

“Ok.”

Mayday.  That was not included in the script.  They both knew this was about more than just yesterday's incident.

“Maybe we can talk about it later?”

“I’m free now actually.”

Bite the bullet, she told herself, just get it over with.  

She read her script from her notes and that’s exactly what it came out sounding like: a recital of a dry monologue on an empty poorly-lit stage with a bad microphone and no one in the audience.  He listened... or rather, he didn’t interrupt.  Once he started talking she realized he hadn’t heard a single word.  Thus the conversation spiraled in toilet bowl circles, rapidly decreasing in circumference as they approached the abyss of their fatal end.  

“So what now?” he asked clinging to the slippery porcelain surface.  

She couldn’t open her mouth for fear that the small animal nesting in her throat would escape.  So she curled her lips between her teeth, raised her eyebrows and shook her head slowly.  

I don’t know.