StoryBurst 3
Jennifer was a tall woman with sharp features, and she found it easy to intimidate men. Unfortunately, Jennifer was also a timid woman with an inferiority complex, and she found it most horrifying to be intimidating to men. She had no desire to be in control of the situation. So she slouched, and looked at the ground, and never raised her voice. Usually this worked.
At the moment she was glad to be tall, however; she grabbed the 24-pack of toilet paper from the top shelf, grateful not to have to impose on anyone and ask for assistance. Actually, had she been unable to reach it, she would simply have modified her intentions and grabbed the 12-pack on the shelf below. But she didn't realize this at the time.
When she was young, she had been on volleyball teams, and almost got a scholarship in that sport to attend Brown. But she didn't, and she ended up going to UC Denver, and she majored in Literature, and then she worked as an administrative assistant for the next 6 years. Every so often she told herself she would join a local volleyball team, or a yoga class, or get a gym membership, but then she would look at her life, have trouble finding where she would get the time and energy to devote to something like that, and delay any action.
She put the toilet paper in her cart, thinking that maybe it would have been better to have gotten it last instead of first; now all her other groceries would have to be finagled on an individual basis somewhere between the cart's walls and the massive prism of toilet paper rolls. It was kind of a bother. But she consoled herself with the thought that after managing this one shopping trip, she would be set on toilet paper for months.
Jennifer hadn't been married yet, and she hadn't dated anyone for a couple years. She was well aware that this might have something to do with her timidity and her propensity to leave the house socially less often than she menstruated. She told herself it wasn't really a big deal, not her first priority, and she was doing fine so far, so why bother seeking almost assured disappointment? But she knew she was just fooling herself and couldn't ignore the consistent emptiness which haunted her lonely moments.
She handed the unwieldy toilet paper package to the cashier, who rotated it several times in several dimensions in search of the bar code. Jennifer had actually handed it to the cashier with the bar code at face-level, and sighed a little at his failure to notice it. He then scanned her milk, her frozen dinners, her cat food, her shampoo. She watched the material manifestations of her life be abstracted into numbers representing their value. She was just standing there. The cashier was standing there as well as waving items at a machine. But they were both at its mercy.
And even if they weren't aware of this, the machine sure was.
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The clock ticked. Without fail, it then tocked.
It was an unwelcome reminder of inevitability, of impossibility, of the lack of control James had. He could frantically do anything and everything to slow or stop it, he could sit back and concentrate real hard, he could try to ignore it. But the clock would stare at him, expressionless, and continue to tick and tock at the exact same intervals. Tick. Tock.
It was a monument to the arbitrariness of reality, it was a primitive attempt to make the organism that is existence into a cyborg, stabbing shoddily-made clocks and watches and calendars into the soft tender skin of time, like thermometers into a turkey, except the turkey was still alive and couldn't give any less of a shit what you tried to stab into it. Tick. Tock.
He was orbiting the progression of time. He could change his position relative to its mass, but he could never alter its location. He could never have an effect on its attributes. He could run toward it for as long as he wanted, but he would only ever be running around it, and it would be no different in the end if he had never existed in the first place. Tick. Tock.
It was sort of admirable. Time is exactly the way James wanted to be. Dissociated, indifferent, unfazed by the meaningless lives of others. To be affected by that which one cannot control is weakness. To be dependant on that which one can never trust to be there is foolishness. To go about one's life for the benefit of others, rather than for the self, is merely accepting death before it comes. Tick. Tock.
But wasn't that what he was doing? Magnum in the mouth, note on the end table? It was an okay note, as notes went, but James knew if he looked at it again he would just want to rewrite it. This sort of note wasn't ever covered in the Chicago Manual of Style. He hadn't had the wherewithal to draw up a will, so he had needed to at least be clear what his intentions were for his stuff. He also knew that people would be confused, that they would say things like "We had no idea", and he wanted to make sure they were aware that this did not arise out of a trauma or depression that they might be keen to blame themselves for. Tick. Tock.
His eyes flit about, resting briefly on the clutter around his bedroom. Each item was nothing more than an image now, and he was still enough that they might as well have been two-dimensional. The snowglobe he got from Rebecca when she went to France, the horrid sweater his mother got him for his birthday the year she died, the stereo system he had bought in a misguided attempt to feel as though he were making some progress in life. They were all just sitting there, having no effect on anyone. They were indicative of the past, but the past was just dreams. And to be reminded of dreams is like lifting up a sheet; the very act of doing it deforms the original, placing disproportionate emphasis on the parts of the sheet that are being lifted, on the parts of the dream that are being recalled. Tick. Tock.
He had taken the day off from work today, and he regretted the annoyance he had heard in his boss' voice. He knew that annoyance would haunt his boss for years, who would bury his face in his hands and feel terrible despite the fact that he had had nothing to do with this, and couldn't have done anything to prevent it. He didn't like that loose thread, but he could hardly address it specifically in the note, for fear of the tactic backfiring. In any case, it wasn't that problematic of a loose thread anyway, and, all things considered, now was as good a time as any.
Tick.