Common Ground 2

It was like a rope went from Amanda's heart to a boulder beneath her feet.  It was tight and strong and she felt like she couldn't move.  Every thought that would have taken her in a direction was tugged back before a step could be completed, her imaginary foot hovered, struggled for a moment, then came back to keep her still, over the boulder.

She thought to move away, but the boulder filled with dollar signs, and she came back.

She thought to clean up, but the boulder filled with question marks about where to start, and she came back.

She thought to read, to nap, to surf the internet, but the boulder filled with guilt, and she came back.

Amanda's mind bounced back and forth, and she raised her foot every time, even when the thought had already proved fruitless, and the short, thick rope bound to the immovable boulder made her come back.

She felt her thoughts panicking, which she knew by experience was followed by a panting, grey hopelessness and, as predicted, tears already pricked her eyes, but a new thought came.

She thought of freedom.  Of sky.  Of lightness.  This time, the boulder did not fill with memories to drag her back.  It did not fill with a to-do list.  It did not fill with guilt.  Amanda thought of freedom without any specific "how" of getting it.  She thought, and she gasped when the rope snapped.

What are good qualities in a friend? Boy/girlfriend?

Amy helped me bury the body.  She was such a good friend.  I miss her terribly.

I guess I should back up a little.

Even though high school students desperately want to fit in and have loads of friends and dress "right" and know all the right pop culture, they each live in a tiny, selfish bubble.  I suppose some don't, but I sure did.  My bubble swirled around me reflecting me back to me and showing me that I was put-upon and I was unique and I was suffering like no one else had in the history of the world.  I didn't notice, or care, that friends of mine, like Amy, were suffering, too.  I was suffering worse.  No one could understand... except, maybe, that strange, elusive creature: a boyfriend.

I wanted, more than anything, a boyfriend.  The desperation began in earnest during 8th grade.  At The 8th Grade Dinner Dance (the first time we all got dressed up and behaved like gentlemen and ladies), I wore a skirt with my shorts hidden underneath, a pair of sneakers, two pairs of socks, and some horrid shirt with a cute collar.  I boogied without moving my feet with my group of girl friends.  Amy looked fabulous, and she wore pink heels.  At one point during the evening, Amy let me borrow them and I strutted around, trying to get a boy--any boy--to notice.  I would have danced with anyone if he had asked me, including the band director, who, in hindsight, was surely gay.  Mr. Phillips said to me as I clicked by, "Tonight's your night!"  I believed him.  He was wrong.  Amy asked for her shoes back.  I went home still having never been kissed.

What is the last book you have read?

The travel agency couldn't guarantee where I would emerge, they couldn't guarantee my safety, and they couldn't guarantee I'd be able to return.  I didn't care.

Most people who traveled via InterPlane Agency were thrill seekers.  Adventurers.  Wealthy beyond imagining and bored with living their pampered lives.  I was none of these.  I sought comfort.  I was a chicken.  I had to sell everything I had to afford the trip, and I even had to lie on a loan application.  Banks don't like it when their loans are used to send the person owing money to a world from which they can't send payments.  I had never had a pampered life, and I was too scared and stressed and depressed to be bored.

The last book I read was Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin, an excellent book of short stories all revolving around the ability to take vacations into alternative dimensions.  As she does in much of her writing, Le Guin explores alien ways of thinking and, in doing so, highlights humankind's faults and difficulty with empathy.

Do you support euthanasia?

I woke up in the middle of the night to growling bowels.  This was when I learned that growling bowels in the middle of the night is a sign.  A terrible sign.  I got to the bathroom and couldn't decide which end to put over the toilet first.  My head won and my underwear lost.

Wasn't I empty yet?  How could there be more?  The consistency and color changed, but it didn't stop the heaving and churning.  I lost a concept of time, knowing only my traitorous body.  When I finished heaving, I would kneel before the sink and rinse my burning mouth.  Eventually, I couldn't get up high enough to reach the water taps.  I no longer cared about the cleanliness of the bathroom floor, the toilet or myself.  I wanted the agony of my quivering digestive system to end, and I didn't care how.

My head lay on the curved carpet that hugged the front of the toilet.  I made bargains in my head.  Please don't let me throw up again.  Please calm down.  Please don't open me up and flush me out again.  If I hold really, really still, will you stop?

24 hour flu.  One day of my life.  I lay there, shaking my head slowly from side to side, willing my body to obey, but my thoughts were detached, too.  If I had to feel like this all the time, like a cancer patient in treatment, could I make it?  Would I want to?  My frightened, honest voice said I would rather die than feel like this.

Pageant Question 38: The late Andy Warhol once said that everyone is famous for fifteen minutes. In your opinion, whose fifteen minutes are up?

Most people blamed the internet, but it was more than that.  It was desperation.  Making a viral video became a version of playing the Lottery.  The Lottery was always a tax on the poor who wished for a better life.  Casinos were the same, which is why cities that added casino gambling as a way to boost their economies stayed slums.

I had worked at the Hauden County SPCA since I was a teenager volunteering for a church school credit.  I loved the animals and the work so much, when they offered me a job, I stayed.  I stayed all the way through college and I stayed when I graduated.  I was known as The Cat Girl because I seemed to have a way with the felines.  It was two years ago that I noticed a trend in the people who came looking for cats.  They didn't choose them the way people used to choose their cats, and they didn't "test them out" the way people used to.  I tried to describe it to my coworkers, but it was such a subtle change, and people were adopting, so all was good, right?

The economy, which had been on the upswing, had the floor yanked out from under it by gridlock and anti-regulation, "freedom" lovers.  There was nothing free about what they did for the majority of the world.  It was like a roller-coaster drop and the riders were deeply shaken.  Those running the ride took our money and grinned.  The Lottery and casino revenues were higher than ever.  That's when the first couple came into the SPCA and asked for a, and I quote, "a retarded cat."

"You want what?"

The girl snapped her gum and said, "A retarded cat."  She read the descriptions on the cat cages, but kept her distance.  I looked at the guy she was with, but he was peering intently into the cage with Heifer, a huge black and white shorthair, four years old and rescued after his just as overweight owner died.

"What about this one?" he poked his fingers into the cage.  "It's super fat."

"Fat's okay, but retarded would be better," she crossed her arms and looked at me, waiting.

"May I ask... why?"

She chewed and blinked at me.  "No.  Come on, Shawn.  They don't have any here."

As she dragged him out of the cat room, I heard him whine, "I still say a really stupid dog would work!"

It was a week after that we received a cat from Animal Control that had been exposed to spray paint fumes on purpose.

Pageant Question 14: If you could be someone else, who would you be, and why?

I was twenty-seven years old when I realized how close thirty was.  I had told myself since I turned twenty that thirty was my new mile marker.  It had been twenty, but the dreams of my teen years were pretty lame and clearly weren't working out.  I had wanted to be a famous drummer, but I never set aside enough time to practice on the secondhand Ludwig set in my room.  It wasn't all my fault; I couldn't play when anyone was home, but many opportunities I did have I lost to video games.  If I had been more determined to achieve my dream rather than simply being attached to the idea of it, I would have found a way.  My other teen dream was to get laid by Megan Huggs, and that didn't work out, either.

At twenty-seven, I had my own apartment, and I still had my drum set, though it was filthy with dust.  I had nearly gotten an associate's degree in Criminal Justice, but it turned out that while I enjoyed watching television crime shows, I despised learning about actually doing it.  I worked as "Collections and Recovery Specialist" for a bank, which means I called people on the phone asking for money they owed.  It was sucking the life right out of me.  I wasn't even good at it because on a great many calls, despite management's training intervention, I would still just apologize profusely and hang up on them.  I was not motivated.  I was not a team player.  I did not have a positive and friendly attitude.  I was not a self-starter.  I was not even detail-oriented.

One morning, when my alarm went off as six for my bleary-eyed shower and cereal breakfast, I turned it off.  Not snooze.  Off.  I didn't go back to sleep, either.  What I did was ponder that in three years, I would be thirty.  I also pondered that if I didn't formulate a new plan for my life, I would find myself at thirty-seven looking at forty.  Then forty-seven looking at fifty.  Then... well, what?  Would I be looking back on my life instead of forward and wondering what I ever did?  I pondered in bed for an hour as the sun rose without any answer then I must have fallen back to sleep because I dreamed.

First I dreamed I was a woman.  Now get this straight: I'm not transsexual and I don't cross-dress.  It was just a dream.  I had just come home from shopping and I was taking off my heels and my husband and kids came to greet me.  The house was spectacular, and I knew we had a maid.  I was looking forward to our upcoming vacation to the Virgin Islands and the new bikini I bought.  This dream was hyper-realistic, unlike my normal, bleary dreams, and it switched me smoothly into someone else.  A man this time, with a beard, which I have never had because my facial hair is the sad, patchy hair of a seventeen year old.  I was sitting on the porch of my cabin smoking a pipe and all was well with the world.  I had a feeling of contentment I had never had in real life.  My dream switched me one last time into a kid.  I'm not sure if I was a boy or a girl, but, man, I had talent.  I played piano and I was giving a concert in what I knew was Carnegie Hall, though I'm sure it didn't look quite like the real thing.  When I finally woke it was nine and with utmost certainty I knew what my dream meant.  It was a dramatic representation of change.  I needed to become someone else to be happy.

361

Her lungs burned with every breath, her saliva felt thick, and it was only sheer force of will that kept her feet pounding one after the other after the other.  Running had never been a passion for Julia.  It had never been a vague wish, like, "I wish I could be a runner."  Julia disliked running and wondered why people would subject themselves to it.  She could see her goal, which gave her the boost she had heard about but never experienced.  She almost thought she could feel the fabled "runner's high", though that was probably just the dizzy relief of knowing she was almost done.  Almost there.  Almost safe.

343

We watched from inside the house, my sisters and I, as people came and picked through the piles of garbage we had put out earlier that day.  It was expected that some would show up to go through what we had sorted and left on the porch as "good", but what we hadn't expected was that grownups would dig into the bags and boxes at the curb, stuffed with trash.  One man, cigarette dangling from his mouth and coughing into the frigid night air, loaded the garbage onto a tarp and dragged it across the street to his small house.  My younger sisters were horrified and wanted to yell at them to go away.  "Don't they know we put the good stuff on the porch?  Why isn't anyone looking up here?"  Annabelle was probably mad that all her hard work wasn't being appreciated, though she had done the least of the three of us.

315

Her face was hot and her eyes were dry and stung a little.  It was late, but Julia still had so much work to do.  What did it matter, she thought.  None of this matters.  The cleaning crew's vacuum had long since faded away, but here she was, still, pushing papers over her desk.  Copy.  Internal mail.  File.  Repeat.  Collate.  Staple.  File.  Repeat.  Julia's hands were dry and she was sore from sitting, forgetting even her own body as she went through the motions of work, work, work.  In her mind, she shoved all the papers off her desk in one swing of the arm, kicked the file drawer shut so hard the cabinet fell against the next, and yanked the phone from the jack, whipping it across the room.  In reality, she wrote dates, signed papers, filed, repeated.

313

Imagine a city where more than half its population has left within the past forty years.  The people who remain cannot afford the upkeep of their houses, nor do they even wish to keep them at all.  If a family still lingers in the city, they will dump their home at the first chance.  A house, for example, in the middle of what had been a thriving part of the city, was dumped for $12,000--more than $50,000 less than assessed value, which was already tens of thousands less than what it should have been.  The house was snapped up by professional landlords and stuffed with tenants, including a family of ten in an illegal apartment in the attic.  The attic burned.  The house emptied.  Although it was salvageable, who wanted to invest in a partly burned home on a street where anyone could easily purchase crack?  Windows were broken and the house was pillaged of materials.  Eventually, the grand, 3,500 square foot house, built in the 1800s, was torn down.  A weedy lot remains.

Now, put a natural wonder nearby.  So nearby that in the quiet of the night, from that weedy lot, you can hear the thundering waters of nature, cascading over a mighty cataract.  Welcome to Niagara Falls, New York.

303

Escobar leaned back, the white leather of the couch creaking with his weight.  Sammy shifted from foot to foot, dabbing a handkerchief on his forehead.  "Jose," Escobar addressed one of his bodyguards without taking his eyes off Sammy, "what do you think we should do with this one?"  Jose smiled behind his mirrored sunglasses.  "What do you think?"  Esocobar and Jose laughed while Sammy's brain swirled for a way out.  Any way out.

297

There was no warning.  The front door exploded inside with the force of the battering ram held by the two police officers on the front stoop.  A stream of black-clad officers flowed into the house, spilling into every room.  Amber had been drawing upstairs when she heard the splintering boom and felt the house shake.  As the men were shouting directions and updates to one another, Amber scrambled into her closet, pushing aside clothes and climbing the shelves like a monkey.  She shimmed up the last bit, bare feet pressing one side of the closet, her back bracing on the other, as she shoved the attic hatch open with her head and fingertips.  Amber climbed inside and slid the wood square back into place.  Wasting no time, she scuttled on her hands and knees across the loose plywood over the floor joists, past the tubs of Christmas decorations, the boxes of old tax documents, and the black plastic bags with baby clothes and forgotten linens.  She could hear the men shouting on the second floor now, and she kept pushing further back to the far corner where she knew there was a hidden door behind more boxes, even older than the rest.

296

Of all the lies movies have taught me over the years, I think the worst is that I believed that I could do anything in a reasonable amount of time.  I didn't think that I could do it within the space of a movie--that's ridiculous--but I did believe the movie time suggestion that within my lifetime I could accomplish goals.  Lies.  Dirty, rotten lies.

My days are spent on a treadmill.  My brain, on the shortest treadmill of them all.  Repetition, repetition, repetition.  Nothing accomplished.  Dishes pile up again and again.  Laundry.  Mail.  Shower.  Eat.  Sleep.  Dentist and doctor and optometrist appointments.  Repeat.  Holidays.  Repeat.  The things I dreamed of doing remained out of my grasp for the daily repetition.  My brain rehashed what it wanted and wondered why the hell wasn't I making progress?  I should have accomplished by now!  Where had the time gone?  Why couldn't I get motivated?  Why couldn't I get out of welding to accomplish my dream of being a professional dancer?  What happened to making the band and winning the hearts of millions?  Shouldn't I be able to save Christmas, or teach the town to dance or preserve the human race?  Goddamn movies.  Lies.

290

Working in the cube farm fielding customer service calls made Mark feel like a rat.  Grey, carpeted cube walls looked like a rat maze in some mad laboratory where the experiment was how much boredom the rats could take before killing themselves.  Everyone lived for breaks, official or stolen.  Minutes without a call were precious.  Bathroom breaks were extended as long as was possible without looking suspicious.  Breaks were the call agents' cheese.

Mark shuffled towards his cubicle, inside right, third in, fourth from the end.  There were no decorations allowed and the grey was unrelenting.  The panels were supposed to block sound, but they didn't fully function, quite like the customer service agents.  Mark's work clothes were wrinkled, grey and ill-fitting.  He had ironed them for his first week before realizing the futility of the effort.  Nobody cared, least of all Mark.

If anyone had looked up from their own cubes, they could have seen Mark's head and shoulders bobbing past.  His hair was mostly dark though streaked with grey on the sides.  It was always too long.  Whenever he got it cut, he looked uncomfortable until it grew shaggy again.  The longer it got, the curlier it became and the tips poked his eyes giving him a twitch when he shook it away.  There was only one shirt he owned that wasn't stained, but it was lost in his apartment, and he had forgotten about it.

286

It was supposed to be  "name your price" sale, but Sam was still embarrassed to offer the church volunteer her measly three dollars for the paper shopping bag she had filled to overflowing.  Sam sat on one of the old upholstered chairs for sale and looked at her finds.  She tried counting the individual items, but kept losing track.  It would cost far more at a thrift store, but she couldn't afford thrift stores anymore.  Sam felt her eyes prickle as a complex wave of nostalgia and pity and helplessness surged through her.  She calmed herself with a resigned sigh.  Three dollars was all she had, so if they said no, so be it.

267

Kell's fingers held her chin, tipped up to see eye to eye.  Lane blinked and her mouth went dry for Kell's eyes seemed to hold the world.  His dark, swooping eyebrows were always so expressive, and now they showed caring beyond that which she had ever experienced.  Eyes, wide open, taking in and showing everything.  The moment stretched and held and Lane would go back to it again and again in her memory, wondering what had become of Kell.

255

The end comes too fast, no matter how long it takes.  Life takes far longer than anyone imagines, and days flit by like a calendar in a breeze.  Marjoram was feeling the passage of time and anxiousness bubbled up inside of her.  It was always at the worst moments, Marjie felt, that she decided her life was being wasted.  At this moment, it was being wasted in a conference room on the sixth floor of an office building in a city that needed so much work it made Marjie cry when she thought too hard about it.  The desire to be out of the room, out of the building, out into the street to even just pick up garbage was threatening to overwhelm her.  A polite cough to her right nearly made her yelp, but her fellow worker only pursed her lips in a smile and gave a glance to Marjoram's bouncing leg.  Marjie played the dance, smiled and apologized in a mutter, though in her head she swore at the lady.

227

The back of Harry's fist connected with the side of her head and she reeled, giving him enough time to shift to a more stable stance.  The litter-filled hallway was cramped and dangerous.  Harry had already had a pile of old furniture bounce off his shoulder as it fell and he knew it would hurt later.  Unfortunately, his reverse punch didn't knock her out and she came at him hard from the shadows.  Harry blocked and gave room as he could, knowing the end of the hall was somewhere close behind him giving no escape.

225

It would have been a fine evening with anyone other than Greg.  Sharon had never been to an underground nightclub before and she thought the sweaty, sticky atmosphere and thumping music was great.  She leaned in and cupped her hand to Greg's ear, "Would you like to dance?"  Greg rolled his eyes and went back to looking at the other patrons, having far more fun than Sharon.  She kept watching Greg.  He scratched his ear with his left index finger, drawing his hand casually in front of his face, sniffing it on the way by.  She wondered why she was there, or anywhere, with him.

170

It is quite amazing how your priorities change when money has no importance any longer.  When property has no meaning.  When making sure you have food and water and a safe place to sleep are your main concern, that is, when Death is not standing right in front of you.  When Death blocks the sidewalk, even food, water and safe sleeping arrangements don't matter.