Vanilla Bean Ice-Cream

There are approximately four hundred twenty-six flavors of ice-cream in the world. Many of these are entirely unknown to Americans. Carl, however, has tasted every flavor he has ever chanced upon. Carl is an ice-cream king. 

Carl owns an ice-cream shop, unsurprisingly, and he thoroughly enjoys his life as an ice-cream connoisseur and provider. His shop is named: Carl's Custards, and children and adults alike come from all over the city and state to taste his fabulous ice-creams and frozen custards. He had flavors like "mushroom-pecan," and "bacon" in his store. Every month he put on special a flavor from around the world. Carl went to ice-cream conventions. 

He loved other things besides ice-cream, of course. Most of these did not love him back quite in the same way, but Carl had always been a little over-dramatic. He loved the woman who worked as a cashier in the store across the street from his: Lisa. She reminded of Vanilla Bean ice-cream. He loved his fourteen regulars, like Callie, the twelve year-old obese girl who lived down the street, and John, the recently divorced and suddenly much happier man that came in every day after lunch for the same thing. The two of them reminded him of mint-pistasio and cherry-chocolate ice-creams, respectively. 

He loved his small but quiet, old dog named Abu. Abu reminded him of that bacon ice-cream, lovable, but a little strange. He loved his town house with the blue door and the neighbors who partied into the small hours of the night and never invited him to drink with him. He was older than they were, anyway. Carl loved his full name: Carl Macy Jones. He loved his parents and he loved his siblings. 

Carl loved just about everything but himself. He reminded himself of lobster ice-cream, one flavor with which he never was really satisfied. He was about 100 pounds overweight, which he hated about himself; he had few friends, and fewer best friends, and he had never really loved another human being romantically who requited his love. He loved Lisa, but she barely realized that he existed. 

The lovable ice-cream man decided, one day, to hold an ice-cream-fest. He would invite everyone who worked in the businesses on his block, his regulars, and anyone else who would buy a ticket. Free ice-cream samples, prizes and gift-certificates! Carl printed up several hundred fliers to spread around his city block and went door to door, imploring several businesses to tape them up in their windows. 

He walked down the street, passing an old, smiling, homeless man with worn out shoes. He handed out fliers to passersby, some happy to receive the small slips of colored paper, most others anxious and annoyed, hurrying to get on with their lives, uninterrupted by fat men with fliers. 

He handed the flier to a lady who became, the moment he looked at her, Lisa. She stopped walking and smiled. 

"I do love your ice-cream, Carl. Thank you." 

He stared at her for a moment and smiled back, nearly dropping his fliers. 

"Will you come? To the..." he asked, his eyes searching for a deeper answer. 

"Absolutely. I can't wait," she responded, happily. 

The rest of the day was a bit of a daze for Carl. The rest of the week, really. And she did show up, staying for most of the day in the shop, eating small samples and smiling at people, and at Carl. His vanilla-bean girl, knowing his name. 

I've decided to post a new one of these every time I finish the next one after it. So yeah. 

The Running Girl

There are not many people in this world whose lives revolve entirely around something other than themselves. Only those who have found their soul-mates or such things really experience this kind of life. Lynn Fletcher's life revolved, like most peoples' lives, around herself. She did not like the word soul-mate because it sounded too final, like destiny, which was also a word she despised. She had decided a long time ago that she would decide what would happen in her life, and nobody had any say about it. 

Lynn did everything for herself. She jogged around the city, 4.23 miles, every other day. She did this because she liked looking at herself and reminding herself that she was, in fact, prettier than many if not all of her friends. She also liked to have men stare at her when she wore her expensive, fashionable, and rather skimpy clothes. She thoroughly enjoyed being able to say that she was in shape and healthy. 

Lynn worked at a job her father had secured for her. She made enough money to live in a nice apartment and buy nice things, and she never gave anyone but her direct family birthday presents. She much preferred receiving gifts over giving them, but she wanted to seem like a good person to her family at least. She always gave Christmas presents that seemed expensive but were actually cheap. But she always gave Christmas presents. 

Lynn had a system. She also had a husband, but her system took priority the majority of the time because it was a system that decided who she could trust and who she could not. If a person she met and who became a regular part of her life had not given her a present by the end of the first year she had met them, she did not trust them. (Her husband had given her a rather expensive gift which allowed her enough trust to eventually marry him.) 

One day when jogging, Lynn saw her husbands' car pass her on the road. She wondered what he could possibly be doing driving home in the middle of the day. This was the first sign for Lynn that her system might need to be redesigned. She ignored it, ran the rest of her jog and went home. She arrived to find several boxes of her husbands things packed, sitting innocently in the hallway. Her husband was at the table, signing papers. 

No hello. No I'm home. Just...

"I want a divorce." 

Lynn, dripping in a bit more sweat than she typically excreted on her run, turned to the bathroom for the shower. 

"Stop, Lynn. I'm sorry. I can't do it." 

She turned to her husband. She felt tears coming to her eyes but she did not speak. She walked to the table, signed the papers, and went to take a shower. 

There was a moment, for maybe thirty-seconds, where Lynn broke down. It happened when she sat down to eat her dinner. A marinated chicken breast coupled with milk and potatoes stared up at her from just one side of the table. Just one side. Just one fork and one knife and then it hit her. 

Her system was wrong. It didn't tell her anything about who she could trust and who she couldn't. That much was made obvious by her husbands' betrayal. She had to discover a new system, a new method. She thought about it all, long and hard. She finally decided to reevaluate every relationship she'd ever built. She had the time, now that she had no husband... 

And that's when it happened. Lynn broke. She cried and shook, her chest heaving and she cried out her fear. She dried her tears and went on another run. It felt good. 

P.S.- I've decided to post one of these every Monday, because I usually have that day off from work and it also gives me time to write. 

Gerald's Shoes

Gerald M. Cotton stared at his shoes. He did this a lot now, because there was not much else to do. His shoes were old. They were brown, but not the nice sort of brown you see in shoe commercials; they were a vomit-hued and aged brown that did not in any way flatter him. The laces were worn, frayed and discolored. They were bumpy and twisted, and he thought they must look like the inside of his head. Bumpy and twisted. The soles of his shoes were nearly worn through and so used to the shape of his feet that sometimes he forgot he was wearing any shoes at all. They didn't offer any of the warmth and comfort they used to, though, so he was quickly reminded whenever a breeze rolled by. 

There were always several moments of interest throughout Gerald's day. Four school buses passed under his bridge every school day, and in the third bus, sitting in the fifteenth row was a boy who played a portable video game, but always looked up at Gerald as the bus passed by. There was a lady who drove by in her nice car every day and had nothing in her car except her. She was always glaring. There was a twenty-something girl who jogged on the sidewalk on the other side of the road under the bridge every other day. She visibly sped up when she passed under the bridge, probably for fear of the men living on the other side. 

Gerald saw the same cars every day, the same things repeated over and over in a useless, endless routine that nearly sickened him. If he had enough food, he would have puked it up, but the little food he got needed to be kept down in his stomach. Every night, just before dark, he would walk four blocks to the soup kitchen on the corner of 4th and Jefferson. After eating his meal for the day, he would walk back. He stared at his feet, his two smallest toes on each foot poking out of his shoes through worn holes, sock-less and wrinkled and sad. 

Gerald had optimism, though. It was the uneducated optimism that children and happy people had, and Gerald was therefore not sure why he had it. But he did. He smiled at the school boy and nodded happily to anyone who looked at him from the safety of their glass, metal and rubber cocoons. He was not, however, happy. He felt like he had missed an opportunity sometime around the age of thirty and he could not ever remember what that opportunity had been. Probably something wonderful. It must have been great. He would have been a star or a rich person or an astronaut. He would have had really nice shoes. He laughed whenever he thought of just how many shoes he would have had. Dozens! Hundreds; so many shoes he would have been sick of them. 

A person could get lost in his own mind for hours, just imagining himself in another place. Gerald did this far too often. Most of the time, he thought he was in a glass house with fans blowing nice breezes at his face and a small servant giving him grapes. He rarely slept anymore, or at least not for very long periods of time. His entire life was a dream sequence, sometimes conscious, most times not. 

One day, he began walking to his daily soup kitchen meal and he turned down the wrong corner. He looked at the buildings and the cracks in the road and the fading, peeling paint in a fascination he had not felt for years. He walked and he saw the people, and they were scared of him, but he smiled and told himself that was okay. He watched lovely women prance through the streets, and saw business men watching them just like he was watching them. Gerald saw men like himself, down and ugly, nowhere to go. He motioned to them, to join him in his walk of fascination. They glared and turned away. He kept walking. He didn't stop. He stared at his shoes and he walked until he could walk no more, and he felt a little bit happier. 

The Un-incredible and Slightly Boring Life of Cathy Jordan.

It is a fast paced world in which Cathy Jordan lives, and she lives for every new day. Thoughts are too slow to be useful, instinct is key. Dates pass and assignments are doled out and accomplished in record times. The world revolves around the work Cathy Jordan does. 

Every morning, Cathy Jordan wakes up to a very normal and well-known alarm clock beeping, puts on her pair of store-brand gray slippers with the hole in the left sole, and goes to the bathroom. On the way to the toilet, she passes a desk on which sits a clutter of papers and bills, but also a pen in a small cup that reminds her of her brother who had passed away four years ago. 

Cathy Jordan arrives at her workplace just before nine in the morning, nearly every morning, and she performs her duties adequately. Every morning, just as she comes to the coffee room, her coworkers fall into a scared and annoyed silence, and one person usually says, simply, "Hello, Cathy." And Cathy Jordan responds, "Hello, (coworkers name)," leaves after her morning cup of coffee is in hand, and begins to work. She types things on old computer screens and watches for memos about meetings and changes in the rules. 

If there is ever a problem in the office, she takes care of the trouble-maker before any higher power ever can, because she is efficient in the art of helping when it is not her place to help. She takes the person into a separate room, explains to them the problem with their particular behavior, and smiles at the office manager on her way back to her desk as she leaves the helpless trouble-maker behind. They stare at the window between the office and the separate room and wish they had never come to work with such an excruciatingly horrid person as Cathy Jordan. More often than not, the problem is fixed, though it is rarely because the particular trouble-maker quit, most did not have the opportunity to do so. 

Cathy Jordan never considers beginning to work at another job because she has a desk with a window near the water cooler and the restrooms. She also has all her pictures of family members she never speaks to and friends she never calls on her desk in strategic places so that she cannot really see them very well, but other people can and will maybe believe that she has many loved ones. Every time somebody passes her desk, she secretly hopes they will stop for just a moment and ask about the picture of the blond child or the brunette man and his happy wife. Nobody ever asks but Cathy never allows herself to be distracted enough by that fact that it affects her work-flow. She is a very focused woman. 

Every night, Cathy Jordan walks to her average, useful car in the company parking lot, her heels clicking on the painted concrete. She drives home and passes several bridges with homeless men living beneath them in impoverished, starving comfort, and she pretends not to notice them, nor the stop sign at a corner that nobody ever drives down but her. 

She drives home and fixes herself a dinner with cheaper, off-brand products and never eats fresh fruit, only canned, and she flips through channels on her average sized TV. She decides on the same show every single time, even though she misses the first ten minutes while she tries to pretend that she could decide on a different show if she wanted to. She likes to keep her options open. 

As she goes to bed, she passes by that same cluttered desk and stares for a moment at the pen in the cup and then she walks through the door. She arranges her gray slippers next to her bed, pulls back the covers, and spends the next half hour crying with a pain that cannot be helped by medication because she would never admit to anyone that she wants to die. In the morning, the tears will have dried and Cathy Jordan will begin again. 

JFYI- there will be more of these stories coming. I'm working on a one-page story book. Enjoy! 

I Would Walk Some Number of Miles

The trip from my hometown to my college town is a long one when driving all alone. It takes more than two and a half hours and, for a girl who's never driven that far on her own before, is extremely tedious. There were too few starry bright spots throughout the trip.

There was one, however, that sticks to my mind incessantly, though I drove here almost two weeks ago. It happened during the final leg of the journey, and I was sorely tempted to turn around and take a picture, but I didn't. I will resort to describing it through the medium of feeble words. 

First, the sky. The sky was dark. A purply, blue color, the color of an immense storm from which you cannot escape. The way the world would look always if we lived in the sea. The color of the night sky lit up by spotlights. It was huge, clouds high in the atmosphere, and towering, crawling toward the highway menacingly. A kind of storm you knew would have low thunder and the kind of lightning that is shrouded by others clouds, so you never see the line of light, only the clouds lit up subsequently. The sky takes up most of the world, here. 

Next, the land. This is farmland Missouri. Smalls hills of course grasses and tall, barley-colored stalks of something not quite wheat. It is mid-winter and the world is windy and bleak. The wind on the plains is harsh and ever-lasting, nothing to stop it or slow it down. The grass sways violently, then gently, beautiful no matter what. 

And there in the midst of all that is a large, old, gray sewer pipe, spilling out near the road. The water in its basin is still and not any specific color. The wind does not reach it because the land dips here and cups the water in a cache of soft earth and solid concrete. The grass is green. 

And there are birds. Not more than thirty, if my memory is correct. White, small (at least from where I was looking), and frenzied. They dove gracefully into the water, pecking at some small, uncatchable specimen there, taking turns of two or three at a time. They seemed to be dancing on the air, letting their bodies plummet toward the earth and arching back up in cursive motions. They were smooth and fluid, wonderfully living. If standing closer, one might have seem the fevered way in which they fought for whatever was down there in the water, but from a distance, in a silent car, the scene is beautiful beyond measure. 

And then it was past. And I thought about turning around. But what picture can do that justice? None that I could take. I drove on. 

Whether the Weather is Normal or Not

Leaves swirling. Rustling, the rattling of bones or dead flora. Curling limbs of thin, paper skin. Leaves swirling.
Sky purple. Colors bleeding into one another, a painter's paradise. The world a snow globe of cloud and sunset. Sky purple.
Wind crying. A kind of animal, primal, lovely sound, whispering in the ears of people. Plastic bags rolling in parking lots. Wind crying.
Air cool. Jacket weather that is appreciated only by those who have recently dealt with extreme's of heat or cold. Air cool.
Halloween weather. This is how I would describe it. Creepy and hauntingly beautiful. Variations in the day, strange images caught in the mind. That was today, and today is January ninth, 2009. And this... is this normal? I can't help but wonder.
I don't know much about science, or climate change, global warming. I've read a book, watched a movie, and beyond that have no interest. I do a bad job of being 'green.' I am politically conscious about a few things, but, like most people, I don't have motivation to care much beyond that. I'm a little ashamed to admit it.
There are, however, moments in my life that make me want to take action. After I finished "Field Notes from a Catastrophe" by Elizabeth Kolbert, for instance, I was ready to write letters and protest in the streets. I'm not much of a risk taker, however, and I let these feelings pass most times without much change in routine. I am slowly beginning to take more action, now. I see the world and its idiosyncrasies and I realize that things are changing, that things are wrong. I recycle more and more, and I think about this problem, and I try to think of what I can do.
And I think that must be normal. People cannot be expected to change so drastically and so suddenly as all the scientists are saying we must. The world, and by that I mean the human population within, must be given leeway time. This, of course, leaves for procrastination in humans unwilling to let go of old traditions, and really, there will be cycles beginning there that will not go well for the earth.
I watch the purple sky, leaves swirling at my feet, wind crying in my ears, air cool on my skin. I know something needs to be done to help our world and ourselves. I just don't know what it is, exactly. For now, I can try to appreciate the beauty in my life, and slowly integrate the new ways of the world into my old routines.

On Death and Holidays

Emotional Range. That shock and sadness when you recognize the reality of the situation. The headache you get from crying so much that your sinuses swell as though you're three days sick. The denial and denial and denial you feel. The way you expect to see them as you walk around the corner, in their usual spot, and happy. 

This December and two days into January, two people close to me have died. My mom's best friend, my aunt, my second-mother, Lauren. My dog, my puppy, my Buddy. Death is not something to which I am accustomed. Pets have died before. Dogs and cats, and usually that's okay. People are something different. People you do not expect to die at fifty. People you do not expect to die. 

And Lauren was healthy. Bike-riding, wine-tasting, cooking, laughing, loving Lauren. Bright colors and dreams Lauren. Animals and pictures Lauren. Caring mother and cursing friend Lauren. She was alive. Healthy and alive. 

And then she wasn't. And that was unexpected. For me, the process was surreal. I was gone, at college, when she went to the hospital. I was gone when she died. I was gone when her kids cried and needed more comfort than anyone could give. I was gone when her mother tried to believe in a miracle that everyone knew would never come. It was all described to me, in phone calls and emails. Everything real, everything not. 

I came home, with a bit of first-semester-of-college-finished glow, but mostly wet-eyed and in denial. Still. I was incapable of believing it had happened. For me, it hadn't. I wasn't sure what to do about that. The only bit of closure I could grasp was at the service they held for her. Friends and family, slideshows and speeches, and a goddamn ton of tears. 

Sometime after that, I went to their house. Tim and Lauren. The couple. That was how they were referred to; Tim and Lauren. 'We're going to Tim and Lauren's house.' Now, just Tim. 'We're going to Tim's house.' Whenever my mom said it like that, I was screaming on the inside. Wishing she could still say that second, precious name. Wishing we could hold on to that past. Knowing that we couldn't. It was Tim's house now. Tim and the kids and a few remaining memories. Ashes and sand and brightly colored bangles. 

...

It was different when Buddy died. The second I saw him, home from college over Thanksgiving break and again for Christmas, I knew the end was coming. It was expected. And that's easier, and harder. 

Easier because you can try to mentally prepare yourself, harder because that is impossible to do. Easier because the denial comes beforehand, harder because it still comes afterward. 

That denial. Tough feeling to understand. As though any feeling is easy. Denial that he's stopped breathing, even as he's in your arms. Denial that his eyes don't see you and his ears are not moving of their own, happy accord. Denial that he can't feel your tears, that he won't get up in a moment or two and lick them from your face. 

Realization. The moment when you walk around the corner from the kitchen to the living room and you expect to see him there. And he's not. And, of course, you know why, but... why not? Where is he? My puppy. 

We always called him that. Puppy. He never was a puppy with us, we got him two years into his life. But he was young, and wonderful, and happy. Mr. Buddy. He was alive. Soft and reddish-gold and handsome. Constantly ignoring the constant affection of Nina, one of our cats. She loved him. 

My holiday season. 

Good gifts, family time, friends with problems of their own. Death and sorrow, joy and laughter. Lots of emotional range.