A Tiny Bit Mortal

by Lindsay Bassett

  A Tiny Bit Mortal

  Lindsay Bassett

  Copyright © 2015 by Lindsay Bassett

  Cover illustrated by Scott Wilson

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-4951-4617-6

  To Emily.

  I finally got around to telling your story.

  I

  Strange Faces

  I poured a cup of coffee, spilling half across the counter. I checked the clock. “7:49 am, shoot.” I said.

  With coffee in hand, I put on my socks one handed. Eyeballing the clock, I saw that a precious minute had passed. I wiggled each of my feet into my black Mary Jane shoes. Grabbing my coat, I flung it around my shoulders like a cape without bothering to put my arms in because I was on the verge of breaking a sweat.

  Flying out the front door with my coat flapping behind me, I locked the deadbolt from the outside in expert time. I did a quick dance down the stairwell, out onto the sidewalk, where I felt the sharp October morning air chill my clammy skin.

  Fishing my keys out of my purse mid jog, I bounded toward my two decades old, beat up black Honda Civic. It was parallel parked next to the sidewalk near my house. After fumbling with the car door lock, I cannon-balled into the car and sprinkled coffee across the already stained up tan passenger seat.

  After turning the key in the ignition, loud, energetic music blasted in my ears, startling me. I stabbed the button on the CD player to turn the music down and to change it to another album containing a classical mix. Looking up to see the car in front of me was about to pull out, I took my hand off the gear shifter and sighed.

  A figure moving in the distance caught my gaze, standing out amongst the morning pedestrians on the sidewalk. There was something unnatural about him that broke the pattern of movement, like his pacing was off.

  Taking a sip of my coffee, I kept my eyes on him. Squinting, I noticed that the fabric of his clothing was rustling as if he were walking in a storm. Looking over to a nearby tree, it stood still. There wasn’t the slightest breeze outside.

  As he got closer, I waited for him to come into focus, but instead I felt a rush of confusion. I couldn’t remember anything about him, not even the color of his clothes. Shifting in my seat, I looked out the back window. He wasn’t there. I looked to the other side of the street. Not there either.

  Looking down into my coffee cup, I tried to process the event. Deciding it must have been the combination of morning shadows and a wind from a passing vehicle, I boxed the whole thing up in my mind and put it away in a far off corner.

  Shifting into drive, I pulled out into the street and prepared to face the world again with classical violins singing in the background. My world was my quiet lab at Carlson Tech Corp where I conducted biomedical research alongside Rick, my awkward colleague. After three years of working with me Rick was still uncomfortable with my presence.

  I didn’t think I was run-way model material, but I had a nice figure, due to my marathon mornings trying to make it to work on time because that damned alarm clock has that stupid snooze button. I also had a pair of breasts, which made me a woman, and women scared the hell out of Rick.

  My coffee was getting cold, so I soldiered it down with one hand while I shut the creaky door of my car with the other. I walked across the parking lot, through the building, and settled into the lab. After shedding my coat, I sifted through notes while I tapped my pencil on my leg. I then peered through my microscope and saw the same damned thing I saw the day before.

  Frustrated, I threw my pencil onto my desk, which bounced off and launched halfway across the room. Rick jumped up out of his chair, completely startled. After giving him an apologetic look, I decided it was already time for a break. I didn’t smoke, but I took “smoke breaks” every few hours just to remind myself I was still on planet earth.

  Pulling on my black wool jacket, I slipped my hands into my pockets, walked down the hall, and pushed my way out of the front door with my shoulder. Feeling a burst of energy from my coffee, I traipsed down the pathway behind the building. Stopping at the end of the pathway where the company had installed a stone bench, I plopped down with a sigh. I positioned myself on the bench like The Thinking Man, hunched over and resting my chin on the back of my hand.

  I let my eyes rest on the swaying trees in the distance. A gust of wind picked up, trembling the leaves on the branches and causing hundreds of them to shed and swirl about in the air as though gravity meant nothing to them. Most people thought of spring as the most alive time of the year for nature, but to me, the fall was most animated.

  There was a breathtaking view of the mountains from where I was sitting. The office and my apartment were both nestled in the mountains of Southern Oregon, in the small city of Ashland. Ashland attracted people for their University, a world renowned Shakespeare Theatre, a downtown area with restaurants catering to foodies and shops to explore for vacationers.

  Shifting my body on the stone bench I let my eyes fall from the view of the mountains down to my feet. I pointed the toe of my shoe into the pathway, sweeping pine needles back and forth. Sometimes, when I saw a rustling in the leaves or an eerie fog, I felt a longing for something more, something magic. Yet, no matter how I poked or prodded things, the laws and theories of physics and the natural world seemed binding.

  Sighing and walking slowly back up the path to the building, I kicked stray pine-cones along the way. Looking up to the familiar brickwork of the outside of the building, I made my way towards the front door. Neither the door nor the building had a sign identifying the company.

  It wasn’t like the company was trying to hide or anything though. Carlson Tech Corp wasn’t built in Ashland to do business with anyone in the area, but for its location, of being exactly halfway between our Portland and Sacramento Offices. The executives held their quarterly meetings there, which I liked to think of as the “Quarterly Interrogations on Progress.”

  After opening the door at the front of the building, I walked in. The tiny lobby contained huge, imposing, metal-forged letters spelling “Carlson Tech Corp” across the wall. I walked passed the receptionist's desk, glancing over at the plastic skeleton sitting in the chair. We quit hiring receptionists because people rarely called or came in. One of the guys put the skeleton there on Halloween as a joke. It was still there years later, untouched.

  I stepped down the hall to my lab, sat down at my desk, and spent two hours reading a document that had been sent down from headquarters. The remainder of the day I spent preparing documentation for my next experiment.

  Some days my work seemed so boring, but I still enjoyed it. I tried to shake off the thought that maybe such a deep love for boring was some sort of mental illness as I headed home to face another Friday night.

  After an uneventful drive home, I threw my purse down onto the kitchen counter and pressed the button on my phone to check my messages on my prehistoric looking land-line phone. It seemed like I was the only one in the city without a smart phone in my hand, but I just couldn’t justify the expense of one with the amount of calls I made.

  My cat, George, meowed at me in a complaining tone until I filled up his bowl. I had learned to hustle and pour quick, to make him stop. He had me trained well.

  I considered calling my mom for a chat, but I knew what she would say: “You are twenty-nine, single, and it’s a Friday night. What the heck are you doing calling your mom?” She worried that the lack of men in my life would leave me old and alone.

  It’s not that I hadn’t been asked out on dates. I had been hit on, even at the bookstore, where it felt the most annoying. It was a book store for goodness-sakes, not a bar. I was there for books.

  There was something about me that made people think they knew me from som
ewhere, despite my complete lack of taking part in things where people could have met me at some point. It wasn’t just a pick up line because half of those that thought they knew me were clearly heterosexual women.

  I’d dated enough men during the first part of my twenties to be sick of it. The problem was they all seemed the same to me. Everything in life was about acquiring things. More money, more success, a better car, a better this and a better that.

  I sighed again and looked at my pajamas in the closet. Of all the shades of gray my wardrobe comprised, my pajamas were another story. My pajamas were full of pinks, baby blues, lace and tiny bows. I felt like that’s who I was when sleeping, but not when awake and in public. I didn’t like standing out.

  Laying out my favorite fuzzy fleece pink pajamas on my bed, I stared at them for a while. Then I said “screw it.” George hopped up on my bed, lay himself on his side with a dramatic flop, and looked at me inquisitively. I sat beside him, scratching behind his ear while he purred.

  The huge bookstore a few miles away in Medford was open late enough. If I had no friends to call on for a Friday evening, I could at least be with books. When I was honest with myself, I preferred the books over the friends.

  Stepping in, and pulling up my light gray tights, I then shimmied into my charcoal gray skirt. After putting on my favorite black scoop necked t-shirt, I smoothed it out over my stomach with my hand. Leaning in towards the mirror, I ran a mascara brush over my eyelashes and a comb through my unruly light brown hair. I didn’t want to disappoint those books looking unkempt. I stepped into my black Mary Jane shoes and pulled my black wool coat over my arms.

  Pausing next to the entryway mirror, I took a look at myself, and let out a "ha." It was odd that no matter how many times I saw myself, I still couldn’t form a clear picture of what I looked like in my mind.

  I could picture every one I’d ever known, but I could only see myself in pieces: green eyes, or long wavy light brown hair. My lips were full and red, which my mom like to refer to as my “pouty lips.” My skin was ivory, which is really just another word for pale. I didn’t tan, or freckle the way my mom did. Those pieces of myself were easy to see, I just couldn’t put them all together to form an image.

  I left the house and drove down the freeway in silence, my hands at ten and two on the wheel, with the sun setting around me. The blue mountains and pink-orange sky were so breathlessly beautiful to me.

  By the time I got into Medford the street lights had lit up. I felt a little guilty twinge of depression by being so alone and so damned excited about the bookstore. It felt so much the same as the week before, and the month before, and the year before. Like déjà vu, except I knew I’d been there before. I had gone to the bookstore way too often.

  Diverting into the coffee store next to the bookstore, I ordered up a latte that I shouldn’t have been drinking that late in the evening. I would be up till 3am thinking about problems at work, but there were worse things I could have been doing to myself.

  Slouching into a sofa with a newspaper, I waited for my drink. I flipped straight to the police reports section, wanting to see what the bad guys were up to that week. After that I’d read the obituaries. I enjoyed reading about the people who died that week, and imagining who they were based on what was said about them. Sighing, I acknowledged my own strangeness.

  Looking up, I noticed someone staring at me and averted my eyes by looking back down at my newspaper. “Oh god,” I thought, “It’s probably a guy.” I tried to read, but the feeling I was being watched was too distracting.

  Working up my best dirty look, I turned my gaze towards the offender. He seemed out of focus, like I had to work hard to see him. It was like when I looked at myself in the mirror, unable to put a picture of it all together in my mind. There was dark hair, conservatively trimmed and sleek like raven’s feathers. His eyes were green, and he had ivory skin. His slacks were gray, and he wore a white button up shirt.

  My face felt hot as I realized I’d been staring. It felt like we were both on pause, staring at each other, in a room of people on fast forward.

  “Emily.” said a chirpy woman’s voice, that sounded like it was one hundred miles away.

  “Emily.” said the voice again, like an echo in a canyon.

  “Emmmily…your coffeeee.” said the voice again, startling me. “Crap,” I thought, “coffee.” Stumbling on my way up from the couch, I grabbed my coffee and thanked the barista with a half smile. She gave me an odd look.

  When I turned around from the counter the man was gone. I contemplated how I might have been fulfilling the “crazy” part of a crazy cat lady as I meandered from the coffee store into the isles of books. Heading straight for customer service, I grabbed the books I had on hold.

  While I stood in line waiting to pay for the books, I shifted my weight from leg to leg impatiently. Attempting to divert my thoughts, I thought about the pajamas I’d set out earlier. I would not let myself think about that man.

  When I pushed open the exit doors and walked out to the parking lot, I thought about the man again. I looked down at my books and tried to think about how I would soon be sitting in my apartment, cozy and reading them.

  When I got to my car I kept failing to find the correct key even though there were only three keys on the ring. Finally making it, my hand was shaking as I started the ignition. I found myself thinking about the man again.

  My mind raced. Was it the lighting? Was I hallucinating? I remembered the blurry man on the sidewalk earlier that morning. “What is happening to me?” I said to myself, hunching over and pressing my forehead on the steering wheel.

  Looking up and out the window, I scanned people getting in and out of their cars. Everything and everyone were completely normal. I slowed my breathing as I tapped my index finger repetitively on the steering wheel. Shifting my car into reverse, I backed out and then made my way from the parking lot to the street.

  As I drove down the interstate, oncoming headlights flashed in the darkness like strobe-lights. Removing one of my hands from my steering wheel, I swiped my hair behind my ear and then stabbed at the button on my CD player. Switching to a different album, I found a song that I knew the words to and sang loudly until I felt too dizzy to think.

  Parking my car on the street near my apartment, I stepped my way along the sidewalk, hyper aware of the rhythm of my breathing and my feet hitting the ground. I was startled by a pack of bar hopping college kids heading towards me, loud and clearly drunk. One of the guys in the group said something loud and slurred at me, like “Heeerytheeere.” Avoiding eye contact, I moved past them and ran up the dimly lit stairwell to my apartment.

  I locked the deadbolt on the door behind me and called for George with a “heeere-kitty-kitty-kitteeee.” He came bounding out from my bedroom and greeted me by rubbing around my legs in figure eights. Crouching down, I pet his soft orange back for a while. If I didn’t pay tribute, he’d try to trip me on my way across the house.

  Wrestling on my pink pajamas, I grabbed my new book and went into my book room. It had every square inch of wall covered in bookshelves. In the center of the room, I kept a dusty blue chaise lounge sofa, and a little coffee table in front of it. It was my sanctuary. Pulling the soft, white fleece throw blanket from the back of the sofa, I read late into the night until my eyes wouldn’t stay open.

  Getting up in the morning I drove straight to the lab, ignoring the whole “Saturday” and “weekend” thing. The whole way I had windows down, enjoying the crisp air and my breath coming out in foggy clouds when I exhaled.

  Shifting into park and removing my keys from the ignition, I opened my creaky car door and stepped out. My feet on the gravel parking lot went crunch, crunch, crunch. I could hear myself breathing. Wrapping my gray and black striped scarf up closer to my ears, I felt like I was alone on another planet that early in the morning.

  The front door was unlocked. It was comforting to know I was not the only one without a life on the weekend. Gr
eeting the plastic skeleton man at the reception desk, I smiled and waved. My sense of humor was still intact, so I felt a little glimmer of hope for my sanity.

  I found Rick at his desk on “his side” of the lab, gave a polite hello, and made my way to my side of the room. We had collaborated some days, but most days we respected each other’s need of silence for concentration.

  Deciding that day was a perfect day to organize my desk, I sifted through paperwork and made a pile of useless documents to shred. I wiped down my desk and lined up all of my pens and notepads like perfect little soldiers in formation.

  Spinning from side to side in my office chair, I thought about how I had evolved over the years. The more involved I had become in my work, the more petty and simple my college friends seemed. I remember how I began to loathe nights out at the bars, staring into my drink thinking about work from earlier in the day.

  I remembered when I started hearing the music in the background, the words and the rhythms. I began to watch the way people moved, and the way they spoke to each other. I had noticed the pattern of the conversations and the pitch of voices. I was seeing it like a symphony orchestra play, and less like a social experience.

  During that time my friends gravitated away from me, naturally. My closest friend told me that I was becoming a snob, and that was the last I heard from her.

  Stopping myself from spinning in the chair, I leaned forward, looking down at my black Mary Jane shoes. I remembered back to when I had stopped wearing the clothes my girlfriends told me I should wear and wore what felt natural to me. My wardrobe became black Mary Jane shoes, tights, skirts, t-shirts, scarves and a wool pea-coat. All of these items were black or a shade of gray.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if all of those experiences were part of a long, slow, mental breakdown. I was twenty-nine years old and talked to my cat more than I talked to all the humans I knew put together.