Borderlands 5

by Unknown

  I am so beautiful, I get out of traffic tickets. Doormen waive the admission fee. The guy at the deli sneaks an extra quarter pound of ham to my order. I can drink straight from the bottle and make it look sexy. My neighbor’s eight-year-old boy fell in love with me. I stopped giving him so many hugs after I realized that he was starting to cling a bit too tightly, his bony chest pressing a bit too much against my bosom. I can drink from the bottle and deceive everybody. Sometimes being beautiful is sad.

  Like when ugly voodoo-eyed girls shunned me because of my long blonde hair. In order to get a similar effect, they had to resort to fantasy, humid bath towels and thick rubber bands squeezing tight across their foreheads. Like when my only friend, K.B., tried to seduce me while we were hunting for crawfish. Like when I was about to catch the biggest one I had ever seen, but K.B. grabbed my arm and spun me to his wet, wormy mouth. I lost the biggest crawfish I had ever seen, then I went home and cut off my hair.

  Mommy?

  Beauty is not good when One is also submissive. A disciplined tongue locked behind naturally plump, pink lips is a sure sign of conceit. Because One must walk head up, eyes straight ahead, ears closed to the horny catcalls and jealous condemnation, One will surely be pegged as stuck up. Or even worse, a cold-blooded killer.

  Stories will be built around and around, tall and lonely like a gigantic tower, and One will not be able to descend to freedom due to the fact that One has chopped her only means of escape into short butchy spikes way before it is fashionable.

  No one wants to eat lunch with a killer, even if that killer has been exonerated.

  One may have to go through Senior year with a funny walk because when everybody stares and scrutinizes everything One does, One becomes so self-conscious, even the mere act of putting one foot in front of the other is excruciatingly difficult. Senior year may bring back horrible memories, such as how hard eating an ice cream cone can be. But only if One’s perverted stepfather is present, especially if said stepfather is indulging in some Mexican comfort instead of a triple scoop, his dangerous eyes following One’s tongue, eyes full of silent anticipation. One’s ugly mother might turn and stare reproachfully, so it is important not to lick in too provocative a manner. One may realize that it is not possible, so the ice cream will invariably melt under Mother’s hot stare and gather in between One’s fingers, over One’s hand. One must never lap at the mess because that would be pornographic. The only solution is to throw the ice cream cone away.

  One will eventually come to the conclusion that all ugly women hate as much as all men want. Ugly women will spit foul words and try to kill One’s beauty with their hatred, their evil poisons. They will try to make One disappear.

  One will finally snap and stab One’s ugly mother in the head, the face. Many, many times.

  I know these things because I am One.

  Mommy, please?

  Yesterday I took Annabell and her sisters to the zoo. This is an extremely rare event because I identify with the animals too much. I always cry in the monkey house.

  There was a clown there, walking about and miming to the visitors, occasionally squeezing his asthmatic bagpipes as if it were a loaf of bread. The clown wore a bulbous red nose and black eyes, his pate a wrinkle of plastic with loose, familiar wisps of silver that hung to his tartan shoulders. A Scottish fool. Ugly.

  My oldest, Margaret, pointed and screeched to no one in particular, “Look! Annabell’s twin!”

  So then I slapped her. Hard. I took my hand and struck my sweet Margaret across her perfect face. It was an evil, evil thing to do, I know. I don’t believe in corporal punishment as the scars on my legs prevent me from being anything other than lenient. But I left my mark upon her cheek, a vivid reminder, my show of pity. I am a protective mother bear, oh yes. And the world should know.

  Margaret, perhaps because she was in shock, did not cry. It was Annabell who cried.

  The clown clopped over to us then, flapped his happy rubber shoes, balloons bobbing. The scowl that rolled under his fake forehead could not be disguised, and his charcoaled eyes belied the lipstick grin. He offered a balloon to each of my daughters with silent graciousness, his wrists twirling before each presentation as if he were bestowing upon them life’s greatest gift.

  Giving my best Avon Lady smile, I thanked the clown and clapped my hands like an idiot. I wanted to show him how nice I am, how adult; how I’m not a cruel, weak-willed, self-absorbed thing-of-a-woman who would ever mean to do her children harm. I never meant to harm anyone. Really, Mr. Clown, it was all an accident.

  He just looked into my eyes, and for one long, Louisiana second, the aural assaults and manufactured aromas of bastardized Africa dissipated. Gone were the cotton candy elephants and cheeseburgery lion, the unnatural melange of children, baboons and hyena, and all I could see, hear and smell were memories, as if Mr. Clown’s eyes had become twin portals pulling me simultaneously into the past, the future. I saw myself in his eyes, my ego stuffed in a bottle, floating like a fetus and dying of shame. I saw myself two years younger—younger but frighteningly crone-like—my face hideous with ancient murderous intent; I saw my ugly little Annabell, blue in her crib, silent at last, free from an inevitable life of hatred, a lock of my hair caught in her tiny fist.

  And then he turned on his slick, shiny heel, almost tripping over the ridiculous, and walked away.

  My girls had started toward the monkey house, hand in hand, a chain of skipping forgiveness, balloons cringing against gusts of crisp Canadian air, and I walked behind them, watching, feeling something wrong, something besides the eerie experience of ruined illusion; of having peeked into my true self. No, it was more, and it wasn’t the ear tweak of motherly failure, the guilt of lost control.

  It nagged at me, this something, until I noticed Annabell’s balloon, a balloon she was happy as hell to have—a perfectly fine balloon, its string wound tight to her wrist. She kept looking up, smile huge and crooked, the wind parting the silvery threads of her hair and accentuating its thinness. She didn’t acknowledge, nor did she care, that her sisters each had the brightest of the clown’s bunch: electric purple for Christine, shocking pink for Madison; Margaret’s was the brightest of all, a swirling confection of Key-lime green and mid-day yellow, clouds of sunset pink and heartbeat red. It was the universe suspended there, creation itself just waiting to burst.

  Annabell’s was white. Like surrender.

  Mommy?

  Annabell is wearing one of her play tiaras, the one with aurora borealis crystals rimming the peak and seed pearls shaped like a star. It sets lopsided on her head, and her eyes are the calm, dark, mysterious blue of India, her lashes sweeping and dense, the color of Egyptian sand. She has become the places she will visit, the places I will never go.

  Yes, Annabell, you may go now.

  I bring her close and breathe in her essence, fragrant, hot, like cinnamon candy. My mouth waters as I call the police.

  One of Those Weeks

  BEV VINCENT

  Since we believe we’re really clever, it’s no surprise we really like stories that owe their success to being clever as well. Bev Vincent has captured the mordant sense of humor and tongue-in-cheek style reminiscent of the masterful short story writer, Robert Sheckley.

  MARCH 23

  On Tuesday morning, Jeff Adams started having trouble keeping his shoelaces tied. This included the laces on his sneakers, his dress shoes and even his moccasin slippers, where a strand of leather threaded around their circumference and tied—under normal circumstances—in a neat bow on the vamp. He tried every trick he knew, including double knotting, but a few seconds after he tied them the laces worked loose and dangled limply to the ground.

  He considered applying glue, but that defeated the purpose of laces, didn’t it? Jeff wasn’t particularly fussy about his appearance but untied shoelaces annoyed him, either his own or someone else’s. He often approached total strangers whose laces were untied to warn them against tripping.

&n
bsp; MARCH 24

  On Wednesday, his toothbrush stopped working. Toothpaste no longer stuck to the bristles; it immediately slid off into the sink. Jeff was a twice-a-day brusher, morning and evening, without fail. Watching perfectly good daubs of toothpaste fall into the sink—the paste had no trouble sticking to the porcelain, he noted grimly—irritated him.

  Even water didn’t cling to the nylon fibers. He dragged the dry brush across his teeth but he could tell they weren’t being cleaned. If pressed, he couldn’t have explained how he knew this, but he did.

  He stood in front of the bathroom sink, faucet running cold water, three perfectly good blobs of toothpaste smeared near the drain, wearing his green terrycloth nightgown and yellow leather moccasins—laces dangling—and stared in the mirror. The brush tasted stale. He gargled mouthwash to freshen his breath then put a strip of toothpaste on his index finger and rubbed at his front teeth. This helped, but the process felt incomplete. He didn’t sleep well that night.

  MARCH 25

  On Thursday afternoon, Judy, his girlfriend of sixteen months, didn’t recognize him when he phoned immediately after he got home from work. They often went out at least once during the week and spent most of their weekends together. Jeff had been working up the courage to ask her to move in with him. He planned to invite her to dinner and drop some subtle hints and maybe ask her that night, if she seemed interested. “Hi, honey. You wouldn’t believe the odd things that have been happening to me these past few days. Want to meet at the Thai Pepper in an hour?”

  “Who is this?”

  Jeff blinked at the telephone receiver. “It’s me. Jeff.”

  “Jeff who?”

  “Ha, ha. Very funny.” April Fools Day wasn’t until next week and Judy wasn’t much for practical jokes, but he’d give her credit for this one, even if it was slightly lame.

  “I’m serious. Who is this?”

  Jeff stared at the handset again before replacing it in its cradle. When he showed up at her apartment door half an hour later, a dozen roses in his hand as an apology for whatever he’d done wrong, Judy regarded him like he’d arrived from a foreign planet.

  “You don’t know me?” he said, affixing a strained smile to his face in the hopes that this might make him more familiar to her. He certainly knew her. He opened his mouth to tell her about the mole on her back just above her waist but changed his mind. His teeth met with an audible click.

  “You must have the wrong apartment,” his girlfriend said. She wrinkled her nose in confusion, a gesture Jeff once found endearing. “I didn’t ask anyone to fix me up with a blind date.”

  “I’m not blind,” Jeff said to the solid wood door that materialized between them. He considered ringing the doorbell again, but why bother? He trudged downstairs to the front door, almost tripping on his shoelaces twice. Judy’s familiar scent—he had purchased that brand of perfume for her on a trip to Paris several months ago and she’d worn it ever since—followed him partway down, then dissipated like a phantom. Visions of the long, enjoyable hours he and Judy had spent in that apartment resisted his efforts to banish them.

  He sat behind the wheel of his car for half an hour. When he had no more tears to wipe from his eyes, he turned the ignition key.

  On the way home, he stopped at a shoe store and bought a pair of brown loafers. He was about to throw his old shoes into a garbage bin in the parking lot when he saw a homeless man sitting on a bench across the street.

  “Here. These don’t work any more, but you can have them.”

  “Don’t work?”

  “Cost eighty bucks and now they don’t work.”

  The grizzled man kicked off a pair of decrepit sneakers and tried on the brown suede shoes. “These’re nice. Real nice.” He looked up at Jeff, a furrow in his brow. “What’s the catch?”

  Jeff gazed at the shoelaces. The man had tied clumsy loops with weather-beaten fingers, but they stayed tied. After several long seconds staring at the man’s feet, Jeff looked up and shrugged.

  “You got me, partner. I don’t know.”

  The man pulled his khaki lapels together and skulked off in his new shoes, apparently afraid that Jeff would change his mind. He abandoned his old sneakers beneath the bench. Jeff considered throwing them in the garbage but couldn’t make himself touch them.

  In his apartment, he searched for pictures of him with Judy, but they were all gone, including the one that once adorned the coffee table. It had been taken during their first trip together, a long weekend in Cancun. A dehydrated potted plant sat on the table instead, surrounded by an array of dead leaves.

  The photo he always carried in his wallet no longer occupied its celluloid pocket. In its place was a well-worn frequent flier card for an airline he didn’t recognize.

  The scrapbook in which he’d kept her letters and e-mails was missing from the drawer next to his bed. Her e-mail account rejected his letters. “Address unknown,” the bounced message informed him.

  MARCH 26

  Jeff got lost on his way to work on Friday morning. He drove around for nearly an hour, looking for his office building but he couldn’t figure out where it was. All the streets looked familiar but when he got to a certain point he couldn’t decide which way to turn. He tried approaching from several different directions but the result was always the same. The building’s location had been erased from his memory. He could picture it in his mind—he just couldn’t find it.

  He pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall at shortly after ten and called in sick on a pay phone. He couldn’t bring himself to ask the receptionist for directions. She sounded puzzled, but took his message without question.

  The nearby coffee shop looked inviting, so he went in and ordered a large cappuccino. After the first taste he realized he didn’t like coffee any more so he went back to his apartment and watched soap operas for the rest of the day, skipping lunch.

  By the end of the afternoon, hunger crept into his awareness. He locked his apartment door and took the elevator to the basement. In the garage, a red Camero occupied his usual parking spot. Jeff looked around in confusion, but his blue Corolla was nowhere to be found. His car key was missing from his key ring, too.

  He contemplated filing a stolen vehicle report, but he couldn’t find any proof he’d ever owned a car. The firebox in his bedroom closet where he stored important documents no longer contained his vehicle title. The file in the cabinet where he kept insurance papers and auto repair statements was missing.

  He walked to a Mexican restaurant three blocks away and drank four large margaritas with salt while munching on bowl after bowl of chips and salsa. Some game was playing on the TV over the bar, but he didn’t recognize either of the teams. He watched anyway, cheering silently for the players dressed in orange.

  He didn’t feel even slightly drunk when he walked home after the game ended (the orange team lost, which saddened him for no apparent reason), but he woke up with a crashing hangover the next morning.

  MARCH 27

  That Saturday he stayed locked in his apartment. Without a car he couldn’t go very far, and he was afraid that if he did go out he mightn’t be able to find his way back home. He picked up a paperback mystery from his shelves he was certain he’d read before, but the character names were unfamiliar and after the third chapter the story went in a completely different direction from what he remembered.

  He would have watched television, but he couldn’t figure out how to work the remote control. None of the buttons, which were arranged in an odd elliptical pattern, were labeled. The only one that did anything when he pushed it rang his doorbell.

  MARCH 28

  Late Sunday morning, the telephone awakened him. He had a pleasant conversation with his father, who had died the previous Christmas. Jeff had a clear memory of standing at the hospital bedside when his father took his last gasping breath, but the man on the other end of the line was definitely the same person he’d spoken to by phone most Sunday mornings since he’d mov
ed away from home ten years ago.

  “How’s Mom doing?” he asked.

  “Pretty much the same,” his father replied, which was no answer at all but Jeff didn’t inquire further. “When are you coming to visit again, son?”

  “Soon,” Jeff said. “I’m having car problems right now, but once I have that straightened out I’ll make plans to fly over.”

  “That’s good. We’ll look forward to seeing you.”

  They talked for several minutes more about the usual topics from the past and then they hung up.

  Jeff redialed the number a few minutes later, but it rang at least twenty times without being answered. When he tried again, the phone didn’t even ring. He listened to staticky silence, going over things he might have said given this chance to speak to his father again.

  After a lunch of raw carrots and popcorn, Jeff turned on his computer, planning to print out a map so he could find his way to work on Monday. When it finished booting up, the only icon on the desktop was for Space Invaders, a game he hadn’t played since high school. His Internet software was gone, as was everything else on the computer.

  By the end of the evening, he’d gotten pretty good at Space Invaders and had advanced to the forty-third level on two separate occasions before running out of ships.

  MARCH 29

  The newspaper, which Jeff found on his doormat on Monday morning even though he didn’t subscribe, featured a bold headline: No News Today. The front page was blank below the fold. Comics filled the inside two pages. A full-page advertisement on the back said:

  WANTED

  NEWS

  Please call 555-1823

  Jeff read the comics. That was what he always turned to first when he bought the newspaper anyway. Some of the strips he recognized but at least half of them were unfamiliar. Some of the jokes he didn’t get, which he hated. He read and reread the problematic strips, searching the panels for subtle clues to the punch line. As he read, he flexed his right hand, which ached from playing Space Invaders.