More fiction. This one’s short enough to post here. I’m wary of posting anything greater than 2500 words or so. I just finished a story this afternoon that’s in the 5000 word neighbourhood but, as good as it is, it’s a little long for most literary magazines.
This particular story (1990 words, including the title and quote, if you’re keeping score) is actually not one of my favourites. I took minimalism to it’s extreme in a lot of ways and I felt like the narrative came out sounding childish.
However, it is my second-most complimented story (after The Myth of Gravity—which I wrote over three years ago) so what do I know?
And yeah, I stole the title from the Ramones.
Enjoy!
I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You
J. D. Buston
Live to the point of tears.
-- Albert Camus
“Christians don’t deserve Jesus,” Cassie says, into the chest of her enormous parka.
She shouldn’t be here, so I ask: “What’s that?”
“Christians don’t deserve Jesus because Jesus was a good guy and all the Christians I’ve ever met are dickheads.”
“Hm.”
Cassie likes to speak in aphorisms. I don’t think she’s very good at it though because I don’t think she really knows what an aphorism is. Still, you’ve got to respect her laboured attempts, as flat as they may fall.
I pull up the collar on my overcoat to block the cutting edge of the wind. They told me it would be brutal. I wish I’d worn a hat or earmuffs or something. Winter is needling its bitter way into my ears. I’m praying for the transition from pain to numbness.
The wind here is nothing like it was at home. It tastes like dirty ice and sulfur.
My overcoat doesn’t look anywhere near as warm as Cassie’s fur-lined parka. I don’t know why she’s wearing it. She never wore one before. It makes sense now but…
“It’s windy,” she says. She laughs and adds, “I almost said, ‘Jesus, it’s windy’, how weird would that have been?”
“Huh?”
“If I said Jesus’s name? I mean, unintentionally, after saying that Christians don’t deserve him. Not that I’m a Christian but…”
I hold up my index finger to Cassie, indicating simultaneously that I want her to be quiet a minute and to wait for me. I put one hand on her shoulder as I slip behind her and into the grocery store. I wonder briefly how that must have looked to the people out on the street—raising my hand that way for no reason.
No matter.
I approach the customer service desk of the grocery store, which is immediately inside the doors, near the produce. I smell the earthiness of it, the fruitiness. It makes me want to bury my head in the apples and never leave.
“Excuse me,” I say to the woman behind the counter, “is this where I would drop off a resume?”
She smiles at me and she seems, for a minute, to be looking out the window over my shoulder. I wonder if she sees Cassie? I turn and look out the window. There she is. She waves at me. I don’t wave back.
“Yes, this is where you would drop off a resume. Have you filled out an application yet?”
“No.”
The woman retreats into an alcove behind the cigarette rack and returns with a green and white sheet of paper. It’s a form and it bears the grocery chain’s logo at the top. She sets it on the counter before me.
“If you haven’t filled out an application you’ll want to. They won’t look at your resume otherwise. You can fill it out and return it later.”
I take the paper and look it over. “But, couldn’t I leave a resume behind and attach one to this when I return it?” I hold up the application at arm’s length like a stinking fish.
“It wouldn’t do any good if it’s not attached to an application. There are questions on there that wouldn’t be answered by your resume.”
I look at the sheet in my hand again. It seems so inconsequential. How could employment rest on a piece of paper?
I look over my shoulder again and Cassie waves at me again. I want this job so I don’t wave back.
“But, I really don’t want to wait,” I tell the woman. “I need a job and to go home and fill this out and come back would--”
“Sir, really, I can’t help you. If there’s no application your resume will go in the garbage.”
I put the paper into the creased manila envelope that holds my resumes.
“Thank-you,” I say, departing.
Outside Cassie tells me I look upset.
“Hm.”
“Was she mean to you? You want me to go back and beat her up?”
I imagine telling her no, but instead I just shake my head and grunt. I would have ignored her completely but that doesn’t seem to work anymore. Nothing that should work does—not sleep, not drugs, not the reams of books on mental health I’ve bought over the last few months.
We walk in silence for a while. Cassie looks about town as she always does, as though it were her first time seeing everything. I don’t think she likes this place. I’m not sure I do.
“Why did you move here? It’s so cold and different from home.”
I shrug my shoulders. She’s asked this question before. I used to have an answer. The answer was quite simply, “because it is so different from home” or, “to get away.” It seems, however, to have failed. Everything I was attempting to get away from is here; accompanied by a bunch of other shit I’m not real fond of.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m actually happy that Cassie is here.
When she first showed up, sitting on the end of my bed, I was surprised and very happy to see her. It felt like God had broken his ages-long silence with man. I’m sure it started to fade almost right away, when I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and the implications bored their way into my consciousness. She wasn’t supposed to be there.
That morning, that first conversation went something like this:
“Wow, this place is fucked. Why here of all places?”
“What do you mean?” I’d said.
She got up off the end of the bed and looked out the window. “I mean, why did you move here? It’s not near as nice as home.”
“To get away.”
“I guess I understand that,” she said.
“Yeah, well after--”
“I know.”
I hate conversations I know I shouldn’t be having.
That’s what I’m thinking about when Cassie grabs my hand. I used to love when she did that. Now it just seems wrong.
“Don’t--” I say.
“Why not?”
I turn away from the street and head behind the nearby gas station. Cassie, still hanging on, has no choice but to follow. Behind the station I make sure we’re alone. I don’t want anyone to see me give her hell.
“Why not?” I repeat her question to her. Then again for good measure: “Why not?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know why not!”
“Oh… that.”
“Yes, that. What else?”
She drops my hand. I start walking, turn the corner and get back to the street. There’s a heavy silence between us for a few pregnant moments. I take the opportunity to study the red-brown patches comprised of the dead pine trees on the ridge that encircles the town.
Dead.
Cassie keeps an even distance between us. There’s about three feet of space there and she’s rigid about it. If I move toward her, she moves away. If I move away from her she pulls closer. There’s an invisible tether.
And that’s the problem.
The tether is all in my head.
Looking at Cassie I try to remember pulling her out of the car in the rain ten months ago. That was April. It was pissing. I was drunk. My car was wrecked. Cassie had been in the passenger’s seat and when I wrapped the car around the tree she took the brunt of the impact. Her legs had been crushed into the tiny space that was left between the engine compartment and her seat. It took forever to pry her out of there.
I got her away from the car and laid her out carefully on the gravel at the side of the road. She asked me to talk to her. I couldn’t think of much to say so I nattered on about… something… I don’t know what. Hockey or music or something really stupid.
She smiled the whole time. She didn’t say anything but she smiled until the paramedics put her into the back of the ambulance.
I decided to move far, far away very soon after that.
How she came to join me here… I don’t know.
We stop in front of another gas station. “Why don’t you try here?” Cassie says.
I look at her and put the question in my eyes rather than my mouth: “Here? You think?”
“Why not?”
I slip past her again, careful not to touch her this time. I enter the store and extract a resume from my manila envelope. “Hello,” I say to the kid behind the counter, “Could I leave a resume here?”
“Sure,” he says. He’s about ten years younger than I am.
“Are you, uh… are you the manager?”
“Huh?” says the kid. I’m distracting him from something. He’s watching a cute blonde girl at the pumps out front. Cassie is standing very near her. She waves and I don’t wave back.
“Are you the manager?” I ask the kid again.
“Oh, uh, no. Manager’s off today. I’ll see he gets it,” he says, taking my resume from me without ever turning his attention away from the blonde.
I leave. I haven’t got time to watch this kid embarrass himself. I need to find a job. I can’t stay on Employment Insurance forever. As much as I wish I could, that’s a river that will run dry soon enough.
I had a job when I first moved out here. I was working with a contract carpenter. The pay was decent and the work kept me busy during the day and tired at night and so, out of trouble.
He laid me off. Fired me really. He caught me talking to Cassie one day.
“What’re you doin’?” he said.
“Nothing. Just talking.”
He looked at me and shook his head. “Okay, whatever.”
He never looked at me straight again. He acted weird around me and kept asking if I was feeling okay. He stopped inviting me out for beers after work. A week after that he sat me down and said things were getting lean and he couldn’t afford to keep me on. He said to consider it a lay-off, that when he needed help again I’d be the first person he called.
This was his delicate way of firing me, and ensuring the crazy guy didn’t burn down his house or whatever.
I’m thinking about how Cassie cost me that job when I rejoin her on the sidewalk out front.
“How’d it go?” she says.
I don’t answer. I’m pissed and she can tell.
“Don’t be like that,” she says.
I thought about asking her what she meant by “like that.” Then I realised that was a question designed to instigate an argument in a relationship that was still alive. This relationship was most definitely dead and so there was no reason to antagonize.
Dead.
I grunted, hoping it would shut her up. I shouldn’t have made any noise at all. I should have ignored her.
“Come on,” she said, touching me on the shoulder. It feels like a remembrance, a vague familiarity on the wind. “Don’t be like that. Remember when you used to come over to my place? Before we got together? You told me how you’d be all butterflies waiting for me to buzz you up to my apartment? Why can’t we go back to that? Those nice nights, just you and me, sitting in front of the TV, cracking jokes about Lloyd Robertson’s hair?”
I thought, for a moment, about the blue-ish light from the television flickering on the walls. And how that light looked through the window as I stood on the doorstep waiting for her to buzz me into what used to be her apartment.
Y’know, before she died. Before I killed her in that car wreck.I really have to tell Cassie to quit hanging around.
This particular story (1990 words, including the title and quote, if you’re keeping score) is actually not one of my favourites. I took minimalism to it’s extreme in a lot of ways and I felt like the narrative came out sounding childish.
However, it is my second-most complimented story (after The Myth of Gravity—which I wrote over three years ago) so what do I know?
And yeah, I stole the title from the Ramones.
Enjoy!
I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You
J. D. Buston
Live to the point of tears.
-- Albert Camus
“Christians don’t deserve Jesus,” Cassie says, into the chest of her enormous parka.
She shouldn’t be here, so I ask: “What’s that?”
“Christians don’t deserve Jesus because Jesus was a good guy and all the Christians I’ve ever met are dickheads.”
“Hm.”
Cassie likes to speak in aphorisms. I don’t think she’s very good at it though because I don’t think she really knows what an aphorism is. Still, you’ve got to respect her laboured attempts, as flat as they may fall.
I pull up the collar on my overcoat to block the cutting edge of the wind. They told me it would be brutal. I wish I’d worn a hat or earmuffs or something. Winter is needling its bitter way into my ears. I’m praying for the transition from pain to numbness.
The wind here is nothing like it was at home. It tastes like dirty ice and sulfur.
My overcoat doesn’t look anywhere near as warm as Cassie’s fur-lined parka. I don’t know why she’s wearing it. She never wore one before. It makes sense now but…
“It’s windy,” she says. She laughs and adds, “I almost said, ‘Jesus, it’s windy’, how weird would that have been?”
“Huh?”
“If I said Jesus’s name? I mean, unintentionally, after saying that Christians don’t deserve him. Not that I’m a Christian but…”
I hold up my index finger to Cassie, indicating simultaneously that I want her to be quiet a minute and to wait for me. I put one hand on her shoulder as I slip behind her and into the grocery store. I wonder briefly how that must have looked to the people out on the street—raising my hand that way for no reason.
No matter.
I approach the customer service desk of the grocery store, which is immediately inside the doors, near the produce. I smell the earthiness of it, the fruitiness. It makes me want to bury my head in the apples and never leave.
“Excuse me,” I say to the woman behind the counter, “is this where I would drop off a resume?”
She smiles at me and she seems, for a minute, to be looking out the window over my shoulder. I wonder if she sees Cassie? I turn and look out the window. There she is. She waves at me. I don’t wave back.
“Yes, this is where you would drop off a resume. Have you filled out an application yet?”
“No.”
The woman retreats into an alcove behind the cigarette rack and returns with a green and white sheet of paper. It’s a form and it bears the grocery chain’s logo at the top. She sets it on the counter before me.
“If you haven’t filled out an application you’ll want to. They won’t look at your resume otherwise. You can fill it out and return it later.”
I take the paper and look it over. “But, couldn’t I leave a resume behind and attach one to this when I return it?” I hold up the application at arm’s length like a stinking fish.
“It wouldn’t do any good if it’s not attached to an application. There are questions on there that wouldn’t be answered by your resume.”
I look at the sheet in my hand again. It seems so inconsequential. How could employment rest on a piece of paper?
I look over my shoulder again and Cassie waves at me again. I want this job so I don’t wave back.
“But, I really don’t want to wait,” I tell the woman. “I need a job and to go home and fill this out and come back would--”
“Sir, really, I can’t help you. If there’s no application your resume will go in the garbage.”
I put the paper into the creased manila envelope that holds my resumes.
“Thank-you,” I say, departing.
Outside Cassie tells me I look upset.
“Hm.”
“Was she mean to you? You want me to go back and beat her up?”
I imagine telling her no, but instead I just shake my head and grunt. I would have ignored her completely but that doesn’t seem to work anymore. Nothing that should work does—not sleep, not drugs, not the reams of books on mental health I’ve bought over the last few months.
We walk in silence for a while. Cassie looks about town as she always does, as though it were her first time seeing everything. I don’t think she likes this place. I’m not sure I do.
“Why did you move here? It’s so cold and different from home.”
I shrug my shoulders. She’s asked this question before. I used to have an answer. The answer was quite simply, “because it is so different from home” or, “to get away.” It seems, however, to have failed. Everything I was attempting to get away from is here; accompanied by a bunch of other shit I’m not real fond of.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m actually happy that Cassie is here.
When she first showed up, sitting on the end of my bed, I was surprised and very happy to see her. It felt like God had broken his ages-long silence with man. I’m sure it started to fade almost right away, when I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and the implications bored their way into my consciousness. She wasn’t supposed to be there.
That morning, that first conversation went something like this:
“Wow, this place is fucked. Why here of all places?”
“What do you mean?” I’d said.
She got up off the end of the bed and looked out the window. “I mean, why did you move here? It’s not near as nice as home.”
“To get away.”
“I guess I understand that,” she said.
“Yeah, well after--”
“I know.”
I hate conversations I know I shouldn’t be having.
That’s what I’m thinking about when Cassie grabs my hand. I used to love when she did that. Now it just seems wrong.
“Don’t--” I say.
“Why not?”
I turn away from the street and head behind the nearby gas station. Cassie, still hanging on, has no choice but to follow. Behind the station I make sure we’re alone. I don’t want anyone to see me give her hell.
“Why not?” I repeat her question to her. Then again for good measure: “Why not?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know why not!”
“Oh… that.”
“Yes, that. What else?”
She drops my hand. I start walking, turn the corner and get back to the street. There’s a heavy silence between us for a few pregnant moments. I take the opportunity to study the red-brown patches comprised of the dead pine trees on the ridge that encircles the town.
Dead.
Cassie keeps an even distance between us. There’s about three feet of space there and she’s rigid about it. If I move toward her, she moves away. If I move away from her she pulls closer. There’s an invisible tether.
And that’s the problem.
The tether is all in my head.
Looking at Cassie I try to remember pulling her out of the car in the rain ten months ago. That was April. It was pissing. I was drunk. My car was wrecked. Cassie had been in the passenger’s seat and when I wrapped the car around the tree she took the brunt of the impact. Her legs had been crushed into the tiny space that was left between the engine compartment and her seat. It took forever to pry her out of there.
I got her away from the car and laid her out carefully on the gravel at the side of the road. She asked me to talk to her. I couldn’t think of much to say so I nattered on about… something… I don’t know what. Hockey or music or something really stupid.
She smiled the whole time. She didn’t say anything but she smiled until the paramedics put her into the back of the ambulance.
I decided to move far, far away very soon after that.
How she came to join me here… I don’t know.
We stop in front of another gas station. “Why don’t you try here?” Cassie says.
I look at her and put the question in my eyes rather than my mouth: “Here? You think?”
“Why not?”
I slip past her again, careful not to touch her this time. I enter the store and extract a resume from my manila envelope. “Hello,” I say to the kid behind the counter, “Could I leave a resume here?”
“Sure,” he says. He’s about ten years younger than I am.
“Are you, uh… are you the manager?”
“Huh?” says the kid. I’m distracting him from something. He’s watching a cute blonde girl at the pumps out front. Cassie is standing very near her. She waves and I don’t wave back.
“Are you the manager?” I ask the kid again.
“Oh, uh, no. Manager’s off today. I’ll see he gets it,” he says, taking my resume from me without ever turning his attention away from the blonde.
I leave. I haven’t got time to watch this kid embarrass himself. I need to find a job. I can’t stay on Employment Insurance forever. As much as I wish I could, that’s a river that will run dry soon enough.
I had a job when I first moved out here. I was working with a contract carpenter. The pay was decent and the work kept me busy during the day and tired at night and so, out of trouble.
He laid me off. Fired me really. He caught me talking to Cassie one day.
“What’re you doin’?” he said.
“Nothing. Just talking.”
He looked at me and shook his head. “Okay, whatever.”
He never looked at me straight again. He acted weird around me and kept asking if I was feeling okay. He stopped inviting me out for beers after work. A week after that he sat me down and said things were getting lean and he couldn’t afford to keep me on. He said to consider it a lay-off, that when he needed help again I’d be the first person he called.
This was his delicate way of firing me, and ensuring the crazy guy didn’t burn down his house or whatever.
I’m thinking about how Cassie cost me that job when I rejoin her on the sidewalk out front.
“How’d it go?” she says.
I don’t answer. I’m pissed and she can tell.
“Don’t be like that,” she says.
I thought about asking her what she meant by “like that.” Then I realised that was a question designed to instigate an argument in a relationship that was still alive. This relationship was most definitely dead and so there was no reason to antagonize.
Dead.
I grunted, hoping it would shut her up. I shouldn’t have made any noise at all. I should have ignored her.
“Come on,” she said, touching me on the shoulder. It feels like a remembrance, a vague familiarity on the wind. “Don’t be like that. Remember when you used to come over to my place? Before we got together? You told me how you’d be all butterflies waiting for me to buzz you up to my apartment? Why can’t we go back to that? Those nice nights, just you and me, sitting in front of the TV, cracking jokes about Lloyd Robertson’s hair?”
I thought, for a moment, about the blue-ish light from the television flickering on the walls. And how that light looked through the window as I stood on the doorstep waiting for her to buzz me into what used to be her apartment.
Y’know, before she died. Before I killed her in that car wreck.I really have to tell Cassie to quit hanging around.
2 comments:
Hmmm....well you have caught my interest with this story...i am not one to read much fiction. i think you have a good idea for your theme although i was waiting for more elaboration of the relationship. i would say...go through it and take out all the cliched phrases and give it more feeling. you are a good writer. i will add you to my links so i can read more of you.
Thank you for your kind words.
It's worth noting that I never really felt this story as I was writing it. It felt like a chore and I feel like it comes across that way as well.
I will take your advice to heart in future stories, though. I think it's sound.
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