The Lottery

“Is Ralph there?” a man barks.

“Sorry, but you have the wrong number.”

Click.

The man has hung up on me. This used to happen all the time, when I fielded dozens of calls from angry elderly women demanding Jose and screaming in Spanish. They tried to understand me, but naturally gave up after a few minutes. Those calls were entertaining; they still sneak into my daily conversation.

But this man, he’s staged a real “well, fuck you” kind of moment.

When I dial a wrong number, I am gut-wrenchingly sorry. I wasn’t whoever I was supposed to be, and I was probably calling too late at night. So even if the other person hangs up on me, I am apologizing to the dial-tone. It always catches me off-guard when someone doesn’t feel the same compassion.

I decide to amend the conversation:

“I’m terribly sorry, miss,” I say, attempting to sound both gruff and grandfatherly. My girly inflections destroy the imitation. “You must have been sitting down to tea with your girlfriends just now and I was ever so rude to interrupt. Do enjoy your afternoon.”

There, I’ve fixed his karma.

Maybe he’ll win the lottery.

 

The Consistency of Couch Potatoes

It is 3AM and the pain in my knees is keeping me awake.

I roll over and flail for my glasses, knocking a pen, my alarm clock, and a bottle of body moisturizer off the bed-stand. Cringing as all three crunch into a bag of Salsa Verde Doritos, I barely catch my glasses as they too attempt a suicide dive.

“I can’t afford to replace you!” I remind them, shaking them a little too vigorously.

My vision right now is 20/600. My back-up glasses are 20/400. So if my current pair break, I would be blind for several weeks until a new pair arrived.

I pat my glasses apologetically and put them on. I know who’s boss.

Still half asleep, I stumble through books, piles of paper, and empty Mountain Dew cans. “Frik,” I mumble, tripping over a nest of phone and printer cables. “I’ma light ya on fire some day.”

I stop.

“I’ma light ya on fire some day?”

What the fuck?

I emerge from clutter and chaos five minutes later, rummaging for a hot water bottle in the upstairs bathroom.

Waiting for the tap to run, well, hot water, I slouch to the ground and stare at my knees: swollen and slightly bruised. ‘You aren’t my knees,’ I think. ‘Bad knees, go away.’ They are disinclined to obey.

Having spent the last four months primarily in front of my television and computer, I don’t know what I was expecting. That my legs still had the stamina to stand for that long? Yeah. Probably. I mean, DUDE – four hours. Four.

“This is fucking embarassing,” I say, still staring at my knees.

With the hot water bottle resting on my legs, I do eventually fall back to sleep. I awake some five hours later, pain free.

And there is a spring in my step.

Crap.

 

Slow-Motion

Everything is lagging.

I turn my head. In slow-motion, it blurs across the screen. My cat dashes through the room;

you see: cat, empty space, cat;

you hear: some kind of loud noise, like thundering hooves,

then silence.

This is your brain on

drugs

dial-up.

This is what becomes of the real world when you have been living at a 16,043 latency for hours. Suddenly, you’re dead and wondering if maybe you lag-kited one of those crazy dragons into your living room.

Curled up in an over-sized chair, laptop balanced on my knee, I blink.

“What do you mean, ‘it’s snowing?’” I think, staring at a friend’s message. “Didn’t it just do that? Yeah, I’m pretty sure it just did that.”

I shake my head and return to trying to get across Honor Hold.

“Gryphon master…so…close…” Disconnect. “NOOOO!” I have been attempting this journey for ten minutes.

“I’m just trying to get back to an AH!” I type furiously to another friend. The text doesn’t even appear on my screen before -

Disconnect.

When I log back on, my buddy is still standing by the inn mailbox. He waves at me. I start to type a “c’ya when I have a better connection” -

Disconnect.

DENIED!! You have attempted an unauthorized disconnect! Die, bitch, die!

…

The power goes out.

My mother walks in and says, “It’s snowing.”

 

Highlight of the Day: Not Dying

I lock eyes with her. She has soft brown hair and freckles. She floats as she comes towards me…in a black SUV. A black SUV barreling around the corner as I drudge to my 8AM math class. The vehicle narrowly misses my nose.

Naturally, my first thought is, ‘Bitch.’ My second thought is, ‘Fucking bitch.’

“Nice!” I yell after her. “Thanks a lot!”

Shaking my head, I continue a few paces and reach the crosswalk. Notice, here, that I say I am at a crosswalk. Yes, doll, I use the frikin’ crosswalk! Cross-walk. Break the word up.

A white car speeds past me. I stumble backwards. All I see is that the driver is female and wearing a ponytail. I can’t hunt her down with that kind of vague detail. Drat.

“Also nice! But you hesitated, so you lose ten points!”

Aw, what the heck, she can lose 9.8 points. I’m in a giving mood. But, next time, I’m hurling a grenade through the back window. Match and set.

Now, I’ve pretty much accepted that cars like to run me over. It’s not that I’m a particularly interesting target. My clothes and hair are disheveled. My book-bag is an ordinary, cancerous growth on my hip. There is nothing spectacular about the items I yield at death. In fact, running me over is like beating a boss in super easy mode – you don’t tell your friends about it. Perhaps this is why I would make good roadkill.

Like a possum or a skunk.

It is now roughly noon and I am making my way back across campus. A green something-or-other faces me. The sportsman behind the wheel sizes me up, determines me easy pickings, and speeds up just enough to set me off balance as I jump onto a curb in terror. Arms crossed, I watch him drive away. He reaches the nearby stop sign and half turns to look at me. I glare. He bolts from the scene. ‘Okay,’ I think, ‘I am asking for a machete this Christmas.’

 

I will stand in the cold for hours.

I look at the woman behind the counter. She has black, purposefully poofy hair and I think, “Your hair sucks. What were you thinking?” She tucks a loose strand behind her ear.

“Have you applied for residence hall access with us yet?”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I have. Several times.”

The woman asks for my last name and flips through a wad of papers. “Well, looks like you’re on my big list. So…we’re looking at access maybe later today.”

“That’s what I was told on Thursday.”

“Well, yes, and it hasn’t changed. There are three hundred people on this list and he has to manually input all of them.”

“I meant, I was supposed to have access on Thursday. And there were three hundred people then too.”

“That isn’t to say none of them have been helped yet. Trust me, there are a lot of people coming in here about the same thing.”

So?

“Do you have the number for your on-duty RA?”

“No.”

“Do you have the number for your service desk?”

“No.”

You were supposed to give me those when I moved in, I seethe.

As she scrounges in a closet for a new pad of post-its, I stare at the betta fish on the counter. He is quietly floating around the bottom of the lonely plastic tank. A sticker on the side proclaims, “Hi! My name is ‘Dude’!” Dude, I think, you poor, sick bastard.

Finally, after answering two telephone calls, the woman finds the post-its, carefully opens the package, and writes down the telephone numbers.

“If you knock on the door before 10PM, there should be someone right there,” she adds.

You have never been inside the halls have you?

I thank her without a smile. I slam my body against the door and exit.

My best friend waves a yellow piece of paper at me as I rant.

“That’s cool,” I say. I don’t really look.

“What!? It’s a $25 ticket!”

“Fuck.”

“$25!!!“

“Bastards.”

 

James Lemke

I cannot for the life of me pronounce the word “hajimemashite” without stumbling over the first three sylabols.

“Ha-gee-may…Ha..Ha-gee-may..maash-tay,” I mumble. “Leh-muh…key dess.”

In essence, I’m introducing myself. “Yo!” I’m saying. “Name’s Lemke. James Lemke.”

Except, if someone came up to me and said “yo” I think I would spit on them. Just because, well, that word is aggravating.

Of course, I’m God, so I can say it all the time.

I stare at my Hiragana practice sheet for “a”, “i”, “u”, “e”, and “o”. I pick up my pencil; it hovers a few inches from the paper. Hesitantly, I lower the lead to the surface. It snaps.

Fuck.

Okay, maybe I’m a little tense… Let’s try this again:

I successfully sketch the first line.

SNAP.

…

“Dude, you want me to kick your ass?” As if I ever carry through on that threat.

“Yes,” it replies. “Just you try: kick my shiny, pointy lead ass!” Indeed, inanimate objects are real snobs.

I throw it at the sterile, white wall on my left. It bounces and stabs me in the arm. Rolling, it falls onto a pillow and glares up at me.

Oh, it definitely needs to die.

“Just you wait,” I tell it. “There once was a bonsai tree that tried to kill itself. So I lit it on fire. You have done me actual physical harm. Just wait and see.”

It seems not to hear me, and then, “Crap.” Good, it understands.