A Rough Start...

Some say it was the 7.52% drop in latte sales on 12th street, but we all know Greg wasn't cut out for a barista's life. He often was caught fake laughing at the coffee house humor from customers. Every "thanks a latte"he received, people could see a little part of him die. One day, he didn't even bother smiling at the "I don't give a frappe if you keep the change." That was the day Mr. Stenson, the regional manager was monitoring the store. Greg served the next customer an iced coffee drink with a raised eyebrow meant to indicate the strange logic in an iced coffee during the snowstorm that day.

"Greg, can I borrow you for a minute in the office?" Jim Stenson was a solidly built man of only five feet. Many believed the excessive weight lifting is to make up for the short jokes. The truth lies somewhere in the middle between self esteem and fighting the fast food he eats ever day in his travels to local franchises.

"You know we don't have an office here unless you mean the bathroom. Sam Matthews tried to convince Sarah it was an office and corporate fired him. I don't know you, but I'd hate to feel responsible for you getting fired." The delivery was dry and direct as most of Greg's conversations went. Most found it difficult to tell when he was serious and took everything as a joke. Even his odd comments about jamming the milk steamer into his eye until the sound of a whistle ends the monotony that is his job. They all thought the joke was that his skull wouldn't whistle if he went through with it.

"Let's take a walk into the back storage area for a minute. I just want to talk to you about your role in this organization." The elongation of the word role made it clear this would not be a good discussion, but Greg was unfazed.

"I'll go, but Janice just went into the employee bathroom back there and she's a little weird about her quiet time in there. One time, I walked back there to take a call from my mother and she blew a cloud of ground cinnamon in my eyes when she came back to the front and told me she hadn't washed her hands."

"Well, we'll just have to whisper." With a wave of his hand, Jim moved towards the back and disappeared through the door. With a wave of his hand, Greg swatted away the steam from a cup of coffee and continued to stand at the counter of the empty coffee shop waiting for customers.

A Walk in the Park

When Ralph awoke, the warm world blanketing his body sensation faded away and he awoke to pain in his head at the crown of his skull and an uncomfortable hard pain in his ear. The light ebbed in and out until he was able to make out the city skyline and the sound of the trickling stream down by the Japanese Tea Garden. He had been down there late at night a few times meeting less reputable men about jobs that would either help him pay the rent or give him a new place to live with irons bars. The rent would have been better but jail was a true studio unit. Even the bathroom was in the main area. Today, Ralph started praying that it was early enough he would hit the police patrol that rushes the homeless from the park each morning.

He pulled his head up from the round rock he had used as a pillow for the night and peered out from behind the bench. The only thing he saw was a jogger stopping to clean up after his golden retriever. In a strange coincidence, the jogger turned looking Ralph in the eye without seeing him and began running on with his dog. Ralph rubbed his eyes trying to clear what had to be a sleepy film distorting the images to his brain. Try as he might, he could still see the jogger running with his dog, but his eyes still said the dog was leading the man with the leash end in the dog's mouth. As if knowing he was being watched, the jogger turned back to look in Ralph's direction and, once again, Ralph saw the distorted face of the man with a set of yellow eyes. The glow seemed to be cutting the distance between them before the man's neck snapped forward by the dog pulling on the leash to keep moving on their run.

Five minutes later, Ralph still lay in the same position staring towards the empty jogging path. Now alone, he felt the pressing urge to find out where he was, but first he needed to find a restroom. Luckily, the restrooms in the park are the easiest place for shady deals and Ralph was only too familiar with their locations. His urgency to get to a restroom was so great that he did not notice he was barefoot still. As his feet hit the cold, damp floor of a public bathroom, he was frozen by the cold shock going up his legs from his feet. Turning to the mirror, he saw he was wearing the same clothes he was wearing the night before he blacked out, but now he was wearing some form of pajama pants covered in blood. Hearing a voice from outside and still frightened of other wolf faced men with yellow eyes, he ran to the nearest stall closing the door to hide. The voices outside sounded like arguing and the faces seen in the cracks kept Ralph paralyzed on the toilet seat for the next ten minutes while the room faded in and out in different hues.

The voices seemed to be wavering and Ralph swore he heard his name several times after one man shoved the other through the door of the next bathroom stall and left. Ralph focused on the silence as all noises faded before he began focusing on his heartbeat until he passed out to the soothing sounds of the man in the stall next to him vomiting.

Pantsless in the jungle

Ralph runs to the kitchen to rinse out his glass from his nightly drink. Wednesday nights he has a rum and coke while watching the latest game shows offering millions of dollars to people no smarter than he is. He runs his glass under the faucet before tossing the glass into the dishwasher. Before rushing out so as not to miss the answer to what is the square root of 4, he notices the trash is lying open by the back door and a small pool has formed of either a barbecue sauce or fudge topping from his dinner.

The next commercial wouldn't be for five minutes and the pool was beginning to gather towards the overflowing electric plug containing ratty extension cords to the refrigerator and microwave. He could sit back and watch his show while waiting for the microwave to short out and take out the rest of the building or he could chance not finding out the latest answer. He made a choice he would regret on a sound decision.



Trying to avoid freezing but unwilling to put pants back on, Ralph opens the back door to the enclosed rear stairwell and rushes the bag to his garbage shoot. Before he can get back to the door, a breeze rushes in and sucks the door closed in front of him. Pantsless and keyless, Ralph begins to shake the door on it's frame gripping the handle tight. He thinks to himself frantically searching his memory for any place where a key could be hidden. The doormat is hiding nothing and the top frame of the door holds nothing but dust and dirt.



A humming noise begins to drown out the shaking of the door in its frame. Ralph stops shaking the door as he notices his shadow on the door. There are no other apartments in the rear section of the building directly across from his door and Ralph's building isn't the type to have apartments with good lighting or undamaged doors. Tenants in his neighborhood are not the type he would want to turn his back on or have sneak up behind him.

Against his flight or flight instinct as Ralph had no fight instinct, he turned in time to see the flashes of light come up the stairwell before pain in the top of Ralph's skull too his vision leaving only the sound of his body hitting the floor and the feeling of the world wrapping around him like a warm blanket. Ralph could only hope it wasn't the blanket he spilled his dinner of buffalo wings on the night before. He saw himself awakening in the hall way coated in teriyaki before he passed out.

The Old Undead Treatment

Darryl walks the streets like everyone is a zombie. It's nothing personal. He isn't trying to take away any one's personality. He's agoraphobic,but you wouldn't be able to tell it by the way he power walks the streets. He began working with a therapist 14 months back. Fearing a panic attack from braving the streets to go to some one's office, Darryl picked Dona Gerald out of the yellow pages. Her ad was a bit more dial-in psychic hot line or local singles part line, but it was the only one offering phone services.

After the first call, Darryl began to wonder about Dona's credentials. She asked him about his youth like any psychiatrist would, but focused more on his preferences in movies and entertainment. When he admitted to be an old horror movie buff, she jumped at the chance to talk about herself. By the end of the 30 minute conversation, Darryl felt like he was working her through her lost childhood instead of getting his own help. By the third call, it all began to make more sense.

Dona explained that her theory on agoraphobia was that sufferers feared having panic attacks over nothing. Her idea was to try and validate the panic and teach people to work through it. Given Darryl's fondness of old monster movies, she asked him if he was a fan of zombie flicks. He was. She asked how he felt about the new remakes of the old Night of the Living dead series of films. Darryl said he could see how giving the zombies more intelligence and quicker movements made them a more serious threat, but he had grown up loving the idea of an never ending swarm of undead creatures that only thought about eating brains and moved at a snail's pace. The only real threat there was if you didn't move fast enough or backed yourself into a corner.

By the end of the fourth call, Dona tasked Darryl with going out to the store. She didn't want him to go with any list in mind. She only wanted him to go there and complete an exercise. The exercise was to enter the store knowing that only the cashiers, butchers and bag boys were real people, but everyone else shopping was a brainless, undead creature trying to relive past moments in life grasping at life. Darryl was to take a shopping cart and get down every aisle and back out without alerting the undead that he was living.

The goal was to mimic the people in the store and move cautiously around the store. Darryl began at the front door feeling nervous about the experiment, but once he entered the store, his fear transitioned to an imperative task of staying alive. He stood by the front doors avoiding the people entering and watching the cashiers. They greeted the oozing fleshed mother of three warmly and took the coupons from her hand as the maggots crawled to the conveyor belt. The cashier did not notice. She merely swiped each item across the scanner and helped the bag boy place the items into bags. Very little eye contact was made and, at the end of the transaction, the cashier continued on as if the last person had not even been there and the next was not shuffling along on a bloody stump of a leg.

Darryl felt slightly exhilarated by the task and went for the carts. He waited for the couple that just entered to pull their cart and tried not to notice as the wife grabbed her husband's butt with a 2 fingered hand. Once in the clear, Darryl grabbed a cart and worked his way into produce. He rushed at first nearly crashing into the meat counter and causing a number of shoppers to stare at him. Fearing he was about to become a meal, he stopped and stood still staring at the beets. No one cares about beets as much as Darryl appeared to at the moment, but it seemed to work.

He began working his way past the onions and into the busier tomato row. He followed slowly behind an elderly man picking up each vine ripened tomato as if they were precious diamonds and he was going to find the perfect one. At one point in his appraisal, the man glanced back at Darryl realizing he was being watched. Darryl rolled his eyes to the sides of his skull and began a low moan hoping to convince the old man that he too was of the not living anymore. This startled the man into taking off with his cart, but it also brought more attention onto Darryl. Don't act like a zombie, just act like a person shopping, he thought to himself.

The rest of the experience was rather uneventful. He passed by the dairy section without a second thought about the shredded cheese he needed for his nightly nachos. He passed through the candy aisle like a mine field trying his best not to bump any other shoppers and passed by the bags of sweettarts he would have loved to have for his mid-day snacks. By the end of his non-shopping shopping trip, Darryl was exhausted. It wasn't until he dropped onto his couch back home that he realized he hadn't freaked out during his trip once.

He began taking larger and larger trips into public gradually gaining confidence. Walking down the sidewalk on a busy street was more difficult than the grocery store task, but he learned to handle it. While walking behind people moving slowly, he would power walk so he could move past them gradually with a sidelong glance at the last moment before completely passing the person to make sure he wasn't about to be bitten. He kept himself from a panicked run by reminding himself that drastic actions make him stand out in a world full of cannibals and he didn't want to be the special of the day.

After 3 weeks of confident journeys on the street, Darryl called Dona to thank her for her help during her off hours and to tell her he wouldn't be needing her help anymore. She thanked him and confessed that he was her first successful test of her theory and that others had not fared so well. She told Darryl that he had renewed her confidence in ideas and that she would continue to use her new methods. She already had a new patient who used to love to jog before being trapped in an elevator when his office building caught on fire. He hadn't been comfortable in the world ever since, but she had him out running last weekend. Without a pause Darryl knew she was working with his sister's neighbor five blocks away. Darryl had seen him out for a run on Saturday. He had bulbs of garlic pinned to his t-shirt.

It's A Steal

Ed had made a habit of riding the trains at rush hour in the evenings. He liked to pluck the expensive electronics from the various pockets of the riders and rush hour in the evening made it much easier. In the mornings, people were still waking up and could barely focus on one thing. This should have played into Ed's favor, but he found that most people in the morning are playing games on their phones or listening to their iPods making these items more obvious when taken.

The first time Ed tried to pick a morning rider, he listened in for the song to stop and tried to quickly unplug the headphones from the jack to give him a buffer of time to run away before the rider realized a new song had not begun. Unfortunately, the tall man in his tweed blazer was unaware of Ed's plan, but hyper sensitive to silence. His iPod was turned up to great volumes causing the headphones to emit a loud split second buzz when unplugged. The rider reached immediately for his iPod to check what was wrong and ended up holding Ed's hand. With a weak smile, Ed apologized and claimed he had accidentally caught his arm on the headphones and pulled them out of the iPod causing it to fall into his hand. One semi-severe beating later and Ed no longer considered the morning trains profitable.


The evenings were Ed's time to shine in his mind. On any given afternoon during rush hour, Ed will come home with 5 high end phones and 4 iPods of varying styles. On this Thursday afternoon, he spotted a young man in black padding fresh off a day of bike deliveries bobbing along to his iPod oblivious to the number of times he was ramming his hips into the other riders. One rider in particular was going to enjoy this new rider regardless of how much he was shoved.


Ed took a couple of shots to the ribs before this tall kid plucked the earbuds from his ears to answer his phone. The nearby group of riders was immediately showered with the loud yet familiar sounds of Billy Idol's Mony Mony. Ed saw his opportunity to snag the mp3 player without pausing to wait for a song break, but as soon as he put his hand on the red player in this kid's coat pocket, Billy Idol broke into his chorus with "I say yeah!" Strangely, Ed and half the train all sang "Yeah!" loudly with Billy.

Ed froze with the iPod in his hand pulled from the messenger's pocket wondering where that burst came from and why everyone seemed to have caught at the same moment. His eyes met the nearest fellow passenger seated nearby. A frail woman in her 80s had wide eyed concern at where her rebel yell stemmed from or even what a Mony Mony was. That didn't stop her and most of the train from echoing with another "Yeah!" as the chorus built to the next verse.

Confused and concerned for his mental health, Ed bolted from the train through the massive crowd pushing on to the train. He was back on the street before he realized he still had the red iPod in his hand. He was surprised to find that the headphones were still attached and Mony Mony was fading in the background to the point that he could not hear the words anymore. He was still mumbling the yeahs as the song faded out and he quickly switched off the music. He rubbed his thumb over the smooth metallic face until his thumb caught on a smooth etching on the upper edge of the face above the screen. The markings appeared to be Chinese characters of some kind, but Ed knew nothing of the Chinese alphabet to decipher it.

He would have to do some research before he could sell it off in case it was a name or an insult that people would not want to own. The last thing he wanted was a piece of electronics that he couldn't sell or that would give away that he had stolen it. He would take it home and reset the playlist. Before that though, he decided to see what music was currently on it to see if he wanted to keep any of the songs already on it. He was still surprised that the owner had not followed after him to get his iPod back as he walked into traffic as Been Caught Stealin' by Jane's Addiction came in and Ed came home with the largest haul he's ever seen.

Limited Edition

Sarah Tott is used to being a slave to her iPod. Every time a new model came out, she was one of the first to pick one up. When the 1 GB turned into a 2GB, she was there. When the 30 GB iPod was trumped in popularity by a smaller and shinier 2 GB iPod nano, Sarah picked one up under the logic that she could run much better with the nano. When the tiny, screenless shuffle appeared, she jumped on it reasoning that sometimes her runs are belabored by the additional few ounces the nano adds. Through iPods and iPhones, Sarah had defined herself with a big white apple.
After spending a day with her iPod touch out in the local street market, she found herself in a small back alley blocked in by a delivery truck. When she realized she could not get around the truck, she swore under her breath and turned back to leave the alley. Dancing Queen kicked in for a second before it began to spark static into her headphones. Ripping the loud distortion from her ears, the ringing drowns out the sound of the back of the truck opening. Looking at the screen, Sarah watched as the album art appeared to melt off the screen and the back light flicker to black. Tapping furiously at the touchscreen, she received no response from the dead bundle of electronics.
"Unlucky break, huh?' The deep gravel voice resonated in her ears and crawled down her spine until her legs felt like they were shaking from the sound. "Sorry if I scared you. Timing was never my thing. Luckily for you, your little problem is my specialty."
Turning towards the truck, Sarah is greeted by a the vision of a six foot five inch man in his fifties. His silver sideburns flow too deeply down his face and connect to an excessive neck beard before rejoining his chin at a point. His hat was a homemade Seattle Supersonics hat with the logo on a tombstone with the year 2008 printed on top. The green and yellow were a near perfect match to the green of his irises and the yellowing of his teeth. The stench of pipe smoke stuck to him like a film of road tar and immediately made Sarah's eyes water.
"I happen to have a special edition iPod touch on my truck as a part of a set of ten going to Electronics Cave here on 2nd avenue. They won't miss one if you can part with $100. I can mark it as stolen off the truck during delivery and the company will just write it off anyways."
Sarah's eyes darted to the back of the truck and doubled in size at words 'special edition iPod'. She vaguely heard the amount. "What's so special about these iPods?" She tried to sound suspicious, but he could have told her Steve Jobs had touched each one with a photo of him holding a random iPod and she would shell out $1000 in a second.
"These are a limited edition iPod touch from the Chinese distributor that made the first iPods for Apple. Each one has 'Touch the World' in Chinese characters on the back and the front is a deep cherry red finish." He reached into the truck and pulled out a red package in the shape of a typical iPod Touch box with a large '#1' printed in the middle of the outline of China. Sarah was digging through her wallet before he even pulled the mp3 player out of the box.
"I must warn you, there's a reason there are only a handful of these from that shop. There was a riot in the test labs before someone torched the warehouse. This handful is about 10% of the total the made it out of the factory. I'll be taking a portion of these to locations in California, Texas and out in St. Louis. I'll be back here with a normal shipment in..." With a slam of the truck door, he turned around to find her gone. The $100 peaking from his pocket was the only proof he had been speaking to anyone other than himself. This is Stan Ernest's first memory of meeting Sarah Tott.

Time after time

Janet has a recurring nightmare about her crush from the co-ed softball team, Tim. In every dream, Tim declares his love for her and promptly dies. On the more extreme spectrum, she will see him fall from the climbing wall they decided to try together and cry even before the harness fails and his body drops to the mat from 50 feet up. On the weird spectrum, she hits a foul ball that cracks his skull. In the more whimsical ones, she watches as he crosses the street in the rain to get the car for the two of them. In the middle of an empty road, a flash of light and fire forms as a silver Delorean pierces reality and runs him down before taking off again at 88 mph back to another time. She's always wondered how the time machine from Back to the Future fame never inadvertently killed anyone upon entry to another time.


Every morning she would awake from fitful dreams as exhausted as an insomniac. She stumbled into work like an alcoholic fresh from a bender and proceeded to her desk. She spends the first hour trying to re-associate what she does at her job to the piles of papers on her desk that seemed to have such order and obvious purpose when she set them there the day before. The stapler seems to be hinting at the pile last attended to and the ring from her coffee cup indicates 3 inches from the monitor is the correct placement.


Tim sits at the desk next to Janet's and she is clearly visible each morning when she presents herself for another somber day in the office in all her disheveled glory. She can see him looking at her when she arrives each morning and, for a moment, smiles knowing her dreams were mere ridiculousness. On this particular morning, she is wearing every imaginable color in a harsh contrast to the somberness of the office. She has just dreamt of Tim stepping into an elevator shaft after telling her she shouldn't have waited so long to tell him how she felt.

With a purpose she has only known in rare occasions, Janet brushes the untamed blond hair from the her eyes and steps forward across the aisle to Tim's desk. She stands in front of Tim's desk as he types furiously into his calculator and writes a set of numbers in the ledger. When he sees her standing there, he smiles kindly and says good morning. She says she hopes it will be a very good morning indeed. She confesses that she has wanted to tell him that she dreams about him each night, but did not want to frighten him with the stalker sound of it. The dreams, she explained, are always the same message of not wasting anymore time on wanting and tell her to speak to him about her feelings.

Tim sits quietly as Janet pauses looking for words. This is when he strikes. Tim scolds her for hindering the workplace with her emotions and unwanted advances. He begins citing workplace sexual harassment codes and every way in which her comments were unprofessional and ill received. He finished with a recap of his resume of athletic achievement, IQ and extensive past relationships with women who don't dress like an ape camouflaged as a rainbow. After this attack he asks her if she will kindly leave him to his work.

Devastated, Janet disappears to the ladies' room to try and piece herself together. She looks into the mirror at her tie dye shirt that she only has for working around her home. She does not recall putting it on that morning. She notices the crazed and frizzy mangle of hair resting on her head and can picture other primates picking through it for bugs. She began working her hands between the cold water faucet and her hair to put it back in order and manages a sideways ponytail that hangs limply over her left shoulder. Attending to her makeup that has begun to run from a combination of tears and water from her hair, Janet feels content with her appearance and decides to return to her desk, put on her black suit jacket to diminish the overwhelming colors emanating from her shirt and finish out her desk never mentioning that morning again.

Feeling a little better, Janet attempts to reach her desk without making eye contact with Tim again. She hides in the break room until she sees Tim leave for the copy machine. In the doorway she is met by Frank, the temp from accounting. He mumbles something about her being unworthy of any man in the building and then offers her a banana for being such a good monkey. She walks in shock back to her desk and manages to knock Tim and a stack of 20 collated reports to the floor. She opts to return to her desk, build a wall to hide from Tim's line of sight and just ignore the giggles of the secretaries at the front desk making ape faces towards Janet's desk.

At lunch, Janet sits alone. She skips her normal table that places her at the end within sight of Tim. Jenny and Kelly do not ask her why she doesn't join them. They sit and listen as Tim whispers to Frank and Sam while stealing sidelong glances towards Janet. She knows he must be telling them about her comments to him from that morning. She sinks lower into her seat hoping that will hide her from view. Her slouching only gives her a more troll like appearance and gets mashed potatoes into her hair. She is patting her hair dry with a napkin when a shadow and a foreign accent reaches her.

Looking up from her pity, her eyes meet those of Ranjit. He works in the finance department with Sam, one of Tim's friends in the office. He asks if he may sit with Janet and she reluctantly agrees. She would prefer to wallow there and finish her meal in silence, but he is insistent. They both sit in silence eating a few bites while Janet continues to stare with disdain at the table across the way. When she turns, she catches Ranjit staring at her before nervously glancing away. She had been receiving looks of pity and disgust all day, but this look was a surprise in a day of regrets. This was a sweet look of a man who saw something he enjoyed looking at and could not help himself.

Janet began to speak when Ranjit stopped her. He told her he had already heard about that morning's fiasco at Tim's desk and how quickly the office had spread word of such a personal and simple conversation. He had initially been more reserved after hearing, but instead decided to use her day as motivation. He said if someone as quiet and sweet as she had worked up the courage to finally say what was on her mind no matter what the outcome, he too would follow her lead. That is why he asked if he could join her for lunch. He stood with his half eaten lunch and turned to go, but stopped to glance back one more time.

Janet was blushing despite herself and Ranjit smiled as he told her that he had always been taken by her and had never had the nerve to come speak to her. He said she may tell people as she wished about his comments, but he did not care. He believed she was a person who has consideration for other's feelings and he thanked her for the chance to tell her how he felt without being patronizing like other unworthy people in the office. With a quick evil glance Tim's way, he stood and left the cafeteria with tray still in hand.

The rest of the day Janet spoke to no one else. She continued working without notice of the passing smirks and snark comments from coworkers. She did not even notice Tim leave a little early to avoid their typical daily conversation as they left at the same time. Janet slept soundly that night and for weeks to come. The dreams have not changed, but, every time she sees that nostalgic silver car enter from another time period and crush Tim in the street. now she smiles in her sleep.

Some Friends Don't Judge

Many people thinks it's cute how I carry my little stuffed penguin around wherever I go. They think it's sweet that Ive become so attached to an inanimate stuffed toy. When I tell them his name is Chubsy and he loves snow cones and hot dogs and never really liked the NBA's luxury tax rule, some coo quietly about the sweetness of youth and the innocence some people manage to hold onto longer than others. My big brother, Ken, isn't one of those people.

Ken tells me to get rid of Chubsy, but Chubsy is my only real friend. I'm 12 years old and maybe a little old for stuffed animals from what I gather from the malicious heckling I get at school, but the other kids don't bother me with their "penguin boy" chants and when they call me a baby. It's not like I'm sucking on my thumbs or carrying a blanket around like Linus from the Peanuts comic strip for comfort. Chubsy is really my friend. He stays either in my desk or my backpack most of the school day and only comes out to play at recess or during lunch if I eat alone.

At least Andy isn't afraid to be heckled either. He sits and eats with me some days when he can, but he has a fragile immune system due to complications when he was born and can't always come to school. Those days I hang out with Chubsy and we play twenty questions. He never guesses what I'm thinking of, but I can usually guess what Chubsy was thinking of on any given day. He's mostly transparent about his interests, but it's the days when I can't guess what he was thinking and he won't tell me that scare me a little.

I suppose Chubsy gets tired of how the other children all tease me and I won't return fire in their verbal assaults. Chubsy is a bit libertarian and believe people should take care of themselves whenever possible. Libertarian isn't my word, but that's how Chubsy describes himself. The tiny black beads of his eyes stare straight through you at times and only the smile sewn into his faded orange beak lets me know his judgements are in my best interest.

The days when Chubsy and I eat lunch together have been increasing recently as Andy hasn't been feeling up to school for about a week now. We would go see him at home, but his parents won't ever let me in the door. They say they appreciate my concern, but that I might be bringing in additional germs. They seem to be saying it directly at Chubsy who has seen better days.

He's been with me daily for 10 years now ever since my parents died and Ken and I went to grow up with our Aunt Jackie and Uncle Sam. They're nice people and Uncle Sam likes to wear a stars and stripes top hat and white beard on the 4th of July to play on his name being Uncle Sam or so I'm told. I don't really get it. Chubsy tells me it's an old characterization of the United States from armed forces draft posters. That still doesn't explain much to me, but Chubsy just keeps going with our lunches and moves on to conversations like "if I were a snow cone, what flavor would I want to be."

Chubsy was the last gift my parents got me before they passed away and he's been there whenever times are rough and when Ken isn't around to help me out. This also means he's pretty dirty over the years and washes have become fewer and fewer as he's become a little thinner around the seams. He's well loved I always say, but Chubsy demands the occasional cleaning. He likes to feel presentable when we go out to play, but doesn't mind playing in the dirt. That's usually where we are when Chubsy and I are mocked and get dirt kicked on us. I like to pretend we are in a baseball argument like managers and umpires have on TV. Chubsy just gets quiet and starts writing in his journal.

Every Corner Crossed

Steven feels the world he lives in is a pop up book. Around ever corner, the leaves and branches sway and the cars bounce in his vision like a new page turned and the scenery still settles as he walks home from the train. Though the cars and people may differ from day to day, they do not make an impact on him. The world could be crash test dummies in wigs to Steven, but he would walk home without a second thought just the same.


As he crosses another intersection, another page turns and a breeze seems to blow the swings in the schoolyard to push the ghosts of children past. The birds rebuild their tattered nests and the empty beer cans roll in the street. Season bring different flowers and colors to the trees that are blocked out by the blinders over his eyes. To him, everything repeats everyday.

He wakes up and sees the same reflection in his mirror. He brushes his teeth with the same toothbrush and locks the door at he same time each morning. He boards the same train with the same people whom he does not know. He sits in his moderately cushioned office chair for 8 hours of work with a half hour break where he gets the same lunch from his favorite local fast food restaurant.

He does not notice the new apartment buildings being built around him each day. The jackhammers are always on the sidewalks he doesn't take. The trains advertise cola products, local hospitals, schools, employments opportunities, but he stares ahead in a daze focusing through in his own world. He does not see the red head that has begun to ride the train at the same time as him over the past three weeks. He does not notice that she began getting off at his stop two weeks ago and does not see her pretending to dig for her keys at different buildings each time she walks behind him down the street.

It is a Thursday afternoon when he is forced to see her in her newly dyed black hair as she pretends to be living in the same building he does. She asks him to hold the door for her as she rushes up behind him before it closes. He does not make an effort for the door or even seem to hear her as she asks him what floor he's on when she enters the elevator with him. He will not remember what floor she pressed for herself, but, when she enters his apartment with him, he begins to wonder if he's been living in somebody else's pop up book.