Death is a Squashed Bird

There are fresh apples in a bowl on the kitchen table. Green and shiny with wax. They are stacked with precision, as though to take one would cause a certain chaos to ensue. Lina sits watching the bowl of apples while she drinks her coffee from a Curious George mug and spoons small bites of oatmeal into her mouth. When she finishes Lina takes her mug and bowl to the sink, washes them, and sets the dishes in the dish drainer. She checks the time on the microwave—7:30. She picks up the mug again and wipes the outside with a towel that hangs on the oven handle. She pours a third cup of coffee.

This happens every day.

The coffee maker is set to brew at 6:30, to be ready at 6:40 when Lina gets up. She pours her first cup and takes it to the shower with her. The second cup is taken with the plain oatmeal Lina eats each morning to stave off the high cholesterol that runs in her family. She sweetens it with a teaspoon of raw organic sugar. She always sits at the small rectangular table she bought for $50 at an estate sale. The bowl of apples is not always full of apples. Sometimes it is filled with flowers, sometimes peaches, sometimes it is empty. Lina always washes her dishes immediately after use. She always checks the clock and finds she still has time. And pours another cup of coffee. She reads the paper while she sips from the Curious George mug. She finds a morbid comfort in the consistency of the news: people will always be killing people, the Middle East will always be at war, there will always be instability in Africa, gas prices will always rise, and the world as a whole will always be in a state of certain demise.

Today’s paper is particularly comforting. So much so that it makes Lina nauseated. When she graduated college she was going to join Peace Corps and help save suffering people around the world. Lina is an underwriter for an insurance agency. She makes good money and has plenty of opportunity to climb the corporate ladder. The monotony of her job makes her dizzy. She is convinced that her dizzy spells are not caused by a tumor in her brain, or an inner ear problem, or low blood sugar, but because her job causes her brain to doze off throughout the day. Lina reads page after page of death and war before finishing the final sip of coffee. She folds the paper neatly and sets it on the corner of the table to finish later. She washes her mug and sets it next to the bowl in the dish drainer. She grabs her messenger bag and her bike and leaves her apartment for work.

Every single day.

Lina named her bike James Stewart. After James Stewart. Lina doesn’t have any pets. She feels that it wouldn’t be fair to an animal to move around so much. Every day Lina decides to move. She has lived in that apartment for four years.

Today the sun is out. It’s unusually warm for April. It’s Thursday and it appears to Lina that she is the only person on her way to work. Everyone else is wearing jeans, walking with children, or friends. She wonders if there is a holiday she’s forgotten about. There isn’t. Lina often runs red lights on her bicycle because she is so apt at looking both ways. Today her cell phone rings as she is rolling through the tail end of a yellow light. She answers. Lina almost never answers her phone. It’s her friend Hannah.

“What’s up? Shouldn’t you be at work?” Lina is also apt at biking with one hand.

“There’s jell-o in my shoe.”

“Sorry, what?”

“There is jell-o in my shoe! Oh yes, jell-o. Green.”

“Why is every jell-o story about green jell-o? They make other colors.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“Right. Why do you have jell-o in your shoe?”

“I ran out of bowls.” The sound of Hannah’s laughter comes through the phone. “No, but for real, it was a quote unquote revenge prank from Jeremy. Ha ha, funny. But now I have no shoes to wear.”

“You have eight hundred and three pairs of shoes.”

“But I’m already at work. If I go all the way home I’ll be late.”

“And you just noticed the shoe jell-o?”

“I’m wearing sneakers. I walk now, remember? and my clever boyfriend put it down by the toe so I wouldn’t notice it before putting the shoes on.”

“He is a thinker. Well, I suppose I have a few extra minutes, I can go back and grab you a pair of mine. Meet me outside the coffee shop in twenty.”

“Thank you thank you! I so owe you. I will be waiting with the biggest soy latte you’ve ever seen.”

They hang up and Lina checks all ways before crossing the street and heading back to her apartment.

Not every day.

Lina suddenly notices a bird land right in front of her tire. She begins to brake, but figures the bird will fly off before her tire reaches him. He does not. The squish and crunch of the bird being flattened startles Lina, causing her to stop so abruptly that she tumbles over the front of her bike, smacking into a passing car before hitting the ground.

The small bird is now a brown and red mush of feathers on the pavement near Lina’s head. To this Lina has a visceral reaction and nearly vomits on the little dead bird.

“Are you okay!?” A man in a suit has stopped and shouts at her from the sidewalk.

Lina looks at the man. “Yes?”

She breathes for the last time.

The Underground Time Continuum

She dropped it down a gutter one day. And realized as soon as it passed her finger tips that she dropped the wrong thing. Once something is floating through a sewer system there’s no getting it back. At least not in any condition that would make a person desire to keep it. Some people throw things away. Jillian lets them drop. She watches them slip further and further from their starting points, closer and closer to the ground, or the sea, or the metaphorical manhole that is her mind. Although this particular sewer isn’t metaphorical at all, but very real. Located on the corner of University and Drifter Street, in the business district of a small city. Jillian had moved to said small city four months prior to the gutter incident in hopes that it would do her well to be away from most everything familiar. Instead, she worked at a café near a bookstore she frequented, but never bought anything. She worked at a restaurant where she ate half off. And she searched for jobs that would lead her to a career, ones that utilized her over-priced education and could actually pay the bills. Because no such job existed as of yet, Jillian worked 70 hours a week to struggle.

Jillian was slipping.

When a ship begins to sink, you empty it of all unnecessary (or all not absolutely necessary) items in order to slow, or potentially halt, the sinking process. Jillian was simply emptying the ship. She decided to rid herself of a watch. This particular watch had no significant value except that it was always seven hours ahead of her own time, and had been since the day that Jillian fainted and fell into the sea. And lived.

The problem is multi-fold. Ever since the watch decided it had it's own thoughts about time Jillian has been unable to keep time. Any time; without the use of her mobile phone, which gets its time via satellites that she has been assured are not only accurate but infallible. She is simply a drifter in the worst sense of the word. Be a drifter, yes, but never be simply adrift, was her motto. However, since the incident with the sea, Jillian had been wandering. Just in her head at first, becoming increasingly unsure of where she wanted to go or be; then one day she began to physically wander. Jillian was and still is lost. But she dropped the watch hoping that it would help her gain some perspective, though she never understood the connection between the wandering and the watch. It should, however, be noted that the watch refused to change times. If Jillian turned the little knob to the correct time, the hands just spun ahead seven hours. It was for this reason that Jillian held onto the watch for as long as she did.

It crossed her mind that the watch was foretelling something, her death, or her re-birth perhaps. But after an unconventionally long time Jillian gave up on the watch and figured it was well out of order and let it drop down a sewage drain. She immediately regretted the act, and she did not regret very much. Now watch-less and quite alone Jillian stood and stared at the timepiece splooshing toward something, she couldn’t know what. Minutes passed as she looked down the grate into the underbelly of the city. And as she stared she saw the watch pass by her eye over and over again; she stood upright and said aloud: “Fuck!”

Funeral Taxi

Jacob Hughes was buried in an oak coffin painted glossy black; his family sent him off with a champagne toast. His daughter Elizabeth waited at the grave site until her family had piled into the shiny black town cars; she sipped from a bottle left by the forgetful or careless parents of the man in the ground. She called a cab as she crossed the graveyard, dew left from the morning gathered at the soles of her boots, crept up the cuffs of her black pants. She leaned against a nearby tombstone and lit a cigarette as she waited for the cab.

When the taxi arrived twenty minutes later she stashed the champagne bottle behind the grave. As she opened the door the smell of orange peels and burnt wood greeted her. She slid across the seat so she could see the driver. She lit another cigarette and rolled down the window. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“No miss.” The driver’s accent placed him in sub-saharan Africa. He smiled a lot, revealing exceptionally white teeth against the contrast of his dark skin. “Where to?” He asked as he put his blinker on.

“Lake Harriet. Just drive around it.” She took a drag of her cigarette. “I’ll tell you when to stop.” She exhaled and tapped the cigarette against the glass.

The next few minutes were silent except for classical music in the background and the occasional laughter that entered through the open window as they passed nearby parks.

“Is it beautiful where you’re from?” Elizabeth watched the driver.

He smiled. “Oh yes miss, very beautiful. It looks like paradise.” He paused briefly. “Inside though, it is hell. Too much anger and too much suffering has made it paradise lost.”

Elizabeth watched him for a few moments before returning her gaze to the window to watch a child play frisbee with a golden retriever. “I thought people only gathered in graveyards to bury people in the movies.” Elizabeth inhaled and blew the smoke out the open window; she let the cigarette butt drop from her fingertips.

“Was it your friend or a family member?”

“Father.” Elizabeth replied without turning her gaze from the window.

“I’m so sorry.” The driver peered at Elizabeth in the rear view mirror. “I also lost my father when I was young. He was killed.”

Elizabeth looked at the driver. “I’m sorry to hear that.” She lit another cigarette and was silent for a while; she just watched the scenery of spring by the lakeside pass by. “He killed himself.”

The driver looked in the mirror again. “That is a great tragedy.”

“Is it?”

Night's Lost

The air is heavy with mist; it holds the moonlight like particles of dust and chills through autumn jackets and settles like dew on exposed skin. The street lamps struggle to light the empty streets. The bars have let out and the late night socialites have found their way to beds. Inside the bowels of this city the dim lights outside the door of a Gothic church land upon a crumpled mass.

Against the grey brick walls and the sharp angular lines of the building she appears to be a collection of blankets donated after hours. But the heels of black boots peek out from beneath her woolen coat, red curled hair swirls each time the breeze finds its way to the doorstep. She is folded with her legs curled toward her belly, the collar of her coat tucked close around her ears with whitened fingers. Her left hand resting on the door base, as one would caress the remains of a loved one long gone. And every few minutes the sound of her breath can be heard echoing in the archway as if to say: “I’m still here.”