Satan's Dollar Store & other stories

The Fullness

M woke up on December 24th and the world was small and red. This was not like other days. I was saving you for the bad times, she told him the other day. Because I want you still around when I change, and you know I will change. I always do. But E said back, I don’t want to just be around like always, like I always am. What makes you think I’ll be here, just because I will be, just because I always am. Because you always are, she said. 

E was in the kitchen, burning the toast. One of those things that made her crazy. Here I am, she thought, trying to live my life to the fullest, because you know that every day might be your last and if you don’t do it now when will you, and there he is in the kitchen every time, every goddamn time he’s in the kitchen, burning the toast. 

The world will be smaller and redder than usual, M decided. Whether it is or it isn't. There are really just two kinds of things, those that are and those that aren’t. In the cult they’d recommended she stop using the words ‘things’ and ‘just’ and ‘always’ and ‘because’, but just because she always said those things all the time was no reason at all to stop. 

What would it mean to live your life to the fullest, E was wondering. If you were busy measuring in the back of your mind, would that detract from the fullness? The worrying about whether or not you were actually doing it? Or did it mean simply to jump off cliffs and out of planes or dart through traffic on a bicycle? If that is so, then E had already lived his life to the fullest, though not willingly in all cases. And what if you had already lived your life to the fullest? If you stopped, even for a day, would that take away from the fullness? Would it begin to empty like a leaky bathtub? And would you hear that sound you imagine you hear when you duck your head under the water and is it the motion or is it the breathing or is it the cooling or is it really a leak? 

M had seen bigger and bluer days, days that jumped off the shelf and shattered on the floor, and days that danced around the room doing cartwheels. I am alive, M decided, as always deciding something. The difference between you and me, she told him, is that I am decisive and you are not. He peered over his newspaper and raised one eyebrow in the way she detested, and muttered, do you really think so? You might be right. 

She would begin the day with a smile on her face, and then the Mozart! Of all things, at six o’clock in the morning. And she knew he was hiding behind the kitchen counter waiting for her to come storming down the rickety steps and turn off the stereo with a shout, and she hated it that he was laughing at her again. Or maybe he loved his Mozart in the morning and simply couldn’t help himself. One way or another he managed to crush the beginnings of her different day every time. 

The thing is, M decided, I would have a perfect life if it wasn’t for him, if only if not for him. I would wake up in a different world every day and it would be glorious, spectacular. Yellow and bright. The birds would be the ones singing Mozart, yes they would, and the newspaper would have only items of interest instead of the usual boring stuff about warlike maneuvers in the Balkans. Yes, items of interest, such as how many millions of mummies there used to be in Egypt before the British Railroad sold them off for fuel. 

But no, he’s always there, every morning, burning the toast, and playing the Mozart, and grinding the juice in that noisy little juice grinder, how she hated the thing. She would throw it away first thing this morning. No, she would break it first, and then she would throw it away. Yes. Decisive as always, she marched to the kitchen where even now the little grinder was grinding away in that horrible little way. 

There were rabbits on the lawn outside the small house, apparently not bothered by the dog which dozed by the firewood stacks. One of these days, E declared, someone will go shooting at those rabbits, and M thought, does he have to always talk that stupid talk about somebody shooting something? He was going to drive her insane.