Temporary

by Hilary Leichter

Never would she claim credit for the new, fresh coffee she brewed, for a fresh pot of coffee without credit is like a love note in your locker—it’s just magic, and if you take credit, you might as well not have made any coffee in the first place, at all, not ever, never! It’s like, What, you want a medal for making coffee? Know what I mean?”

No one is ever exactly who they claim to be, but some people are closer than others. Who’s to say the prisoner Pearl is still even Pearl after all her time away? Who’s to say I’ll still be myself a year from now? Twenty years on, someone might be more my current self than I ever could have been.

She didn’t have to explain. I already knew it in my bones, in my knees, in the way you understand things about yourself even before you hear them spoken aloud.

A forty-minute sneeze is something I know how to do, and it’s not even listed on my resume.

We drew the scotch for which to hop.

We drew doodles in our leather-bound planners, but only on the first page and the last. The days have only so much room for frivolity.

“You’re on our rock, sweetie. You’ve been enlisted as a human barnacle by the Wildlife Preservation Initiative. Remember?”

Murder isn’t a brand that usually goes public, I think, at least not by choice. But I don’t dare turn up my nose at a share of his shares.

“Gentle’s debatable,” he says. “Man: also debatable. More like a monster, really.”

Then she started crying, like a woman who realizes that even though the piano didn’t fall on her head, it fell on someone else’s head instead, and not just any someone, but her younger sister, a brilliant bank robber in her own right with so much potential, so much potential, potential like a piano prodigy, and she suddenly hated the word potential, because it’s either wasted or lived up to and guess who was no longer up to living in this particular scenario.

The universe doesn’t subtract, it just replaces. Matter isn’t created or destroyed, it’s just replaced, it just changes, it’s just misplaced. And if nothing is ever really lost, how can we ever mourn?

Sometimes a woman will request the prospectus for a murder and make suggestions to Carl based on what she knows will cause the victim additional pain. Torture isn’t a thing I’d considered. Sometimes a man will request the prospectus for a murder and make suggestions to Carl based on what he knows will cause the least pain possible.

We would fall asleep on a pile of papers and I would wake up with a headache and a stomachache and a bitch hangover, which is the kind of hangover you get in the morning after spending the whole night talking shit, saying crap, acting like a huge and massive jerk, allowing all the horrible things in your head to somehow make their slimy way out of your mouth.

When her nails are tough and dry, she sits on the floor in sweatpants, assesses her life choices, enumerates her achievements, flirts with a pile of resumes, finds someone to replace me.

the distance between our interpretations somehow made my chest swell, for his effort, for the aching separation between his intended outcome and the actual result, fueled only by the goodness in his heart.

This is like a surprise party where they forget to invite the surprised party. They reminisce about shopping for donuts, picking out streamers. The piñata, the balloons. The party expands and replaces the person.

Three people: six arms, six legs, thirty toes, infinite hairs, infinite pores, infinite dreams.

I liked when my mother had ideas about eating at the coffee table. Us, sitting at the dining table, and she would pick up her plate and walk across the room. I would pick up my plate and follow her. We would put our plates on the coffee table and pull it closer, close enough to touch our knees. There was a little shelf below the table, a kind of undertable, and that was where we placed our tall, cool drinks. This was the way we ate dinner, just the two of us, creating rings of condensation, wet little galaxies where there had been none. “Much better,” my mother said.

Just us on Saturdays, and we didn’t get dressed. We stayed in our sleepwear until it was time to go back to sleep.

My mother was filling in for the Funicular. She stretched herself from mountain to shore, stretched her skirt into a bindle to carry a skirtload of tourists, or so she said.

What I mean to say is that my mother was larger than life. My mother was very tired at the end of the day, when she turned out my lights and told me stories.

“It doesn’t matter what you offer,” the Director of Pamphlets says, laughing. “It doesn’t matter what you say, as long as they take a pamphlet.”

“Can you just skip the stories and give me the pamphlet?” one man says. I give him a pamphlet gladly, and he places it on a pile of other pamphlets from other companies, on the handy pamphlet table in his home’s entryway, an aedicula to life’s mysterious accumulation of printed collateral.

There is certain work that cannot be done well and cannot be done poorly. It can only be done or undone. There is no success metric for a job that simply keeps me busy, so I ignore her empty praise.

“Yeah,” and she sounds disappointed by my lack of excitement. “Like, you know, a regular job.” She lobs the word regular in the manner of an eye roll.

“I didn’t mean it like that!” she cries. “Don’t worry. When you know, you just know!” I hope she won’t say the next thing, but she says it anyway. “Sometimes these things happen when you’re not looking for them.”

“We need to treat ourselves kindly, you know!” Anna declares. “Especially right now, with all the bombings and the fugitives. And I heard something about a wild beast, like a dragon? What even is this life?” She shakes her head, then laughs. A real, happy laugh.

But the word stay has two syllables in her mouth—stay-ee—and I recognize that second syllable. It’s the extra square foot, the exit where I’m supposed to see myself out.

The last time you see someone is never the last time you see them. The empty space a person leaves behind retains heat; a retina will preserve a face for later.

My favorite boyfriend devotes himself exclusively to pumpkin spice this time of year, in his cocktails and his coffee and his attitude. A one-man harvest for the coming cold.

“And I’m going to be you!” Farren says. Good old Farren, faring so very well for herself, fare thee well to me.

“We were loyal!” yells my earnest boyfriend, whom I’ve never heard get mad, not once, not ever. “We only spooned each other three times, four times maybe, tops.”

You who botch assignments, as if there’s anything more valuable in this infinite world than a day’s worth of work.” “It was just that one job! Just that one time!”

I click my former employer’s boots against the barstool in celebratory rhythms. If I return the boots, she’ll stop trying to get in touch. I don’t want her to stop trying to get in touch. I want the defiance of a life spent almost in touch.

The plurality of their lives, I think, trying to cast a line to a person, place, or thing I can claim for myself.

They can watch movies all day long. They can just sit here and watch as many movies as they want. How many days are like that? It’s a good kind of day to have.

At the new bank, they’re hiring human metal detectors.

She guided the temporaries through their placements, preserved their infinite time in this infinite world. To perhaps ensure for them something more sacred than survival.