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There were solutions that needed managing. There was the shepherd of pamphlets. There was the checker of facts and, later, the checker of spells. There was the learning on the job, and the lying on the job.
My boyfriends call these positions A Great Opportunity, but they’re company men. They carry comedic mugs to their offices and leave them on their desks overnight, little pools of sludge staining the ceramic bottoms. In the coffee grounds I divine their fortunes: my boyfriends will go gray at these same desks while purchasing cubicle-sized funeral plots.
Her nails are always painted with a sparkly glitter polish, fingertips flashing from below her neutral sleeves like hidden constellations peeking through the clouds. So these are the hands reaching down from the sky, I think, shuffling forms and contracts to guarantee me some honest employment.
“Or,” says a man at the far end of the table, “you know, maybe we could just put a pin in it?” At the suggestion of pins, there are audible sighs of relief. “Yes, yes, yes,” the room agrees. From their briefcases emerge a proliferation of tacks, which they stick into the leather flesh of the briefing books. And the meeting is done.
She liked to change the parameters of my job such that each task’s completion was just a later task for undoing. A box moved to would later move fro. The groceries carried upstairs were left to rot, molt, and travel back down the stairs and into the bin.
At first I considered this a kindness, a way of manufacturing work when there was none. I now understand it to be a sort of game, the kind of constant undoing that leaves no actual accomplishment, that makes a person question her very existence.
The gods created the First Temporary so they could take a break. “Let there be some spare time,” they said, “and cover for us, won’t you?
It takes an aggressive empathy to accurately replace a person. A person is a tangle of nerves and veins and relationships, and one must untangle the tangle like repairing a knotted necklace and wrap oneself at the center of the mess.
Pearl explains, sitting with me in the crow’s nest, that we’re looking for investors and will steal them if we have to. Soon we’ll go hunting for venture capital.
“I mean, you were born for this,” I say, and a shard of jealousy lodges somewhere in my side. Pearl frowns. “How can you say what I was born for or against?” she asks.
She shows me a knot called the evolution, named for the way it gradually tightens over time. If you leave the evolution alone for a month, it grows tighter than a gnarled root. There are evolution knots at the bottom of the ocean, buried in sunken ships, perhaps the tightest tangles you can find on the surface of the earth.
I had a glorious, shiny wristwatch to keep track of time. But time kept no track of me, and soon my arms and legs shot out and up, and I was grown.
“I can offer you gobs of experience,” he says. “What about exposure?” “I can offer you the opposite of that.” He promises me stock in his company. “When we go public, you’ll be a very rich lady!” 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.
We don’t discuss the murders, or, as Carl calls them, the business trips.
We find a rhythm in this routine. Summer is the busy season, and Carl is all booked up. “Something about the heat,” he says, “makes the blood boil.”
Files and documents come and go by way of the shredder, but murder is a task that lasts. It’s nice to have my head in something nearly steady. I’m not sure if the real steadiness will come, but a girl can dream.
Life is a stranger in a crowd whose intentions are unclear and, come to think of it, so is death.
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?
I try to find comfort with lying every day, practicing mostly on myself.
For the first time I smile, and he smiles, then a guard comes over to our table. “We don’t encourage that,” he says, and we put our smiles away, and the guard goes away too.
Some days, our home was full to bursting. Three people: six arms, six legs, thirty toes, infinite hairs, infinite pores, infinite dreams.
This was the way we ate dinner, just the two of us, creating rings of condensation, wet little galaxies where there had been none.
I could be happy and sad. It’s the way I can multitask, it’s the way two feelings can be the same feeling.
The next morning, one of our colleagues refuses to press her buttons. “What do you mean, refuse?” the supervisor asks. “I refuse,” the temp says again. “Refuse how?” “I refuse vehemently.” Harold gives me a look, mouths uh-oh. “Vehemently?” the supervisor repeats, eyes bulging. “At the very most, I refuse vehemently. At the very least, I refuse firmly. Firmly like a good mattress.” “And on what grounds?” “Which grounds where?” “On what grounds do you refuse firmly, like a good mattress?” “Not on grounds, on clouds.” “What kind of clouds?” “Moral ones,” our colleague says. “I refuse on moral
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I notice a nodule of boredom hiding in my mind, and I want to pick it. I pick it until it bleeds. Other times, boredom blossoms in my chest like a lush chord, an empty schedule, the luxury of freshly fallen snow.
Getting older is the difference between solving mysteries and studying to become one.
Happy hours and just OK hours.
At the new bank, they’re hiring human metal detectors. I drink a thick milkshake filled with special particles, and now, when someone walks past me, I can detect their metal. I can also detect their mettle, an unintended side effect.
She noted the fallacy of permanence in a world where everything ends and desired that kind of permanence all the same.
