Temporary

by Hilary Leichter

I worry about living the life of an unwashed vessel. The mold that fissures the leftover coffee, floating like a lily pad on forgotten dregs.

I didn’t want to miss out either. I don’t. I’m filling out forms, always. I’m shaking hands. I’m gainfully employed, again and again and again. The surest path to permanence is to do my placements, and to do them well.

Sometimes he perches on a post, nose to the sky, flapping his arms ever so slightly. “He’s filling in for our parrot, Maurice,” the executive assistant explains.

I knew I, too, would always find myself somewhere new, someone new, for the rest of my life, like my ancestors, like theirs, like theirs, like theirs.

I learned to do everything in forty minutes. Some tasks that were shorter I extended for the sake of clarity and precision. Brushing my

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

The house was a house for a family, and I was filling in for a ghost.

In the distance we see other rocks, other people filling in for other species. Barnacle Toby points out the mussels, the clams, the whelks, a woman struggling, desperate to shrink into a shell. And farther in the distance still, halfway around the world, the reef that stopped living long ago, now renewed with life, a species replaced, then another, another.

I take a dryer sheet and set it on my forehead like a veil, then lean forward and slip the sheet down my nose and into the machine with the fresh, clean clothes.

Maybe the banks are all the same bank. Maybe the people are all the same people. Maybe I’m my sister and my sister is me, and in this way, living

is also a state of mourning.

how when every other door had closed to them, these doors had opened, and beggars can’t be choosers, and isn’t that just the way you find your purpose sometimes, by looking into the last available option and meeting your sorry self, standing there at the end of the line?

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.

cross a stream and pass through a clearing, through several gates of wood and wire, through a metal detector and an intrigue detector and a sorrow detector and a new kind of detector that detects schemes, patent pending,

“You can call me Harold. After all, I’m not a barnacle anymore.” “Harold,” I say, “what are you doing here?” “Kicked out of the ocean for changing the emotional pH of my sector. My feelings were killing all the surrounding aquatic life. I have that effect on people, and apparently also on shrimp.”

She opens a hatch and shoves our colleague out into the moral clouds. “What a waste of a morning!”

“They make it so confusing,” she says, “but between you and me, it’s really all the same bank. Just one bank. All those robberies barely make a dent.”

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.

The sky would not meet the sea, and so a temporary folded herself into a thin connecting strip of mist and air, henceforth called a horizon.

The world accumulated more stuff but stayed the same size. Clutter gave the impression of completion, but the First Temp knew there was still work to be done. “Get clever,” she told her colleagues.