Snaps for Subtlety

Disregarded overtones
Overused, jealous bones
Under-zealous lovesick rhymes
Can't even hardly feel.
Hanging on invisibly
Everything becomes the sea
Breaking over and over
Again, until the last
Goodbye.

Doesn't Have a Title Yet

May started as the door of her dorm room crashed open and against the wall. I hope that didn’t disturb anyone else…, she thought. It was about 11:30 at night, after all, so there were probably at least a few other people asleep or doing last-minute homework. Looking up from her homework, she saw that it was her roommate, Leah.

“I’m gonna kill him!”

May winced. She had been rooming with Leah since their freshman year of college--that made this their fourth year living together. But that didn’t mean that she was used to Leah’s temper--just that it no longer surprised her. “Er, I take it the encounter went badly, then?” she said tentatively. Leah had recently broken up with her boyfriend, John--May was a little fuzzy on the details, but she knew it hadn’t gone well.

Leah leveled her glare on May. May knew that, deep down, Leah wasn’t really mad at her, but the glare was intimidating nevertheless. “Of course it went badly.” With that, Leah stalked out of the room. Concerned, May tentatively followed her.

As she did so, she felt a guilt wash over her. This is my fault…I should have known better, with Leah’s temper. Today, Leah had gone to see John; May had suggested that Leah try to get some closure out of the relationship. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, since their breakup had been pretty tense. It didn’t seem as though it had left much room for closure, which in May’s opinion was pretty important when ending a relationship. But apparently, Leah wasn’t quite ready to have a rational conversation with John.

Fortunately, Leah hadn’t gone far--she had just stalked off to the bathroom she and May shared with another room. Even after four years of getting to know Leah, May still wasn’t any better at dealing with her anger. “Leah…?” she inquired tentatively.

“He blamed it on me. Me. I wouldn’t be so angry if he’d just accepted the blame!” After that, Leah started mumbling, so May couldn’t really catch what she was saying. There was a moment of silence before the shouting began again. “Am I really so hideous!?” A choked sob was all the warning May had before--

CRASH.

Now, May didn’t hesitate to rush into the bathroom. She let out a slight gasp at the sight that greeted her upon her entry. The mirror in the bathroom had cracked, and a few pieces of glass had fallen into the sink and onto the floor. Also on the floor was Leah, clutching her right hand with her left. Blood leaked between her fingers and down both her hands and onto her wrists.

“Oh, God, Leah…let me see that!” May crouched at her roommate’s side and carefully took the injured hand. Leah winced slightly, but she didn’t resist, so May could tell that all the fight had gone out of her. May inspected the wounds as carefully as she could. Her medical intuition was telling her that Leah’s hand was definitely broken, but it couldn’t tell her if there was any glass in the cuts or not. However, after a minute of looking carefully at the cut, it appeared that Leah was lucky.

“It doesn’t look like there’s any glass in these cuts….” May told Leah, who didn’t respond for a minute.

“This freaking hurts,” she finally mumbled.

“Yeah, I can imagine,” May replied.

“I’m going to have to go to the hospital, aren’t I?” Leah mumbled miserably.

“Well,” May hesitated. Leah didn’t know about her powers. Besides her brother, Dane, no one did. She had hoped to keep it that way, but on the other hand, it was just too difficult to watch her friend sitting on the floor, broken and upset and bleeding on the floor. And when she thought of it like that, well, she didn’t really have a choice, did she?

She carefully surrounded Leah’s injured hand with her own and focused her energy on reversing the damage that had been done. It took a few minutes, but when she was done, Leah’s hand was fully healed. Leah snatched it away from her.

“What…what did you….” Leah stared at her newly-healed hand. She appeared confused for a minute before a look of realization formed on her face. She looked at May accusingly. “You’re a mutant.”

May winced at the ire in her voice. She’d known Leah’s reaction wouldn’t likely be good, but she hadn’t been expecting it to be quite that bad. “Um, yeah, I am,” she said. There was no point in denying it; the proof was right before Leah’s eyes.

“That…you really fooled me, you know. I never suspected, even after four years. Then again, I guess you’d have had to use your power in order for me to suspect anything. Besides, you’d always seemed nice….”

“I haven’t changed! And I‘ve always been sincere,” May exclaimed.

Leah shook her head. “But you’ve lied to me for four years! When were you going to tell me what you were!?”

May sighed. “I…well, I didn’t want to take the chance that you’d react badly.” And to judge by Leah’s reaction, May had had good reason to fear.

“React badly? How could I not react badly to find out that you’re one of those lying, thieving, murdering monsters!?”

“You really think all of us are like that? I’ve never stolen anything in my life, never mind murder!”

But Leah wasn’t listening. “Do you know how my Dad died? A mutant was out on a killing spree. He saw my father walking home from work, and decided that he’d make a good victim, or something. I don’t really know what happened, but all I know is that he kissed me goodbye that morning and then walked out the door…forever! And it was a mutant’s fault. I’m not the only victim of the mutants, May. I hear about it on the news all the time. I just…God I can’t believe you’re…you’re….” Leah paused before suddenly standing up and stomping back to their room.

May hurriedly followed her. “Leah? Leah!? What’re you doing?”

Once May reached their room, Leah had a cell phone in her hand and was about to dial something. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m reporting this to the police!”

Leah had dialed one number before May had managed to snatch the phone out of her hand. “Leah, wait! What have I ever done to you? Think!” May said, holding the cell phone away.

Leah, who was taller than her, managed to snatch her cell phone back with ease. “Gee, I dunno, lied to me for four years?” Leah said sarcastically, but she didn’t attempt to dial again.

“Well…I suppose I have. But is there anything else? Have I ever hurt you?”

Leah paused for a moment. “Well, no, I suppose not…but how do I know you’ve never hurt anyone else?”

“Have you ever known me to hurt anyone else? Really? Besides, I’m a healer. Who could I possibly hurt with that?”

Leah stared at her for a moment. May almost thought she’d convinced her, but then she said, “How do I know you don’t have any other powers?”

“The only other power I have is medical intuition, I swear it.”

“What the heck is that?”

“It means that if someone’s not healthy, I can tell what’s wrong with them. I could tell that your hand was broken, Leah. You probably would’ve had to have some surgery, though I don’t know, I’m no doctor. Even if you hadn’t needed surgery, you definitely wouldn’t have been able to use that hand for weeks. I couldn’t just let you go through that, you know, not when I could fix it.”

“Is that it? Is that really why?”

“Why else would I do it!? Well, besides the fact that we’ve been friends for four years.” At this point, May didn’t know what to say to convince Leah that she wasn’t a threat.

Finally, some of the anger bled out of Leah. She appeared to be considering May‘s words. “I suppose you have a point…but there are laws, May. I can’t just let this go. I’ve got to report this,” with that, Leah started to dial again.

“Wait!” May interrupted. “Could you at least wait until tomorrow, or something?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Well…it is pretty late at night, and we’ve probably already woken up enough people already without having the police come here. It’ll probably be a little easier to deal with all this in the morning, won’t it? I mean…haven’t you had enough drama for one day?”

May could tell that she had almost convinced Leah with that last comment. “Well…,” she hesitated. May couldn’t blame her; in fact, she wasn’t really expecting Leah to actually agree. Leah wasn’t stupid; obviously it would be a good time for May to escape.

May sighed. “I’m really sorry about your father. But not all mutants are like that. I know you’re angry, but I think you know that I’ve never hurt anyone in my life. I’m not about to start now,” she said.

Leah returned her sigh. “…All right. I could use some sleep for dealing with the police, anyway. I’m pretty tired.” May almost couldn’t believe her ears. Leah was actually giving in. “But I’m calling the police in the morning,” she asserted. May almost smiled. That was the Leah she knew.

“Fair enough,” May said. “Well, good night. I’ll wait until tomorrow to say goodbye for good, I suppose,” May said before putting her homework away and getting ready for bed. As she did so, she had to wipe away a couple of tears that had started to escape. She couldn’t believe her life had changed so drastically in one night, and for the worse, at that.

Leah waited for May to get into her bed before going to bed herself. Apparently, her roommate still didn’t trust her. But she’d agreed not to call the police right away, so May counted that as a sign that Leah didn’t completely hate her.

May pretended to have fallen asleep until she heard some light snores from across the room. Leah had always snored while she slept, though May had never told her that. Fortunately, it wasn’t much of a problem, because Leah’s snores were relatively quiet. loud and May was a pretty heavy sleeper. In any case, the snores meant that Leah was asleep, so May quietly rose from her bed and snatched up her backpack. Being as quiet as possible, she went about filling it with necessities such as food, clothes, water, a toothbrush and some toothpaste, and the money her parents had given her to use in case of emergencies. May had never been one to defy the law, but she had no desire to go to jail (or worse; she’d heard a few horror stories about the government and mutants) for doing absolutely nothing wrong.

She pondered bringing her cell phone for a moment before deciding that she wouldn’t need it. She wouldn’t need to call anyone, and she didn’t think she wanted anyone to try to contact her. She turned to her laptop. That was a more difficult decision; she wasn’t entirely sure if she’d get too many chances to use it, but it could certainly come in handy.

She jumped as Leah let out a sudden, slightly louder snore before rolling over and continuing to sleep. As May looked at her, she abruptly realized that her roommate was letting her escape. She had no doubt that Leah had every intention of calling the police in the morning--after all, even despite having a mutant friend, it was doubtful that all the prejudice she had over them was suddenly gone. Besides, Leah had never been one to defy the law either.

Yet May had been a good roommate and friend to Leah over their years in college together. And really, May had done her a favor by healing her friend. May decided that this was Leah’s way of thanking her; at the same time, she would be calling the police in the morning, so she could avoid changing her views on mutants. This would have been hard for Leah (especially given how her father had died). But there was no way that it hadn’t occurred to Leah that May would try to escape if given the opportunity. And this was the perfect opportunity.

Impulsively, May grabbed a sticky note from her desk, along with a pen. She scribbled a short note on it and stuck it to her laptop. Then, with one last glance around her room, she slid her dorm room window open. Fortunately, it was pretty close to the ground, so it was fairly easy for her to slip out the window and into the night, into a new life.

“Leah:

I won’t be needing this where I’m going. Thank you for a great four years.

-May”

This is (Not) a Story

This is a story. Stories give a series of events that tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end – in theory – and at the end, there is a climax, the pinnacle of excitement in the series of (usually interrelated) events, and there is a resolution, where all of the problems discussed in the story get tied up neatly so that in the end, you have a nicely wrapped package that someone somewhere will want to open, and when they do, out will come the story.

So this is a story:

A woman walks into a bar. She sits down. She looks casually around the room, because she is trying to find a man. This man is a weapons dealer, who deals in what one might call slightly unconventional weapons, especially for a weapons dealer to be dealing. So she sits, and she waits, looking around the room even though she doesn’t know what this man is supposed to look like. Eventually, he sidles up to her at the bar, and under the rouse of buying her a drink, he slips her a dust-buster. But this is no ordinary dust-buster. Leaning in to kiss the man on the cheek, presumably in thanks for buying her a drink, the woman slips the money that she is exchanging for the dust-buster into the man’s pocket.

The exchange being finished, the woman leaves the bar and goes home to her abusive husband. Creeping to the linen closet in the hall, the woman replaces the old dust-buster with the new one from the weapons dealer at the bar, and then conveniently bumps into the vase in the living room, knocking it over, and causing it to shatter into a million tiny pieces. Her husband comes running and screaming into the room, a sort of manic glee evident in his face, and we think he is going to hit her – he moves as though he will hit her – but he doesn’t. He goes to the linen closet and he takes out the dust-buster, the one from the weapons dealer in the bar, and just as he turns it on in order to clean up the mess, the dust-buster explodes. The abusive husband is dead, the wife disposes of the body, goes on with her life, and lives happily ever after.
So, if that is a story, then what follows is most certainly not a story.

It begins with a lawyer – but it is not important that this person was a lawyer. It is only important that this person walked to work everyday, and when he walked to his office, he took the same route without fail. As far as this lawyer knew, no one had noticed or cared that he took the same route everyday. He was incorrect. Someone had noticed.

That someone was a woman who worked in a similar office, which looked down on a street that happened to be a part of the lawyer’s route to work. Not only had this woman, who was a magazine editor of a not-too-great-but-not-bad-either sort of publication, noticed him, but in fact she made a point of watching him walk to work every single morning. She needed to look down from her window on the seventh floor to see this lawyer on his way to work because he passed by her window at the exact same time every morning – but not by the measure of any clock.

Every single day, that lawyer passed by this magazine editor’s window exactly four minutes after the newspaper vendor down the street opened (she presumed because the lawyer stopped there to get a paper every morning, and it took him four minutes to get from there to her window), and therefore exactly two minutes before her own boss arrived at the office. She needed to know when he would arrive because it gave her just enough time to hide the stack of papers that she kept on her desk whenever her boss wasn’t around. Since the newspaper vendor did not open at a specific time, she couldn’t use the clock to gauge how much time she had before the arrival of the editor-in-chief.

The editor had to hide the stack of papers because if the editor-in-chief were ever to see them, then he would know that she was having an affair with Ed in accounting, and due to the strict rules on intra-office dating, both the editor and Ed in accounting would surely lose their jobs. So she was very grateful to the lawyer on the street because he made it possible for her to read her secret love notes in the morning and keep her job, which made her happy and kept her in a good mood throughout the day, especially when he was a bit later than usual and therefore allowed her to read through more of the old notes.

And when the editor was in a good mood, so was the staff, especially the editor’s secretary. This secretary, unlike the lawyer and the editor, did not much like her job, but it was made far more enjoyable when the editor was happy, because when she was happy, she gave her secretary more time for lunch. Normally, this secretary would only get the mandatory thirty-minute lunch break that everyone else got, but on the days when the editor got to read through all of her old love notes, and therefore was in an especially good mood, she allowed her secretary to take a full hour.

On these days, when she was allowed an hour for lunch instead of just a half of one, the secretary left the office building and walked the five or so minutes that it took to get to the little deli down the street. At this deli, she always ordered the same thing, a pastrami sandwich on rye, but it was not the sandwich that brought her to the deli – it was the waiter. Now, typically delis don’t have waiters, but this particular waiter was the nephew of the owner, and being his nephew and a college student, the owner felt obligated to give the boy a job. Unfortunately, his nephew was useless in the kitchen, so he would have made him the cashier except that he already had an excellent cashier. And so, he made the boy his waiter, even though it was more or less unheard of for a deli to have such a thing.

In any event, this waiter, over time, grew to understand that the secretary did not come to the deli for his uncle’s delicious sandwiches. He knew that she came to the deli to see him, and he knew that if he flattered her profusely, and flirted with her as he brought the extra pickle that she always requested, she would leave a hefty tip when she went back to her office at the end of the hour.

On the days when the secretary came in for lunch and left a large tip, the waiter usually used that tip to treat himself to a drink at the end of the day. When he left his uncle’s deli, he walked the couple of blocks to his favorite bar, and took a seat in his favorite spot – right near the bartender. He liked this spot not because he liked the bartender per se, although she was very friendly, but because this particular bartender was an excellent listener, and she never seemed to mind when the waiter talked about the stresses and problems in his life.

Sometimes he felt guilty about venting to the poor girl, but he’d always felt that he could be himself with her, and she didn’t seem to mind the company. In fact, some nights she would even stay with him long after the bar had closed and, on the days when the waiter didn’t have to get to class for a while, well into the morning and the two of them would just talk.

The bartender only worked nights, so it wasn’t a problem if she didn’t get home until early morning. She knew that her roommate preferred this, because despite her late-night job, she had always been an early riser, and so she usually woke up just a few minutes before her roommate and beat him to the bathroom for a shower. But, when she stayed out all night talking to the waiter from the deli a couple blocks over, her roommate was able to get the first shower of the morning, which always made him happy because he could get down to the street earlier and open his newspaper stand before the two finely-dressed gentlemen showed up.

The newspaper vendor hated getting there to find them waiting for him. It made him feel late, and one of the reasons that he had his own business was so that he would never have to feel late. So as often as he could, mainly whenever the bartender stayed out late so that he could get the first shower in the morning, he beat them to his spot on the curb and set up his stand. One of the men – his briefcase made the newspaper vendor suspect that he was a lawyer – always just grabbed the day’s paper and went on his way. The other, some sort of fancy magazine editor, took a couple of minutes to survey all of the covers before making his choice. As he watched the two gentlemen disappear further down the street, on those mornings when he beat them to his spot, the newspaper vendor smiled, glad that he had helped them get on with their days a little bit earlier than usual.