Small Relevant Fictions Until They Sink In

Pria Mara with razor-burn up and across her thighs. Pria Mara sighs. It's the only way to breathe deep. Pria Mara can't sleep. She's fake, though, so, no...worries.

And what had she wanted to say earlier in the shower (the shower was a perfect metaphor...it was only ever too hot or not quite hot enough)? Oh yes. The blinking bold cliche of Sunday night. Smoking a Parliament inside a Bank of America ATM portal, frantically waving down cabs in a weary city. Weary is key. She'd been sleepy. And he'd been kind. He hadn't known her last name. He'd actually uttered the words, "I'm not looking for anything serious" before not walking her to the door. People are complicated. She always assumed. But in that paradigm, who to resent -- the Tom Cruise-or-similar perps, the pioneers? The "culture, man" with its invisibility, it smells like burned bagels, rank. Or thinking wider PM and all the feelings she notes the conspicuous lack of, all the thoughts she hates to find coda. No. It isn't any different. Not with sweet kisses, not with big heavy sighs, not BEING TOUCHED at all. That wasn't the most fun part. And lo, she's lost the most fun part, anticipating this alleged most fun part. Let's settle on "culture, man." Track the bastard down, we'll have a trial.

This is not the low point of her life. This is exactly what it sounds like. Travel like Goldilocks, seek and steal and care enough. So much work to jerk. Static, lazy little sentences. Blurts. This is what I got:

You’re an alien to basics, motherfucker. You’re a shrimp. Don’t be a wump chump, put pen to paper and slide I mean let-it-all-slide down. I’m talking to you, look hard at my face. Is this the face that launched a thousand ships? Are you experienced? Hop to it, dope.
Here’s the gimmick. Here’s the secret. No one will ever really ask too much of you. No one will ever know how to ask you for something you can’t give. Maybe I should rephrase: no one can be crueler to you than your own personal self, genius. No one else will know your weak points. No one else’s mind can throw you around like your own. There’s a lot of songs -- a LOT of songs -- people sing about ‘my own worst enemy’, realized in their own personal self, of course, you know what that means without friggity frack frack Black Tar or Ice, I know you do. You’re smart. I can see it in your cool beans. That will hurt, kid. It hurts to be smart. Being smart will always alert you to what you don’t know, and eventually to what you can’t know. Us dummies live in the shadows. We have more fun in the dark. You ever read that Plato short story? It’s like that. We like the dark. It’s all like chess, it’s all like a sacrifice, you decide what to get turned on to, you get turned on. Obvious oblivion or sharp, flinty tumors. Yeah. You know. I’m repeating myself, you know.
If you’re using any of this, I want a Mercedes Benz from your first million doll-hairs. Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz! Ha!

Colin was writing the graduation speech. He’d been hand-selected by a board of student council members and teachers to do it. That was how it worked at his school, you didn’t even apply -- a secret, somewhat anonymous board got together after hours and just yanked some hapless senior out of the yearbook. Well, he figured there was more to it than that, but it was still a strange choice -- Colin didn’t get especially good grades. He was well-liked but not the best-liked. He wasn’t rich, he wasn’t an athlete, he didn’t have a lot of hot mamas following him around all the time. He drove a Trans Am.

Fat lot of good it did the kid, the girl, sitting on piles of unwashed laundry (do your laundry add LAUNDRY to your grand poobah to do-list) waiting for the Joe to call, the Caroline to call, the Art Garfunkel to call. A lot of life was waiting for someone to call. A lot of life was waiting for someone. A lot of life was waiting. Pria met Uncle Jethro on line at the gas station buying his weekly cocktail of Crest toothpaste, two-count-em-two Lotto tickets one bag of Cooler Ranch Doritos and a Corona 40 for the left hand, a tall boy Bud for the right. “I’m balanced, like the law.” Sometimes he also bought a wad of skunky chewing tobacco but she’d never seen him swallow.

Pria Mara lived down the road from Uncle Jethro and Colin, on the crest of the hill where the block visibly started to improve. She lived by a Neighborhood Watch sign and around a mailbox coalition -- little ladies with mailboxes, they had a coalition, who knew? Pria Mara was the solo endeavor and single fruit of the loins of Paola and Gussie Mara. Her parents were quiet people. They listened to Edith Piaf on a quiet turntable, quietly cutting vegetables as the season permitted. They were good at silently exerting a will that often left Pria guilty. She could feel, for instance, their hollow disappointment waft through the kitchen (guised as garlic) the afternoon she told them “The Grad Board picked Colin Culkey to deliver the speech, not me.”
“Aren’t your grades quite a bit better than his?” her mother asked.
“It’s not just about grades.”
And: “Mmm.”
It was like sex. You just got used to it.

Did they know each other? Did they know know each other? Pria and Colin had ridden the same bus to school for the better part of ten big years. Their little points of eye contact could be counted on one hand, the words exchanged eight digits tops. He and Uncle Jethro had moved in down the block at some untraceable, unmemorable moment -- she couldn’t remember. Colin Culkey not a threat. Colin Culkey flew low below the radar. Pria Mara was a schooled soul, she cared about grades and extracurriculars. They’d carpooled on a school trip to a reconstructed eighteenth century village in the tenth grade. They’d played the license plate game and gossiped harmlessly and it had meant very little, quite little. They smiled in greeting.

Did she think he was a thick wedge of man cheese? Couldn’t say. She didn’t keep a diary.
On Graduation day, Pria Mara wore a white dress because that’s what all the girls had been asked to put on beneath their robes. Her parents kissed her perfunctorily getting into the car, getting out of the car and just as soon as they got a hold of her with diploma in hand. It had been a boring ceremony. For the Principal’s Talk and the dreaded Choral Segment she’d been picking gunk out from beneath her fingernails. When Colin Culkey stood to deliver the student address, she’d run out of fingers.
“I owe my Uncle Jethro my first million dollars for what I’m about to say,” he’d begun. This had gotten a laugh. Pria thought the timing was weird, that the laugh was preemptive and planted and perhaps tonally inappropriate. “It’s very hard to live inside mistakes. It’s so hard that most people on this planet labor in service of ignoring or obliterating them. Mistakes.” Colin Culkey wiped some nervous sweat from the rim of his mortar cap. It was very sweet to Pria. He looked at home in the words he’d chosen, like someone in their Saturday lounge pants.
After the ceremony was over, Pria looked for Colin, to tell him something about what she’d thought. She hovered behind Uncle Jethro for a moment before her parents swooped in, but realized just as space before Colin cleared that she had nothing to say really, they weren’t friends.