the story of life

whenever you move you always find the strangest of things laced throughout your possesions. this is a short story i wrote when i was twelve or thirteen:

the sad lady lived alone. high above the city. in a small, dirty apartment which she kep surprisingly well. she wore to much makeup and drank more than she should have. her perfume always made your eyes water and she had a tendency towards bars filed with young seedy singles where she smoked too many ciagarettes and night after night, left alone.

she walked home, and having little money, paid no concern to being mugged. she didn't even carry a purse. the little money she had usually was empotied into the old cigarette machines and and barely covered to bar tab. no one ever bought her drinks.

she used the restroom more than most, perhaps to make people think she was just arriving. for the smae reason, she changed seats at the bar often.

once or twice she'd come on to the bar tender and he'd politely declined.

she had never been an attractive woman. her closet was filed with blue dresses and stacked high with empty cigarette cartons. she carried an umbrella wherever she went.

her record collection consisted of old tony bennet records most of which she'd bought second hand and were so worn down you couldn't make out the faces on the cover and the liner notes were all worn and yellow.

she had a drab little record player that must'v been made in 1930 and amplified every scartch in her scratched records. but it didn't really bother her.

she left her christmas tree up the better part of the year and never got around to opening the presents. she had bought and wrapped them all anyway.

the only pleasure she got was from a small aluminum vibrator she'd mail ordered years ago. it was the second and last love of her life.

vernon, the first love, had put a pistol in his mouth ten years before. she'd found him blood stained carpet hours later. she'd spent most of the time since drunk. he was a real estate broker. his life insurance had left her enough to ensure no need for a second job yet al the same, had afforded her no luxury.

she held a part time job at a local drugstore. some tiny hole in the wall place built three hundred years before to compete with eckard's or whoever seemed powerful at the time. she sold film and batteries and little bags of chips.

when she left she usually stole a magazine which she'd read while eatting her take out dinner on tuesdays ot tv dinners on wednesdays. she made an occasional frozen pizza wehich she never finshed almost always leaving it till it grew new forms of mold unknown to science and only then, when it began to permeate her place with rank odors, did she throw it out.

she had little plug in night lights all over the apartment. the kind that only turn on at night. the ones with the little light sensors.

she' bought them with her ten percent discount at work one day when she cashed her check. she usually bought a smal tea and sipped it throughout the day on friday's when she got paid. it was the only visible form of celbration in her life.

she looked through the pictures people had developed there hoping for lasting images of bizarre sex acts or violent crimes. sometimes she kept a shot or two and slipped the into her purse to put in her photo album at home. one could always use more good memories, she reasoned. isn't that what people take pictures of? she pinned them up to the inside wall of her closet.

she had a habit of playing out (in her mind) long love affairs with the characters she saw in movies and novels. she'd read all the daniel steele books and had posters of "an affair to remember" on her wall.

she almost never spoke to anyone in words beyond "yes" and "no". a lot of people thought she was mute.

she'd had dreams of being a movie star, or being in playboy, or dancing at carnegie hall. sometimes she stil dreamt about these things. but she knew they'd never become realities. none of her dreams ever would. but she had them anyway. it was easier than sleeping alone.

most of the time she cired herself to sleep and woke long before the sun came up. she only drank coffee out of habit and always used styrophoam cups so she didn't have any dishes to do.

she'd go to work around 8 or 9 aznd get up around three or four, when she went to find something to eat and took a hot bath before dressing. but there was no pleasure in any of these things for her, now. she rarely wore underpants becasue the ones she had were old and not sexy.

but every night she shambled into a cheap blue mini skirt and walked down to the young singles bar. and every night, a few hours late, she went home. most ngihts she'd didn't even bother undressing before she went to bed.

2002-11-11 | 2:58 p.m.
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