By M.A. Banash
It’s 11:55 a.m. I’m crouching on the toilet at work. Pants buckled. Jabbing my phone to download an app. I want to get pizza for dinner but I’m too—what’s the word?—nervous, uptight, about ordering on the phone. The acoustics are daunting. Figure I should finally get in step with the world and do it with an app. But the reception sucks and I don’t want to spend all afternoon in the can. Abort. I get up, flush, wash my hands and walk out.
Like yesterday I wanted to get out. Go for a walk on the greenway. But I diddled around all morning and by the time I got in the car a few stray raindrops were falling on the windshield. I drove by the entrance to the trailhead. Turned around a few hundred feet up the road. Drove right past the entrance again and headed back home. I blamed the impending rain. And parking. And that I didn’t have my umbrella. And that I was late already and would have to cut my walk short to get back home to eat lunch in time to read enough of the new book, a novel about a being trapped in ice, real and metaphorical.
Now I want to give my ham sandwich to the guy wearing a cardboard sign full of holy scripture at the intersection of South and Tyvola, but worry he doesn’t like mayo on ham. Who does? Why can’t I get over this? Or anything really?
The dead hawk in the middle of Johnston Rd. The day splitting the horizon into a singed orange through the trees and a roiling purple on top, on my way to the dumpster in the morning. The sound of babies crying the next aisle over in the grocery store, making me want to sweep everything from the shelves, the cans of sweet corn “packed in the field,” Extra-Strength stain removers, the store-brand Oreos, Sriracha Ramen noodles, “Spring Morning” scented dryer sheets, Garlic Tandoori naan, Cheddar Colby Jack cheese in aerosol cans. Nothing goes away. It just kind of changes its shape, its tone, its presence. But it never leaves. It’s always there. Here.
And now the President of the United States knows about me, too. He said that I’m like a “boiler ready to explode.” That I need to be in a hospital. How does he know about me? How can he know that? Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing.
I may want to wipe everything off the grocery store shelves, may think about what it would be like to feel the wind rush past me as I fall into the Grand Canyon, may tell myself over and over that truth, reality, happiness are only one or two slight adjustments away and that I deserve it, that tonight I will stop and tomorrow I will start. That it’s a marathon and everyone has to be in shape to run a marathon. And I’m not quite in that shape yet. Or anyone to talk to.
I just want to lie down. And rest. Sleep. No dreams. Just sleep.
Matt was born and raised in PA and has lived in the Carolinas for the past twenty years. He writes poetry and short fiction. His work has appeared in Penumbra, Poetry Quarterly, SurVision, The Blue Nib and Micro Fiction Monday.
Photo credit: Mike Mozart via a Creative Commons license.
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