Tuesday

Going postal would have been easy, too easy on this day so very far away from Eden and its promised perfection. A crow circled overhead while she journeyed past a gravesite where a flowered covered mound housed the remains of a stranger whose named she’d missed on the news. The Spartan landscape had been something grander in its heyday, now it harvested junkyards that rose and collapsed like the swollen bellies of starving children.

She spit out her gum and silently remarked how it resembled a cloud caught in the mud. The horn of a nearby ferry summoned her back from odd thoughts about rodeos and runners and the sound that raindrops made on her grandmother’s tin roof. She would be late for work again. She would hear her boss call her a “stupid junky girl” and threaten to fire her after first taking away her awful puce-colored uniform and the joy of serving sweet potato fries to sweaty old men who thought it charming to demand free cups of coffee, while copping cheap feels. They didn’t know that she imagined each of them dead with their severed heads on spikes that she—their murderer—held high as she danced in the shadow of the Bastille.

Returning once again to herself, she surveyed the restaurant and its attempt to appear tropical and far away from its own bleak reality. The owner’s wife had decorated it with raffia placemats, photographs of travel posters and plastic hula dancers that lined the counter and swayed in unison to the coughs, belches and sighs of unsatisfied staff and customers.

This was how she spent her day; disappearing from the ticky-tack ticking of miseries that languished like cats in rainy day doorways waiting for a glimpse of profundity. Mundane conversations drifted in and out of her consciousness like stark sea waters impinging on the arsenal of daydreams she valiantly conjured in an attempt to escape. This was not how this day was supposed to have played out. It didn’t matter that every day played out in the same way beginning and ending with anti-bacterial soap, wallpaper peonies that she and her mother had selected when they’d decorated her room or the smell of coffee and grease that penetrated the rooms with age.

“I am one year older today,” she said looking at her reflection in the cracked mirror of the employee washroom. “I am one year closer to oblivion and eternity.” She searched her knapsack and found her iPod. It would be a long walk home and she would need the comfort of Lead Belly and Johnny Cash singing about prisoners and prisons to remind her that to the rest of the world it was just another day.