Percent Daily Values
Percent Daily Values
2400 words // PG-13
experimental/absurd fiction (first draft)
You were never good at having an imagination.
A chocolate glazed donut contains thirty percent of the daily recommended saturated fat. This is a fact. You write the facts.
You got your job at this graphics company because of your strong editing skills. They started you as a copywriter, someone to look over the food labels they created. You weren’t even supposed to be writing nutrition fact labels, but with food companies always making fat-free options and reducing serving size, the designers saw it as a tedious side project, something to shove onto an entry-level copywriter. The brands think they’re helping fight obesity in America. Really, they’re just giving you more work to do.
-
Your husband Marty buys you a book of Mad Libs because he is afraid of your lack of imagination. It starts with a thin flipbook with a half-peeled sticker reading $1.99. “Don’t try to guess what the right words will be,” he says. “Try to be creative.”
This is how you fill it in: Yesterday I went to the MALL to BUY SHOES. At the MALL I saw MARTY, who was there to BUY PANTS. Together we WALKED HAPPILY until we reached the EXIT and we said to each other, “SEE YOU LATER.”
Marty frowns as he reads over your page. You tell him to do one, then. His chooses words like HEMORRHOIDS, VODKA, POOPIE.
“What decent thirty-two year old Anthropology teacher would think of the word poopie?” you ask him.
“I teach eighteen-year-olds,” he says. “All I hear is the word poopie.”
Sometimes you think Marty stays in his teaching job so he can relieve the glory days of undergraduate. You were both seniors when you met - you were in your editing internship and he played drinking games and read comic books. He wanted to explore ancient civilizations and travel the world. He’s still never left the country.
You know he leaves early in the morning so he can grab a coffee on campus and read the free university newspaper, watching the students and overhearing stories of last night’s party. You thought it would be something he grew out of. You still think it is something he will grow out of, because nothing would be sadder than a forty-year-old man who thinks he can still sink that island shot in beer pong.
-
All Nutrition Analysis Reports are now emailed straight to you with instructions on how the label needs to look: vertical standard, horizontal standard, two column, linear, bilingual, for children (the font is four times bigger on a nutrition label for children), and so on. You have almost fifty saved templates on your computer.
They’ve kept you at this job writing labels for six years because you’ve never once had a typo. You don’t daydream at work; you write labels. Fiber. Sugar. Protein. Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your daily values may be higher or lower depending on your calorie needs.
You know Marty is only trying to help when he buys you the mad libs so you pack them in your purse, take them to work with you. You start doing them on your lunch break, because for eight hours a day you type up a given set of words and numbers. You are never allowed to write FART or PENIS and get away with it. They’re childish and you’re a grown woman, but it does make you feel like you still have some imagination left in that fact-filled brain of yours.
Now, you’re up to a book a week. They’re these slim little things; you’ve found a good deal at the local bookstore where they sell a five pack for $6.99. You only need to stop there once a month.
Marty grins too wide whenever he sees you working on one. That night, you’re in bed in your favorite grey sweatpants and reading glasses, working on a book of holiday-themed mad libs.
His smile is still lingering when he tells you, “I’m going to the moon next week, you know.”
“You are, are you?” You don’t look up from the booklet. One verb left to fill in. You write JUMP, but then erase it. You write PLOP and smile.
“Are you gonna miss me?” Marty asks, climbing in bed and cozying up to your side. He looks over your shoulder at the words you’re choosing. You wish he wouldn’t.
“There’s no oxygen there,” you respond. You look over your choices one final time. You’re satisfied. You read it through.
“Aren’t you going to ask me how I’m going to get there?”
“How are you going to get there?” you ask automatically.
His silence prompts you to look over at him. He’s got that frown on his face again, the one he gives you when you don’t play along.
“You’re no fun sometimes,” he says. Marty scoots back over on the bed, reaching for the television remote.
-
When you first started dating, Marty was attracted to your logical approach to things. It’s your best feature, your level-headedness and calm rationality. Sometimes you think you could be Obsessive Compulsive. You just know the volume on the car radio must always be on an even number. You count the seconds when you brush your teeth, when you fill a pot with water at the sink. You count the steps in between cracks in the sidewalk. You told him all of these things in the restaurant the first time he took you out. You thought they were interesting bits of your personality.
Because of your logical nature, you knew that the sweat stains under his shirt were probably because he was nervous, and from this detail you thought he probably didn’t date often. You knew that he was trying hard to impress you, trying to think of clever bits of dialogue that would make him seem charming. His jokes came across as too forced, and you thought he had probably read somewhere that there’s nothing better than a guy that can make a girl laugh.
As he sat there struggling through a joke about politicians, you watched the way he used his hands to emphasize his speech (he still often relies on air quotes to get his sarcasm across, it’s annoying but you’ve learned to deal with it). You noticed the tiny dots of dried blood on his chin and cheeks, and you thought of how there were probably little torn pieces of toilet paper stuck to them just minutes before he left his house to come pick you up. You thought he would look better with stubble anyway, but he must have read somewhere that he should be clean-shaven on a first date, just like he read somewhere that he should tell a lot of jokes.
-
“What should I wear to meet them?” Marty asks, standing in front of your closet, hands on his sides.
“Who?”
“The moon people.”
“Oh, I don’t know, wear a jacket, I guess.”
“What if there are moon babes though?”
“It’s awfully cold, in outer space.”
“I bet there are moon babes.”
“You should pack a scarf.”
“What if I brought a moon babe back to Earth? Where do you think I should take her to dinner?”
“Oh har, har.”
“No really. You write the labels for the products. You tell me the place. Where can I get a meal with less than 15 grams of fat? I bet moon babes watch their figures.”
“Piss off.”
-
You waited five dates until you went back to Marty’s apartment. Because you knew what “going to his apartment” would mean, you paced it out exactly to five dates. Twenty-four days since you’d met. It was a nice even number.
And because you knew this was coming after date four, when you made out in his car for fifteen minutes like a bunch of high school freshmen, you took a long, careful shower that evening, going methodically slow in shaving. You wondered what sex with him would be like. You hadn’t had sex in over a year, since you got that editing internship. You were glad you met someone outside the office this time.
After you toweled off, you applied lotion thoroughly, stopping in places normally skipped when applying lotion, spraying perfume in those little areas where you know he will be excited to find your fresh, floral scent. The crook of your neck. In your cleavage. Just below your belly button.
Even though it had only been five dates, and because you liked Marty more than you have ever liked another guy before, you and your logic thought he would be a good match for you. Marty, with his love of prehistoric civilizations and his bad jokes and his fanciful ideas. You thought you could balance each other out.
-
The next week he’s on to Mars.
“The moon was nice,” he says, his tone light and thoughtful. “But it wasn’t exotic enough. Those moon babes were all tourists. No one settles down there. I want locals.”
“Okay,” you say. This is annoying. He is annoying.
“I mean, what would Mars culture be like, ya know? What are their customs? This is an anthropological trip. This is a work trip. It’s not for fun.”
“I wouldn’t imagine Mars to be much fun, anyway.”
You have grown tired of these games.
“I’m going to be gone for like, a year and a half, you know. It takes an awfully long time to get there.”
“Then I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
Marty texts you when you are halfway through your set of cereal box labels for the day. The double-beep notification on your phone echoes in your tiny office, the only noise next to your fingers on the keyboard.
You ignore it, because Marty texts a lot because he’s got plenty of breaks in his day, but you are in the middle of something and you hate stopping a label once you get going. But your phone goes off again, three times in a row and now you’re compelled to know what he’s sending you.
I wont be home right after work.
found some moon rocks, need to study them.
ps you were right about mars. canceling the trip. It wouldn’t have been fun.
You tuck your phone back in your purse and go back to work, annoyed at the interruption. You aren’t particularly upset, just disappointed. The fact that you will once again be eating dinner alone while watching Fraiser reruns is something you’ve come to deal with.
-
The moon is a room at the Marriot two blocks from campus.
A room key with the number 434 in elegant script: this is how you get to the moon. This where the moon babes live. This is where your husband is. You are sure of this, because when you start the laundry that night and shake out his work pants from the day before, the plastic card falls out of the back pocket. You thought he was leaving early and coming home late so he could stay on campus longer. You were sure of it. It logically made sense.
You wonder if he’s with one of the eighteen-year-olds he teaches. You wonder if she looks at nutrition fact labels. You wonder if she ever thought about who wrote that label, or if she’s just looking to stay under 20 percent of her daily recommended fat. Moon babes have got to watch their figures.
You’re on your way to the hotel because you can’t just sit here and do nothing. You don’t know what you will do, but you have to go. You wonder what you will find when you insert the key and throw open the door. This is most likely a spare, a copy, something he forgot he left in his pants because he’s got one in his wallet too.
You feel disgust deep in your stomach when you wonder if she does the dirty things you’d never do. You think back to the most spontaneous, most sexual thing you’ve done. All that comes up is that one time you went down on him in the bathroom at this party.
Then, you had only known him five weeks. You had only slept together twice. You still counted the dates and this was date eight, even though it was his friend’s birthday party and there were more people in that tiny house than you know is allowed by the fire department, but that was when you knew who Marty was, past the blood dots on his chin and the sweat armpits and bad jokes. You knew that he used to write his own comics when he was younger. You knew the nickname he had for every one of his friends. You knew that he wanted to make an anthropological discovery one day that would make a significant contribution to society.
And you also knew what it meant when he sat on the closed toilet lid in the bathroom at that party and started undoing his belt. So you did things like use a lot of tongue and suck your cheeks in real tight. He kissed you right after and you briefly wondered why, but then you thought if someone had just done that for you in the bathroom of a party that you’d kiss them, too.
And that’s what you can’t stop thinking about as you drive to the hotel: you think that at one point in your life, he kissed you right after and neither of you cared. You are sure in knowing that it was the one and only time you have not rushed to the sink afterwards to rinse your mouth. Maybe he is looking for someone to not care anymore. Maybe he is looking for someone that does more than plug in numbers for a living without credit, a job a computer could do. Maybe he is looking for someone to play along with his stories about outer space. Maybe if you had more of an imagination, you would have known what the moon was. Marty has always been afraid that you have no imagination because he is afraid he did not marry the right person.
2400 words // PG-13
experimental/absurd fiction (first draft)
You were never good at having an imagination.
A chocolate glazed donut contains thirty percent of the daily recommended saturated fat. This is a fact. You write the facts.
You got your job at this graphics company because of your strong editing skills. They started you as a copywriter, someone to look over the food labels they created. You weren’t even supposed to be writing nutrition fact labels, but with food companies always making fat-free options and reducing serving size, the designers saw it as a tedious side project, something to shove onto an entry-level copywriter. The brands think they’re helping fight obesity in America. Really, they’re just giving you more work to do.
-
Your husband Marty buys you a book of Mad Libs because he is afraid of your lack of imagination. It starts with a thin flipbook with a half-peeled sticker reading $1.99. “Don’t try to guess what the right words will be,” he says. “Try to be creative.”
This is how you fill it in: Yesterday I went to the MALL to BUY SHOES. At the MALL I saw MARTY, who was there to BUY PANTS. Together we WALKED HAPPILY until we reached the EXIT and we said to each other, “SEE YOU LATER.”
Marty frowns as he reads over your page. You tell him to do one, then. His chooses words like HEMORRHOIDS, VODKA, POOPIE.
“What decent thirty-two year old Anthropology teacher would think of the word poopie?” you ask him.
“I teach eighteen-year-olds,” he says. “All I hear is the word poopie.”
Sometimes you think Marty stays in his teaching job so he can relieve the glory days of undergraduate. You were both seniors when you met - you were in your editing internship and he played drinking games and read comic books. He wanted to explore ancient civilizations and travel the world. He’s still never left the country.
You know he leaves early in the morning so he can grab a coffee on campus and read the free university newspaper, watching the students and overhearing stories of last night’s party. You thought it would be something he grew out of. You still think it is something he will grow out of, because nothing would be sadder than a forty-year-old man who thinks he can still sink that island shot in beer pong.
-
All Nutrition Analysis Reports are now emailed straight to you with instructions on how the label needs to look: vertical standard, horizontal standard, two column, linear, bilingual, for children (the font is four times bigger on a nutrition label for children), and so on. You have almost fifty saved templates on your computer.
They’ve kept you at this job writing labels for six years because you’ve never once had a typo. You don’t daydream at work; you write labels. Fiber. Sugar. Protein. Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your daily values may be higher or lower depending on your calorie needs.
You know Marty is only trying to help when he buys you the mad libs so you pack them in your purse, take them to work with you. You start doing them on your lunch break, because for eight hours a day you type up a given set of words and numbers. You are never allowed to write FART or PENIS and get away with it. They’re childish and you’re a grown woman, but it does make you feel like you still have some imagination left in that fact-filled brain of yours.
Now, you’re up to a book a week. They’re these slim little things; you’ve found a good deal at the local bookstore where they sell a five pack for $6.99. You only need to stop there once a month.
Marty grins too wide whenever he sees you working on one. That night, you’re in bed in your favorite grey sweatpants and reading glasses, working on a book of holiday-themed mad libs.
His smile is still lingering when he tells you, “I’m going to the moon next week, you know.”
“You are, are you?” You don’t look up from the booklet. One verb left to fill in. You write JUMP, but then erase it. You write PLOP and smile.
“Are you gonna miss me?” Marty asks, climbing in bed and cozying up to your side. He looks over your shoulder at the words you’re choosing. You wish he wouldn’t.
“There’s no oxygen there,” you respond. You look over your choices one final time. You’re satisfied. You read it through.
“Aren’t you going to ask me how I’m going to get there?”
“How are you going to get there?” you ask automatically.
His silence prompts you to look over at him. He’s got that frown on his face again, the one he gives you when you don’t play along.
“You’re no fun sometimes,” he says. Marty scoots back over on the bed, reaching for the television remote.
-
When you first started dating, Marty was attracted to your logical approach to things. It’s your best feature, your level-headedness and calm rationality. Sometimes you think you could be Obsessive Compulsive. You just know the volume on the car radio must always be on an even number. You count the seconds when you brush your teeth, when you fill a pot with water at the sink. You count the steps in between cracks in the sidewalk. You told him all of these things in the restaurant the first time he took you out. You thought they were interesting bits of your personality.
Because of your logical nature, you knew that the sweat stains under his shirt were probably because he was nervous, and from this detail you thought he probably didn’t date often. You knew that he was trying hard to impress you, trying to think of clever bits of dialogue that would make him seem charming. His jokes came across as too forced, and you thought he had probably read somewhere that there’s nothing better than a guy that can make a girl laugh.
As he sat there struggling through a joke about politicians, you watched the way he used his hands to emphasize his speech (he still often relies on air quotes to get his sarcasm across, it’s annoying but you’ve learned to deal with it). You noticed the tiny dots of dried blood on his chin and cheeks, and you thought of how there were probably little torn pieces of toilet paper stuck to them just minutes before he left his house to come pick you up. You thought he would look better with stubble anyway, but he must have read somewhere that he should be clean-shaven on a first date, just like he read somewhere that he should tell a lot of jokes.
-
“What should I wear to meet them?” Marty asks, standing in front of your closet, hands on his sides.
“Who?”
“The moon people.”
“Oh, I don’t know, wear a jacket, I guess.”
“What if there are moon babes though?”
“It’s awfully cold, in outer space.”
“I bet there are moon babes.”
“You should pack a scarf.”
“What if I brought a moon babe back to Earth? Where do you think I should take her to dinner?”
“Oh har, har.”
“No really. You write the labels for the products. You tell me the place. Where can I get a meal with less than 15 grams of fat? I bet moon babes watch their figures.”
“Piss off.”
-
You waited five dates until you went back to Marty’s apartment. Because you knew what “going to his apartment” would mean, you paced it out exactly to five dates. Twenty-four days since you’d met. It was a nice even number.
And because you knew this was coming after date four, when you made out in his car for fifteen minutes like a bunch of high school freshmen, you took a long, careful shower that evening, going methodically slow in shaving. You wondered what sex with him would be like. You hadn’t had sex in over a year, since you got that editing internship. You were glad you met someone outside the office this time.
After you toweled off, you applied lotion thoroughly, stopping in places normally skipped when applying lotion, spraying perfume in those little areas where you know he will be excited to find your fresh, floral scent. The crook of your neck. In your cleavage. Just below your belly button.
Even though it had only been five dates, and because you liked Marty more than you have ever liked another guy before, you and your logic thought he would be a good match for you. Marty, with his love of prehistoric civilizations and his bad jokes and his fanciful ideas. You thought you could balance each other out.
-
The next week he’s on to Mars.
“The moon was nice,” he says, his tone light and thoughtful. “But it wasn’t exotic enough. Those moon babes were all tourists. No one settles down there. I want locals.”
“Okay,” you say. This is annoying. He is annoying.
“I mean, what would Mars culture be like, ya know? What are their customs? This is an anthropological trip. This is a work trip. It’s not for fun.”
“I wouldn’t imagine Mars to be much fun, anyway.”
You have grown tired of these games.
“I’m going to be gone for like, a year and a half, you know. It takes an awfully long time to get there.”
“Then I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
Marty texts you when you are halfway through your set of cereal box labels for the day. The double-beep notification on your phone echoes in your tiny office, the only noise next to your fingers on the keyboard.
You ignore it, because Marty texts a lot because he’s got plenty of breaks in his day, but you are in the middle of something and you hate stopping a label once you get going. But your phone goes off again, three times in a row and now you’re compelled to know what he’s sending you.
I wont be home right after work.
found some moon rocks, need to study them.
ps you were right about mars. canceling the trip. It wouldn’t have been fun.
You tuck your phone back in your purse and go back to work, annoyed at the interruption. You aren’t particularly upset, just disappointed. The fact that you will once again be eating dinner alone while watching Fraiser reruns is something you’ve come to deal with.
-
The moon is a room at the Marriot two blocks from campus.
A room key with the number 434 in elegant script: this is how you get to the moon. This where the moon babes live. This is where your husband is. You are sure of this, because when you start the laundry that night and shake out his work pants from the day before, the plastic card falls out of the back pocket. You thought he was leaving early and coming home late so he could stay on campus longer. You were sure of it. It logically made sense.
You wonder if he’s with one of the eighteen-year-olds he teaches. You wonder if she looks at nutrition fact labels. You wonder if she ever thought about who wrote that label, or if she’s just looking to stay under 20 percent of her daily recommended fat. Moon babes have got to watch their figures.
You’re on your way to the hotel because you can’t just sit here and do nothing. You don’t know what you will do, but you have to go. You wonder what you will find when you insert the key and throw open the door. This is most likely a spare, a copy, something he forgot he left in his pants because he’s got one in his wallet too.
You feel disgust deep in your stomach when you wonder if she does the dirty things you’d never do. You think back to the most spontaneous, most sexual thing you’ve done. All that comes up is that one time you went down on him in the bathroom at this party.
Then, you had only known him five weeks. You had only slept together twice. You still counted the dates and this was date eight, even though it was his friend’s birthday party and there were more people in that tiny house than you know is allowed by the fire department, but that was when you knew who Marty was, past the blood dots on his chin and the sweat armpits and bad jokes. You knew that he used to write his own comics when he was younger. You knew the nickname he had for every one of his friends. You knew that he wanted to make an anthropological discovery one day that would make a significant contribution to society.
And you also knew what it meant when he sat on the closed toilet lid in the bathroom at that party and started undoing his belt. So you did things like use a lot of tongue and suck your cheeks in real tight. He kissed you right after and you briefly wondered why, but then you thought if someone had just done that for you in the bathroom of a party that you’d kiss them, too.
And that’s what you can’t stop thinking about as you drive to the hotel: you think that at one point in your life, he kissed you right after and neither of you cared. You are sure in knowing that it was the one and only time you have not rushed to the sink afterwards to rinse your mouth. Maybe he is looking for someone to not care anymore. Maybe he is looking for someone that does more than plug in numbers for a living without credit, a job a computer could do. Maybe he is looking for someone to play along with his stories about outer space. Maybe if you had more of an imagination, you would have known what the moon was. Marty has always been afraid that you have no imagination because he is afraid he did not marry the right person.