I've been writing this short story. Looking for comments.
Her name was Lola; she was an overweight post feminist twenty something. I think my landlord killed her.
This house was put up for rent at a weird time for college kids, the beginning of May - after spring break and still at least three weeks until summer. Not to mention that most landlords in this area sign their leases in the fall when classes start. It just makes more sense. But not this one. Nope. About five hundred dollars less a month than you’d find anywhere else. But you had to sign the lease now. Take the place as-is. No washer/dryer. Hideous paint on the walls. Broken stove. Permanently stained unsealed enamel bathtub. Inch gaps (like a palmetto bugs’ version of a doggie flap) under the doors which had a tendency to become unhinged. For Tallahassee’s winter - the original 1964 in-wall kerosene heater. For the summer - screens on the windows, provide your own fan. All conveniently located in the shit part of town where there was easy access to drugs, stolen property, and hookers. But think of the extra beer money. Plus it had a huge backyard and wooden floors.
There were a bunch of hangers left in what would be my room. Most of them were from retail joints and still had the 20 or XL or XXL on the hook of them. I had no problem reusing these artifacts, as I had none of my own. There was a second-rate chandelier that hung just above my 5’4” frame depending on how the dangly bits were arranged it would crown me as a halo or thwack my forehead when I got up to get water in the middle of the night. The plastic prisms that wanted so bad to be crystal were stained yellow from what I initially assumed as cigarette smoke. As I’ve learned more about her, there’s a chance the discoloration came from incense. Had to clean every single one of those damn things by hand to get the lights to shine white instead of sepia-toned. Who ever moved out was mid-paint job. There was a layer of primer on about half of the room. All the paint cans we found were at least half empty, so there’s no way of guessing what color the previous resident really wanted, but anything would’ve been better than the canary yellow that the place had before she started to prime.
We took almost the whole three months to make the move from our student oriented apartments. Weaning ourselves off of things like air conditioning and cable, getting ready for our new lives as what was, comparably, monks. On one of those days that we were cleaning or repainting, before we started bringing in the garbage bags full of our clothing and book bags full of books, a man in a pick up truck walked in through our open door calling someone’s name. He was scrawny and unwashed and clearly didn’t like the green we had going on the walls. After we determined what he was looking for, we informed him that we just moved in and didn’t know anything about the people who lived here before. And that the landlord didn’t mention anything about them.
As the resident gourmand, it was my task to clean the kitchen. Three cans of skunky PBR were waiting for me in the fridge. Unopened ranch dressing was in a pantry cupboard with some cans of beans and tomatoes. I thanked god that regardless of the hurry the previous tenants had been in, they didn’t leave anything organic around rotting for us. I boiled some rice someone brought over from the other house and warmed up the beans with garlic, onion, and salt. No use in wasting the stuff; canned beans would’ve been what kept those poor souls who made it through nuclear attacks alive, had we had any. I sit down on what will be our dining room floor with the two other kids who were stupid or cheap enough to do this with me. A beautiful girl, who let you think that was there was to her. And a tall, slender boy in the ROTC program who had the bad habits of taking things too seriously and leaving peanut butter on spoons in the sink. We didn’t talk much at first. Mostly we just sweat together, which is a much more honest way of bonding. So we sat on the floor in a triangle spooning sustenance into our aching bodies and chasing it with the donated swill. When we polished off our lunch, I went back to cleaning the kitchen and the other two to the backyard to pull up the vines that crisscrossed the yard. (We didn’t know it at the time, but the vines were poison ivy. What’s more, once the backyard was cleared, the boy and I, in celebratory exuberance, flung the girl into a pile of leaves and the vines - she ended up being reactive to the stuff and still has scars from the incident.) I turned the oven to the self-clean setting without even looking inside the thing. There was no way it couldn’t be as horrible as the rest of the house. I was about twenty minutes into bleaching out the freezer when a smell caught me. One of those smells that catches on the back of the throat and causes coughing fits. I look towards the over and see a thin line of smoke billowing from the seam in the front. All I could hope for was that it wasn’t a rat or a baby that I had inadvertently cremated. What would I do if it was? Call the landlord? I’d get the police here if it was an infant. More likely a rat. Probably just a rat. Oh god, then we have rats here too. I turned off the oven as my logic overtook my emotion and reminded myself that this smelled nothing like the acrid stench of cooking hair or nail. This was vegetable stink with a chemical twang - forgotten t.v. dinner or frozen pizza. That, or the oven was dirtier than I could possibly imagine. Opened up the doors and windows, brought in a fan, armed myself with makeshift oven mitts (a few layers of heavy utility towel) and opened the door as smoke whooshed out of what at that moment may as well be the depths of Hell itself. After the dark clouds cleared the cavern and dissipated throughout the house, I fished out the still hot black oblong object of terror. They were in from the yard at this point, and while I was content to double bag this monster and plant it in the neighbor’s trashcan; the girl had to investigate. Whoever left was in the middle of baking themselves a potato.
We started getting mail the same day we discovered the potato. None of it was for us, of course. But of the twenty or so pieces of junk and publications there were at least six different names. This is how I committed my third uncharged felony . Jonathan Hilbrands, who received coupons to no less than three different clothing chains, augmented my wardrobe. Stormy Lee Rich (Dec’d), who was, well, deceased, taught me that bill collectors will still send you mail after you’ve passed. Laura Brogano, Lola Brogano, Lorna Brogano and L.R. Brogano, enlightened me to the usefulness of aliases. She did like Lola a whole lot though. Got most of her feminist literature to that name as well. That struck me. Lola, the showgirl, the transvestite, the sexually abused 12 year old from Nabokov. Lo, Lola, Lolita, Dolores. Dolores means sadness in Spanish, and Nabokov had used it intentionally. Had She? What a strange handle for a feminist. Maybe she was taking it back from the side of sexualized little girls and securing the name for womyn everywhere.
For months the three of us made up stories to go along with each of these personalities, why they left and why they didn’t bother to have their mail forwarded. Jonathan was clearly homosexual, and had left Tallahassee for D.C. with intentions of joining this century’s addendum to the equal rights movement. We had nothing to base this on but his retailer’s coupons that I kept stealing. While there, he was swept up in several causes and now lives as a converted freegen, squatting in an abandoned building with several other people who also spend their copious sums of free time holding signs and marching for or against things. Stormy was a contentious character. We knew that Stormy owed plenty of people plenty of money. We knew Stormy was dead. We knew that Stormy’s bills were not medical in nature, but short term loans. One plus one plus one equals killed by loan sharks. We still argue over Stormy’s gender. The girl insists that Stormy was a woman. “StormEEE. EEE is for girls’ names.” I am more convinced that Stormy was a man. “Loan sharks are a sexist lot, they wouldn’t kill a woman over money; they would probably just rape the value out of her.” In any case, we weren’t sure if Stormy was a guy or a girl, but for my purposes, Stormy Lee Rich is a he.
Lola though, Lola was the one that got me. Mostly because of how similar we must’ve been. My quiet feminism reflected in her as vocal avocations. My size 14 pants hanging on her size 20 hangers. My beige and green paint covering what one could only imagine her wall colors being. I felt like a shadow next to the idea of this woman; a paler, more standard and socially acceptable version. And to think, I’m living in her room. She probably installed that second-rate chandelier herself. The fact that I can switch out broken light bulbs is saying something. The nails on these walls are where she hung her art. Art? There was no evidence this woman was an artist; no abandoned brushes or discarded canvas in the backyard. But then, maybe she cared deeply enough of those things to bring them with her when she left so abruptly. She must have been an artist. No other class of society lives in this condition, so itinerant. So free. So fully. But, if she was an artist, she had the worst sense of interior decorator’s style I had ever seen. And not in that ironic 1970’s throw back kinda way either. No no no. Not Lola. The kitchen looked like Bondage Christmas in latex red and green paint; the living room looked like it had shit smeared on the walls - a failed experiment in ragging off color I suppose. It wasn’t even a nice shade of brown. And I love brown. Brown like dirt and tree bark and chocolate. This was brown like beige turned sour. Maybe she wasn’t an artist.
One day, the girl came home with a puppy that a hooker from down the road decided to give her. I didn’t ask any questions. It was a small, dirty whimpering thing. Obviously quite a bit of pitbull in this sad cross breed, he was too young to be terrifying, but would eventually grow up to be a dependable and effective guard dog. I’ve never been much of a dog person, myself. Or a cat person. I had a hedgehog for a few years, but I left it in a friend’s care one weekend and the thing keeled over. I don’t do very well with people either, now that I think of it. In any case the landlord made her get rid of it. Gave it to some people down the street who still let us come over and play with the thing. I mean, I don't play with the thing, but the girl does. Brings it over sometimes too. Damn dog digs up the backyard something terrible. I think that's why the landlord made her get rid of it. The holes.
I know where this is going, it's just taking a while to get there.
This house was put up for rent at a weird time for college kids, the beginning of May - after spring break and still at least three weeks until summer. Not to mention that most landlords in this area sign their leases in the fall when classes start. It just makes more sense. But not this one. Nope. About five hundred dollars less a month than you’d find anywhere else. But you had to sign the lease now. Take the place as-is. No washer/dryer. Hideous paint on the walls. Broken stove. Permanently stained unsealed enamel bathtub. Inch gaps (like a palmetto bugs’ version of a doggie flap) under the doors which had a tendency to become unhinged. For Tallahassee’s winter - the original 1964 in-wall kerosene heater. For the summer - screens on the windows, provide your own fan. All conveniently located in the shit part of town where there was easy access to drugs, stolen property, and hookers. But think of the extra beer money. Plus it had a huge backyard and wooden floors.
There were a bunch of hangers left in what would be my room. Most of them were from retail joints and still had the 20 or XL or XXL on the hook of them. I had no problem reusing these artifacts, as I had none of my own. There was a second-rate chandelier that hung just above my 5’4” frame depending on how the dangly bits were arranged it would crown me as a halo or thwack my forehead when I got up to get water in the middle of the night. The plastic prisms that wanted so bad to be crystal were stained yellow from what I initially assumed as cigarette smoke. As I’ve learned more about her, there’s a chance the discoloration came from incense. Had to clean every single one of those damn things by hand to get the lights to shine white instead of sepia-toned. Who ever moved out was mid-paint job. There was a layer of primer on about half of the room. All the paint cans we found were at least half empty, so there’s no way of guessing what color the previous resident really wanted, but anything would’ve been better than the canary yellow that the place had before she started to prime.
We took almost the whole three months to make the move from our student oriented apartments. Weaning ourselves off of things like air conditioning and cable, getting ready for our new lives as what was, comparably, monks. On one of those days that we were cleaning or repainting, before we started bringing in the garbage bags full of our clothing and book bags full of books, a man in a pick up truck walked in through our open door calling someone’s name. He was scrawny and unwashed and clearly didn’t like the green we had going on the walls. After we determined what he was looking for, we informed him that we just moved in and didn’t know anything about the people who lived here before. And that the landlord didn’t mention anything about them.
As the resident gourmand, it was my task to clean the kitchen. Three cans of skunky PBR were waiting for me in the fridge. Unopened ranch dressing was in a pantry cupboard with some cans of beans and tomatoes. I thanked god that regardless of the hurry the previous tenants had been in, they didn’t leave anything organic around rotting for us. I boiled some rice someone brought over from the other house and warmed up the beans with garlic, onion, and salt. No use in wasting the stuff; canned beans would’ve been what kept those poor souls who made it through nuclear attacks alive, had we had any. I sit down on what will be our dining room floor with the two other kids who were stupid or cheap enough to do this with me. A beautiful girl, who let you think that was there was to her. And a tall, slender boy in the ROTC program who had the bad habits of taking things too seriously and leaving peanut butter on spoons in the sink. We didn’t talk much at first. Mostly we just sweat together, which is a much more honest way of bonding. So we sat on the floor in a triangle spooning sustenance into our aching bodies and chasing it with the donated swill. When we polished off our lunch, I went back to cleaning the kitchen and the other two to the backyard to pull up the vines that crisscrossed the yard. (We didn’t know it at the time, but the vines were poison ivy. What’s more, once the backyard was cleared, the boy and I, in celebratory exuberance, flung the girl into a pile of leaves and the vines - she ended up being reactive to the stuff and still has scars from the incident.) I turned the oven to the self-clean setting without even looking inside the thing. There was no way it couldn’t be as horrible as the rest of the house. I was about twenty minutes into bleaching out the freezer when a smell caught me. One of those smells that catches on the back of the throat and causes coughing fits. I look towards the over and see a thin line of smoke billowing from the seam in the front. All I could hope for was that it wasn’t a rat or a baby that I had inadvertently cremated. What would I do if it was? Call the landlord? I’d get the police here if it was an infant. More likely a rat. Probably just a rat. Oh god, then we have rats here too. I turned off the oven as my logic overtook my emotion and reminded myself that this smelled nothing like the acrid stench of cooking hair or nail. This was vegetable stink with a chemical twang - forgotten t.v. dinner or frozen pizza. That, or the oven was dirtier than I could possibly imagine. Opened up the doors and windows, brought in a fan, armed myself with makeshift oven mitts (a few layers of heavy utility towel) and opened the door as smoke whooshed out of what at that moment may as well be the depths of Hell itself. After the dark clouds cleared the cavern and dissipated throughout the house, I fished out the still hot black oblong object of terror. They were in from the yard at this point, and while I was content to double bag this monster and plant it in the neighbor’s trashcan; the girl had to investigate. Whoever left was in the middle of baking themselves a potato.
We started getting mail the same day we discovered the potato. None of it was for us, of course. But of the twenty or so pieces of junk and publications there were at least six different names. This is how I committed my third uncharged felony . Jonathan Hilbrands, who received coupons to no less than three different clothing chains, augmented my wardrobe. Stormy Lee Rich (Dec’d), who was, well, deceased, taught me that bill collectors will still send you mail after you’ve passed. Laura Brogano, Lola Brogano, Lorna Brogano and L.R. Brogano, enlightened me to the usefulness of aliases. She did like Lola a whole lot though. Got most of her feminist literature to that name as well. That struck me. Lola, the showgirl, the transvestite, the sexually abused 12 year old from Nabokov. Lo, Lola, Lolita, Dolores. Dolores means sadness in Spanish, and Nabokov had used it intentionally. Had She? What a strange handle for a feminist. Maybe she was taking it back from the side of sexualized little girls and securing the name for womyn everywhere.
For months the three of us made up stories to go along with each of these personalities, why they left and why they didn’t bother to have their mail forwarded. Jonathan was clearly homosexual, and had left Tallahassee for D.C. with intentions of joining this century’s addendum to the equal rights movement. We had nothing to base this on but his retailer’s coupons that I kept stealing. While there, he was swept up in several causes and now lives as a converted freegen, squatting in an abandoned building with several other people who also spend their copious sums of free time holding signs and marching for or against things. Stormy was a contentious character. We knew that Stormy owed plenty of people plenty of money. We knew Stormy was dead. We knew that Stormy’s bills were not medical in nature, but short term loans. One plus one plus one equals killed by loan sharks. We still argue over Stormy’s gender. The girl insists that Stormy was a woman. “StormEEE. EEE is for girls’ names.” I am more convinced that Stormy was a man. “Loan sharks are a sexist lot, they wouldn’t kill a woman over money; they would probably just rape the value out of her.” In any case, we weren’t sure if Stormy was a guy or a girl, but for my purposes, Stormy Lee Rich is a he.
Lola though, Lola was the one that got me. Mostly because of how similar we must’ve been. My quiet feminism reflected in her as vocal avocations. My size 14 pants hanging on her size 20 hangers. My beige and green paint covering what one could only imagine her wall colors being. I felt like a shadow next to the idea of this woman; a paler, more standard and socially acceptable version. And to think, I’m living in her room. She probably installed that second-rate chandelier herself. The fact that I can switch out broken light bulbs is saying something. The nails on these walls are where she hung her art. Art? There was no evidence this woman was an artist; no abandoned brushes or discarded canvas in the backyard. But then, maybe she cared deeply enough of those things to bring them with her when she left so abruptly. She must have been an artist. No other class of society lives in this condition, so itinerant. So free. So fully. But, if she was an artist, she had the worst sense of interior decorator’s style I had ever seen. And not in that ironic 1970’s throw back kinda way either. No no no. Not Lola. The kitchen looked like Bondage Christmas in latex red and green paint; the living room looked like it had shit smeared on the walls - a failed experiment in ragging off color I suppose. It wasn’t even a nice shade of brown. And I love brown. Brown like dirt and tree bark and chocolate. This was brown like beige turned sour. Maybe she wasn’t an artist.
One day, the girl came home with a puppy that a hooker from down the road decided to give her. I didn’t ask any questions. It was a small, dirty whimpering thing. Obviously quite a bit of pitbull in this sad cross breed, he was too young to be terrifying, but would eventually grow up to be a dependable and effective guard dog. I’ve never been much of a dog person, myself. Or a cat person. I had a hedgehog for a few years, but I left it in a friend’s care one weekend and the thing keeled over. I don’t do very well with people either, now that I think of it. In any case the landlord made her get rid of it. Gave it to some people down the street who still let us come over and play with the thing. I mean, I don't play with the thing, but the girl does. Brings it over sometimes too. Damn dog digs up the backyard something terrible. I think that's why the landlord made her get rid of it. The holes.
I know where this is going, it's just taking a while to get there.