Life In Pause Read online

difficult to believe that he maintains that shape living off of her bitter fruits and whatever vegetable she’s got on the market that season. I’m convinced that he eats small children to supplement is lackluster diet.

  No, I’m kidding. He doesn’t eat children. But then again we all will get to that point when we find ourselves deep in the thick of our most horrific possibilities.

  The woman along with her bodyguard/field hand set up shop in front of an abandoned electronics warehouse. It’s best to arrive early before the line gets too long, wrapping around the boarded up buildings like a living, breathing serpent. Sometimes, as it happens with wild animals, the serpent gets agitated, quivering in anger as it waits and pines for nourishment that won’t ever be satisfied by simple food. Most days, though, it is still as it slithers along patiently. As if it knows it must behave or the meager rationings won’t be given to them from the ‘All Mighty’ hand from above.

  But still arrive early. It’s been, based on my own experience that after so many of our hands have been touching the produce, what’s left is several notches down form appealing. Yet when the hunger that coats my mouth and shades my eyes from the truth sees the cruel results of being one of the last to reach the stand, it turns even the feeblest of leavings into a feast for God, the angels and the most discriminating food critics.

  Pause…

  It’s trash day again and I don’t mean the day when those nice green trucks come by your house to take away the evidence of your gluttonous appetite for life and pleasure, I mean the day I spend digging in the waste of last week’s un-valuables. It doesn’t take much effort to find a dump site; new ones spring up almost overnight. Find a few empty cups one day on a sidewalk, rolling around playing tag. Then the next day they’ve found true love and started a family which grows into an extended family of half cousin night stands and bureaus, beat up ex-girlfriend boxes and great-aunt frilly, damaged and torn night shades. It’s a family reunion of trash.

  People aren’t very creative these days in spite of the fact that creativeness is about the only thing we’ve got going for us. Then again too much creativity can get you turned into this thanksgivings cooked bird. Remember, if you’re going to do something that has even the slightest chance of blowing itself up in your face be in an area where you can make a good run for it, or at least a plan for mishaps. I do.

  I make it my mission on these days to find what most overlook when they’re divesting themselves of useless property. A broken bulb can be repaired with some reclaimed wire and a bit of determination. I’ve been working on a fuel source using some old chicken grease and other things I’d rather not mention. It’s just really hard to find good chicken grease these days, let alone a good fat chicken to make it.

  Pause…

  The foot was the first part of her I saw and even now I’m not sure why I recognized it as a foot at all. If you’ve never seen a human body lying in a bed of last week’s garbage then you can’t fully understand the series of thoughts that go through a mind. At first you don’t know what it is even though your eyes are clear and telling you the obvious. Then it’s a cold splash in the face that it’s a human body that someone mistook for day old bread. It’s a sobering reality to know that just as our possessions are things to discard so too can we be easily thrown to the wayside.

  When it twitched I thought it was a rat or other dumpster creature moving her foot around in its’ hast. It wasn’t. Difficult isn’t a good enough word to describe the process of dragging her out from under a sizable pile of human leavings that brought with it a cacophony of smells not excluding her own. I might have thrown-up a couple of times, I don’t want to remember. I’ll never be able to get the scent of that day out of my nasal passages no matter how much hot water I pour down them.

  Suffice it to say she didn’t fit into the basket behind my bike. And before you go into a disgusted rant about my bringing home a dead woman I’ll point out that she sort of was alive, at least by the medical definition of the word. I’d like to say that I was strong enough to hoist her over my shoulders and carry her home like some great hero, but I couldn’t. You eat rotten vegetables and road kill and then tell me if you can carry the limp deadweight body of a woman who weighs over a hundred pounds four miles up hill to a house on the end of a deeply rutted dirt road, then tell me the results. You probably left her ass before you were half-way up.

  As it happens I found a child’s size plastic bed with wheels – not sure why it had wheels and attached it to the end of the bike, behind the basket. I found some musty rope with the dampness of the morning dew still clinging to its fibers, wrapping it around her and the little bed I’d hefted her still form on to after several weak kneed attempts. She didn’t fit real well, but she didn’t seem to mind much as we made our way home, the un-valuables of this day’s trash day jingling joylessly in my bike basket.

  It goes without saying – but I’ll say it anyway – that we managed to get ourselves home, stopping only to rest on the side of the dirt road two or three times. I live far from the city. It’s been better because as much as I’d like company, company tends to want more from me than I can give right now. So as I pushed myself and my weak legs up the hill I had to ask myself why I was bringing home another mouth to feed. I don’t know, or at least not then, but I could guess at the time that the sight of a woman thrown in a trash heap struck the chord of humanity inside me. It continues to resonate inside ever since.

  Pause…

  I watched her for several hours, not in a perverted or creepy way, but in the way a man who finds himself stuck with an unconscious woman and doesn’t know what to do with her kind of way. She wasn’t very big, underfeed like the rest of us, her hair dirty and sticking to her head with the glue of garbage fluids. She remained lost in her own mind even as I soaked her with buckets of water I’d collected from the lake out back which was only a few degrees cleaner than her skin.

  Pause…

  I was in my basement fooling around with some wires and empty fuel cells when I heard her scream. I’d left her tied to the tiny bed, but managed to push her inside the house to get her out of the sun and away from the wild animals that would mistake her for a trussed up hare. Once I’d reached her on the main floor I found she’d turned herself and the bed over so that she was on the floor with the plastic bed on top. She continued to scream as I cut her loose, kicking at me like a wild animal. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if I wasn’t one too.

  Pause…

  ‘What’s your name?’ Those were the first coherent words she’d spoken to me after I’d convinced her I wasn’t a rapist or a lunatic. She seemed to accept my words for the truth. I told you people believe whatever comes out of my mouth wasn’t total bullshit. In this case I was telling her the truth.

  ‘Mason.’ I told her my name, finding it odd that I was talking to another human after so much time of talking to myself and my car. She gave me one of those tentative female smiles they use to show they still might think you’re a rapist. I would have told her that I didn’t have the energy to rape anyone that day.

  ‘I’m Lyn,’ She touched her hair, cringing as she felt the goo in it as a result of using a garbage heap for a bed. Women, no matter what age or race center much of their minds attention on the state of their hair. In my world, as long as it was still attached to my cranium I was doing better than most. She watched me; I’m sure with the same set of expression as I’d used to watch her while she’d been unconscious.

  Pause…

  She made me dinner. From whatever sacrificed animals could be found in my trap along with some other ingredients I hadn’t thought to add that had been in my pantry from a long ago raid but didn’t know what they were for. A hefty dose of spicing made the dead carcasses almost restaurant quality; at least in my opinion. All the while she told me how the people she’d been staying with had mistaken her fainting spell for death. It goes without saying – but once again I’ll tell you – Lyn wasn’t the only body in that garbage heap today, nor
will she be the last. I considered today a good day, I had food to eat and I’d saved a woman from certain death. Who said a hero isn’t born every day? Today it was me.

  As I handed her a halved piece of my bruised apple, making sure to give her the half without a worm, I felt the skin around my mouth straining as if it was trying to pull away from my teeth. Later I realized I had been smiling, this time without the aid of homemade spirits. For a few moments I forgot about batteries, my car and the fact that I lived in a broken world.

  Pause…

  Weeks passed and I found Lyn – it’s still unnerving to speak about people with names – she was more of an asset than a hindrance. It became obvious to me that she was one of the innovative sorts without being stupid and with a great deal of kindness I’d been lacking in my world. She assisted me on trash day and while we found no new bodies she always stuck close to me just in case.

  We had matching pairs of bikes, one that I had found and repaired for her to use along with a basket too, in the back like mine.

  Our conversations began and ended quickly during the first few days she was with me. I wasn’t accustomed to the face-speak-to-face contact and I found at times my thumbs itched to voice my