Embedded Files
THIS IS A REDLINE TRAIN TO—SHADY GROVE—THE NEXT STOP IS—RHODE ISLAND AVENUE/BRENTWOOD—STEP BACK—DOORS CLOSING
Oh yay. A relatively empty car. I can put my feet up on this side seat.
I hope I’m not late. What time is it? 11:39
Oh, I’m fine.
Wait, I forgot what it read. 11:39
Yeah. Yeah. I’m fine. It won’t matter anyway.
I hope that man doesn’t look at me. No. Stop. Do not look at me. DO NOT look at me.
Hopeless. Window distraction. It looks hella nice out. Wish I could see the world for the whole commute.
Blech. What is that smell?
Hold up— this is a great song.
music to my ears1
For Elise
Saint Motel — saintmotelevision
Yes. Favoriting that.
I should do something more productive on these rides to work. Like read. I have so much to read.
Eh. Sounds like it would trigger my motion sickness.
It’s not like people don’t throw up on the metro all the time.
Oh my gosh that time I threw up in the middle of a Verizon store. That sucked.
Shit what should I get for lunch today? Honestly, that salad place slapped.
$12 for a salad though? I’m too cheap for that.
But it was big. Carried over into another meal after work.
Hmm. Maybe.
Oh I need to call Mom on my break though.
Cliff bar it is. Big dinner.
Do I have groceries at home?
When was the last time I stayed in the apartment?
I should go back tonight.
Proof of life.
Did I even bring my laptop? Nope.
Yeah, I’d have to go back tonight.
Maybe there’s frozen pizza.
I should text—
THIS IS DUPONT CIRCLE
Shit.
1 Name of my airpods.
It’s a miracle I never miss my stop. Weed and Krispy Kreme waft down the escalator that I refuse to walk up.2 I feel confident walking around the circle. I am the first pedestrian on the curbside tidal wave to brave the waters of traffic. Always embarrassing for the people who follow suit but aren’t paying attention and haven’t realized that my walk was perfectly timed between vehicles and them being mere seconds behind makes them subjects for honking.
The same police officer on the corner. A smile. A nod. I should learn his name.
I clock in a few minutes late but it doesn’t matter. Nothing’s too strict around here.
There are books waiting to be shelved at the front counter. My boss gestures to the two largest stacks.
“This and this is all Russia.”
I stare at the towers unblinking before looking up at him, incredulously.
“What?” he asks.
“That’s an entire shelf of Russia.”
“We’ve got gaps there.”
“Not a whole fucking shelf of 'em.”
Arms crossed.
Heads tilted.
Brows furrowed.
“Shrink Stalin.”
“Same as the royalty gap.”
“Hmm. Let Russia conquer England?”
“England! There’s enough to take over the entire U.K.”
“Start pulling then.”
Alone with the jigsaw puzzle, I begin snatching book after book, checking the dates scribbled on the first page, indicating what year they were shelved. Everything before 2020 is getting pulled. The problem is that this process is so routine, there’s not a lot of those.
I pull a purple paperback: 9H
We got one.
I turn to look at the cover before dropping it in my discard stack.
The History of Anti-Semitism in Russia
Shit. I’d be a real dick if I took that off. I cannot indirectly contribute to a lack of racial awareness.
Even if it has been there since 2009.
That book goes back and I continue pulling. Once I get a decent sized stack of stale books, I cram the rest of the new Russia content in to fill the vacancies. No more gaps. And England has retained its territory.
I wander around shelving some of the other sections. A lot of the haul was related to World History or U.S. Politics. Each country’s collection of books represents them well. China yells at you. One red spine blends into the next so they all scream down as one
The U.S. is cluttered with white spines of red and blue title fonts—all caps—with the same words jumping down off the shelves. POWER—DIPLOMACY—STRUGGLE—FREEDOM
2 It is a people mover. I am a people being moved. Why wreck a perfectly good invention by stripping it of its purpose? Also it’s a really fucking long escalator and I get tired halfway up. That’s the real reason.
America is so full of itself there’s hardly ever space for more voices. I pull from the early 2020s in that section. By the time I’m done cramming, it’s already time for lunch. Outside the store is a bus stop with a man slumped over in what I assume to be a deep sleep. I hope his dreams are pleasant.
I walk to a coffee shop on the circle and buy a latte, not because I want it, but because I need an excuse to sit in there. I pull one of the dozens of books from my employee holding shelf before I left. Today’s was Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. I can’t tell you how many books I’m reading right now. Maybe five? I don’t like to think about it; it frightens me.
The coffee shop has a long yellow bench along the wall with scattered yellow tables in front of it and a single chair on the opposite side of each table. I pick a spot on the bench and set up camp at the nearest table. At the table next to me sits a guy who looks to be in his late twenties. Two women are with him, one possibly his sister, the other possibly his grandmother.
I am just there to read and have no intention of eavesdropping, but sometimes people say the most outrageous shit that I second-guess whether I’m witnessing reality or something staged.
“I think since I gave up drinking and stopped doing drugs, I get a pass.”
I fucked up and then fixed my fuck-up so where’s my reward? This is youngest-child logic. I know, I use it all the time.
“We were in L.A. I think. Remember that shirt: I survived a dance marathon?”
I just want to know why THIS shirt was the main take-away from a trip to L.A. Give me that story.
“On my deathbed I wanna play video games.”
To each their own.
“If I can’t play video games, pull the plug.”
Well that’s a bit much.
“I want to overdose on meat.”
Holy shit who even is this guy.
After a half hour of catching one liners and reading a total of 5 pages of Ishiguro in between, break was over and I admit another defeat in attempted productivity. Thanks a lot meat-man.
When I leave, I walk out onto the streets, back into weed and Krispy Kreme, cars honking and sirens blaring. The sirens follow me as I go.
Approaching the store’s corner, I see that the man asleep on the bench is dead.
His body is now sprawled across the sidewalk with limbs still hanging off the bench, bent up in ways that aren't natural. The sirens following me park on opposite sides of the street. The paramedics step out and start putting on gloves. They walk over with no real sense of urgency. One kneels down beside the man and begins checking for a pulse. I do not stop. I walk past. I do not know any details and I do not want to.
I don’t think it was meat.
I start to think that maybe he was never asleep at all.
Back inside, I take what we call ‘the driver’s seat’ and man the register.
“Something’s happened outside.”
My boss glances over his shoulder out the front window.
“Oh. Overdose.”
A face that shows pity but no real surprise.
Back to business as usual. I sit behind the counter and scroll through my phone, glancing up to check on the blue and red lights striking the shelves through the windows until they stop altogether.
“Oh my goodness! Howard! Come look! Come see what they have!”
A tall man across the store, who I assume to be Howard, and further assume to be this woman’s husband, responds indifferently to his wife’s enthusiasm.
“Howard! Howard, come see this!”
The woman looks away from the case and sets her eyes on the tall man, confirming to me that he is, indeed, ‘Howard.’ She stands there, mouth pinned up in a grin, waiting to be seen. After about a minute, Howard looks up from the book crumbling into his hands. The woman takes his shift in gaze as an inquiry.
“They have my girls! A first edition!”
“Hmph.”
And the eyes swing back down upon musty pages below like a guillotine.
The woman doesn’t react to this indifference, caught up entirely in her own discovery.
“I could take it out for you, if you’d like.”
Truthfully, I am surprised to hear my voice. There are some exchanges that I bear witness to so deeply, they feel like a scene of a movie passing before me. My interjection made the moment a director’s cut.
The thing is, this book she's ogling at is, like she said, a first edition. This prices it at $12,000. A book like that needs to be locked up. Her breath is fogging up our glass.3
Her eyes swelled in amazement. “Could you?”
Of course. Of course.
I pull the keys out of the deep front pocket on my jean skirt. The smallest silver one unlatches the luggage lock that keeps the cabinet secure. Unhooking the lock, I drop it into my opposite pocket. It holds a faint dead-weight presence there. I gingerly removed the book in question and place it on the counter for her to leaf through. The linen cover board was once a rich wine color, but has faded entirely in certain places; underlying tan canvas is exposed on edges of the spine, the boards' corners, and through patches of scoring.
Its cover is blank with the exception of a small gold emblem impressed upon the center.
LITTLE
WOMEN
——
L. M. ALCOTT
3 I wrote that line as if I was annoyed—I wasn’t in the slightest. I just liked the way those words sounded. Read them again. Aren’t they nice?
I love fueling a book obsession. People that come into the store and leave with a fat stack of books love to give a quick smirk at the size of their purchase and say, “it’s an addiction.”
I reply: “There are worse things to be addicted to.”
I stole that line from an interview with Daniel Radcliffe on some late night show. The interviewer asked him something along the lines of how he felt about people being addicted to Harry Potter, the books, and in some cases, him. He essentially said that at the end of the day, they’re just books.
“There are worse things to be addicted to. Some people are addicted to cocaine.”
I leave the second-half of the quote out of my regular recitation, but that might change. It’s punchy.
The woman doesn’t remove the book from the counter. She moves each page with the care someone would take with butterfly wings.
Passing by only the first few pages, she looks up at me.
I am surprised to find tears building in the corners of her eyes.
“I’m sorry. It’s just— I first read it when I was a little girl. To tell you the truth, I haven’t stopped reading since. These girls —this family— well, they feel like my family.”
I think for a moment about my family— the sort that lives outside of the stories that raise us and does the dirty work of guiding us through reality.
I’m the youngest of three girls and am very close with my sisters. We have a habit of aligning ourselves with characters of three or groups of sisters.
“Shit. Am I Beth?”
“You 100% are Beth.”
“Damn it...I feel more like Amy.”
“Bitch, I’m Amy. I’m the most Amy anyone could ever be. You’re more of a Jo.”
“...Maybe.”
“Alex is Meg.”
“Well obviously Alex is Meg, ya idiot.”
Becca and I argue like this frequently, pointlessly, without end.
But I am Amy.
She is probably Jo.
Alex is obviously Meg.
The woman lets me return the book to its place in the cabinet. She and Howard need to catch a flight. She holds my hand and thanks me on her way out. Howard nods.
Shortly after they leave, I pick up a call.
“There are too many fucking racists in this country.”4
What the fuck is happening right now.
The voice on the other end continues on with aggressive language that makes me increasingly confused. At first, I think I am somehow getting chewed out and accused of being racist. Overwhelmed with trying to decipher what on earth is happening, I'm not processing the content of his words aside from their general vulgarity.
Hold on.
There’s rhythm.
This has meter.
Is this man—
Is he reciting poetry?
As soon as I piece this together, he finishes his last line with a flourishing, “pussy!”
The silence that follows is deafening.
Then the line goes dead. I listen to the dull hum for a couple seconds before hanging the phone back up.
My coworker gives me a look that says, what the fuck just happened?
4 Couldn’t agree more, proceed.
“I think someone just yelled a poem at me.”
“People are so fucking weird.”
By the time my shift is over, I've decided I need to slim down my holding shelf. I take off six books and stand back just to see that I haven’t even made a dent in the collection. It is what it is.
THIS IS A REDLINE TRAIN TO—GLENMONT—THE NEXT STOP IS—FARRAGUT NORTH—STEP BACK—DOORS CLOSING
This one’s for Elise
Krispy Kreme, Louisa Alcott, and poetry
Ishiguro, overdosing
Blue collages got it started with Stalin
This one’s for Elise
Winter 2021
Written by Jessica Wyeth.
Wyeth studies politics at Catholic University (class of 2023). This is her first publication.
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