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This post is an installment in a continuing series of content coordinated by theme or motif with posts from Enoch Allred of Chiltingham, John Allred of clol Town, Jon Fairbanks of Funkadelic Freestylings of Another Sort, Eli Z. McCormick and Miriam Allred of Modern Revelation!, Davey Morrison, Joseph Schlegel of Sour Mayonnaise, Sven Patrick Svensson of Sadness? Euphoria?, and William C. Stewart of Chide, Chode, Chidden. This week’s theme: ‘Circuses’.
For an evening in June, it was frightfully chilly. Margot pinched her jacket tightly around her torso and shivered. Again, she glanced at her watch. 11:58 p.m. Midnight couldn’t come soon enough. Every few moments, the image of her parents knocking on the door of her empty room flashed through her mind like a shooting pain. Margot wasn’t the sort to sneak out of her room to do drugs, drink alcohol, or screwing boys or whatever it was her mother was always convinced she was doing behind her back. Claiming that she was on top of a hill, trying to confirm an urban legend would never fly, and would make the last two years living at home unbearable hell.
Why was she out here anyway? The Wednesday Cry rumor Taylor was spreading was patently retarded. Wednesday didn’t have a voice, because Wednesday was a human concept, its beginning and ending definied centuries ago by some dudes who might just as well have preferred a 14-day week cycle. So how could it cry when it died? So it made absolutely no goddamned sense that Wednesday cries at its weekly expiration.
And besides, in New York City it was already Thursday, while in Honolulu it’d be Wednesday for hours still. Does a different Wednesday god die every
But Taylor was swearing up and down that she had heard it. Taylor must have been bluffing, but it turned into an argument, and Margot had promised that she’d go out disprove it.
“I’m not gonna go with you,” Taylor laid it down. “‘Cause you have to go out and listen alone, exactly at midnight. It’s just the cry is so, so quiet. Just someone ele being there, breathing could cause you to miss it.”
So there she was, alone, counting down the seconds till midnight. She glanced back toward her house. The only sounds were her breathing and the sounds of crickets chirping. “Oh God,” she thought, “crickets. I’m gonna get to school tomorrow–tired!–and I’m gonna say I didn’t hear it and she’ll be all like ‘Were there crickets?’ and I’ll say ‘Yeah,’ and she’ll be all ‘Well then they probably drowned out the sound; try again’ and I’ll just tell her to fuck off.”
Margot glanced at her watch again. 12:01. She’d missed midnight while playing tomorrow’s scenario in her head, but she also didn’t hear a thing. She knew she wouldn’t. Of course. The Wednesday Cry made no sense at all. Margot turned back to her house, down in the valley, and began the walk home.
There’s this idea that I scrawled down on a piece of paper at work a few months back.
I keep trying to turn this into something. On its own merits, it very nearly is something. But I’ve yet to be able to tie it to any sort of satisfactory character or story. Perhaps one day.
Even if you don’t have time tonight to honor Chow Day by watching a film featuring on made by Stephen Chow Sing-Chi or didn’t get to attend a kickass Chow Day (observed) party yesterday, take just a bit of time to enjoy this amazing clip from 1994′s Love on Delivery (featuring the old “Gar Fei Cat” English translation). Film comedy doesn’t get any better than this, folks.
Every night when she got home, Aubrey would pull out the sheets of paper–hundreds of pages, connected at their edges by Scotch Tape–on which she calculated her happiness. Thousands of variables multiplied and divided, sqaured and subtracted preceded an equals sign which preced a value of 100,000. 100,000 was the nubmer that signified her optimal happiness, and she was working to solve for all the variables that came before it.
These variables represented all the myriad factors in Aubrey’s life. Some were set in stone, like n1, which was her birth name. Aubrey had no intention of changing her name, so n3 carried the same value, as n1, though it might be changed, should it prove necessary.
So every night she sat in front of the coffee table in her bedroom, rearranging numbers and operations and little letters with numbers under them.
The difficulty of this long equation was not only that she didn’t know the necessary values of the variables (and a hundred always changed each time she changed one), but she didn’t know the proper formula to begin with. She was constantly rewriting sections of the equation, recognizing the flaws.
One night, Aubrey’s roommate, Susan, observed Aubrey working on solving for g5 (the number of years of an undefined foreign language she should take in college).
“Oy gevalt,” Aubrey moaned (she had until six months ago been a non-practicing Catholic, but had recently converted to Judaism per her conclusions on r16 and was injecting Yiddish vocabulary into her speech to smooth the transition–till the dictates of r19 would make her an atheist in 2014), “g5‘s in the wrong spot entirely!”
“Hey, Aub,” Susan suggested, leaned up against a doorjamb, casually sipping a cup of tea, “what if you just plugged in all of the variables that sound best, and just go with whatever you end up with?”
“I’ve tried that, Susan!” Aubrey snapped, “and I end up with 79,846.43333 and on! Does that sound like 100,000 to you?!”
“Just a thought,” Susan shrugged. “Don’t gotta bit my head off about it.”
Aubrey sighed. “Sorry I snapped, Susan. I just know I can get it perfect, and I can’t stop till I do.”
“Alright. I’ll leave you to it, then.”
“Thanks.”
Susan walked away. Aubrey erased g5 from the equation, and began sifting through the pages, tattered from age and revision, and searched for where it belogned.
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This post is an installment in a continuing series of content coordinated by theme or motif with posts from Enoch Allred of Chiltingham, John Allred of clol Town, Jon Fairbanks of Funkadelic Freestylings of Another Sort, Eli Z. McCormick and Miriam Allred of Modern Revelation!, John D. Moore of Whatnot Studios, Davey Morrison, Joseph Schlegel of Sour Mayonnaise, Sven Patrick Svensson of Sadness? Euphoria?, and William C. Stewart of Chide, Chode, Chidden. This week’s theme: ‘Algebra‘.
“And so, Lonnie’s birthday was on a Monday, and she’s exactly two days younger than Gary, whose birthday is June eighth. So add two days, and the tenth was a Wednesday. It’s Wednesday again tonight–I know that because I had my Tuesday figure drawing class at the community college last night–so that would make today the seventeeth, right?” Mary looked up for confirmation.
The cashier nodded her head silently, making no mention of the date displayed in the corner of her monitor.
“Alright, the seventeeth it is,” Mary scribbled the date on her check.