tuckova

New Faces*

Mark brought the steaming coffee closer to his face, cupping both hands around the warm ceramic. Rubbing his thumb absentmindedly across the chipped edge, he stared through the steam and imagined a slightly different world on the other side. 

Many worlds. He’d first read about it in high school, probably. Dismissed it at the time as sci-fi. Well, not dismissed. He loved sci-fi in high school for the escapism of it, the round-breasted pneumatic women especially, and the heroes who he could picture himself becoming. In college he learned that the future depicted in science fiction was more like a metaphor for the present than a realistic future. He still loved it.

But now it possessed him, specifically the idea of multiple worlds. The “many-worlds interpretation”. Infinite universes. In this interpretation, every interaction could result in a split into two worlds. The world where Schrodinger’s cat lives, and the one where it died.

Mark knows it’s supposed to explain quantum mechanics and not relationships, but he draws such comfort from it that he can’t let it go. What if all the decisions he’d made – good ones, bad ones – what if they weren’t really decisions at all? This Mark was on a branch where he’d made one decision, and another slightly different Mark was on a branch having made another choice. The world proceeding forth from each decision would be slightly different. And what happened after that might mean the worlds diverged so much that there was no point in wondering “What if?” anymore. Somehow he finds this so comforting, to imagine that some version of himself had taken the road more traveled, and had wound up somewhere else, and thus it wasn’t that he’d made a wrong decision, he wasn’t missing anything at all; some other version of him was on the path he’d chosen not to follow.

There was a world, then, where they’d stayed together. A world where they’d stayed together and Emma hadn’t died, a happily-ever-after world, maybe. Also a world where they’d stayed together and she died anyway, and he wondered whether that pain would be worse. Probably not worse; probably just different.

Going further back, there might even be a world where they’d never met. Aren’t meetings so coincidental? If butterfly wings could cause a tornado, surely a missed bus or some other small thing could create a world – could create entire worlds – in which they hadn’t met. There’s a Mark somewhere who never met Emma, who met someone who found him easier to love, and who knows. Maybe if he hadn’t felt like a failure so much of the time, he’d be happier. He’d be more successful for sure. He’d feel more successful anyway, and isn’t that really the measure of success?

Who would he be without her? Who would he be without anyone? Sometimes he pictured himself like a lump of clay, easily molded into shapes by everyone he met, no definition of his own. Other times, he felt like a pinball, banging up against different people, sometimes a bell dings and sometimes he just buzzes on, nothing changes. And then you lose.

There was a world where he drank tea instead of coffee. A world where everything he owned wasn’t cracked or tarnished. A world where he hadn’t met Emma and so her death meant nothing to him. Worlds with different people, not yet disappointed in him. Somewhere, even, a world with all new faces. Not this one, though.

*In response to a writing prompt ("new faces"). Meh.

Primrose Road

The smell hit Emily through her mask, before she even walked through the sliding glass door and into the living room. Chanel N^o5 and urine. “Mixing memory and desire,” she thought to herself, remembering a poem she’d learned in college, and suppressed a laugh. She shifted Bella up a bit higher on her hip. Bella was awake now, and her sweet toddler weight was almost too heavy, but at least she wasn’t wriggling, and carrying her was much better than putting her down in this sad home.

Marianne came around the corner from another room, carrying a bag of what seemed to be clothes, her mask firmly above her nose for once. The older woman’s eyes twinkled with a combination of laughter and steely determination, the magical mix that made her both an excellent realtor and an incredible mentor. “This one, my god!” exclaimed Marianne. “Hoarding doesn’t even begin to… well, wait until you see the upstairs!”

Emily had started helping Marianne eight months ago, just before the pandemic, as a little escape from her housewife life. Just part time, while Bella went to preschool. Still, in those hours Emily felt like an adult, a career woman, more than just a mother and wife. She wanted to have a second child soon, so that Bella wouldn’t be lonely, and then she hoped that when both kids were in school full time, she could be a realtor, too. That was the plan. Then the pandemic hit and the preschools closed, which meant no childcare at all for Bella, and even though Jack was home all the time now, he was working and he couldn’t juggle that and Bella, even for a few hours. Fortunately, Marianne understood, and Emily could usually bring Bella with her. It didn’t feel to Emily like the independent career woman she wanted to be, but it paid, and Marianne was so grateful for the help. The market was booming now, especially here in Tahoe. The pandemic meant that people were willing to pay top dollar or a hideaway home, away from the city, and it also meant that a lot of homes owned by Bay Areas folks who had bought summer homes here when they retired in the booming 90s were, to be blunt, vacated suddenly or about to be vacated.

Emily’s eyes adjusted to the relative gloom and she looked around properly. Rugs on top of carpets. A mantle sagging with knickknacks. Three coffee makers on the kitchen counter. Hoarders. She’d seen a good number of them now. People who initially filled their second homes with all the odds and ends they couldn’t use but couldn’t bear to get rid of. Then when the second home became the primary one, the clutter quickly became overwhelming. The people took up less and less space, became smaller and smaller while their collections of objects expanded until the house was filled with bric-a-brac, boxes of things ordered and never even opened, file cabinets bursting with outdated paperwork, receipts, correspondence. Then they died, leaving behind a dusty mess of chaos that their children (if they had any) didn’t want, and the clean up was often left up to the realtors. Marianne specialized in these sales. Her straightforward common sense was part of what made her great at this kind of thing. Emily felt overwhelmed by disorder, and she was regularly overwhelmed; being around Marianne made her feel like there was a future for her where she could handle anything with a good pair of rubber gloves and brusque practicality.

“Keep it if you want it, sell it if someone else wants it, or trash it,” was Marianne’s mantra. They’d spent whole days at properties, just loading up the back of Marianne’s SUV. The things to keep or sell they drove to Marianne’s garage, and she sold them on eBay. But most things honestly weren’t good enough to sell. Most of the time, they just drove to the dump and back, until they had achieved some semblance of a normal looking place, and then they’d start with the open house on Saturdays, blast all the rooms with lemon-scented room freshener in the morning to take away the sad stale air, and then take more loads to the dump or to Marianne’s at the end of every day until the house sold. At least, that’s how they did it before the pandemic. Now they had to take lots of photos of every room, post everything online, let people in by appointment only, condition “as is”, serious buyers only please.

“Wait until you see the upstairs,” Marianne repeated, piling pillows on a broken chair in the living room. “It’s… something. We’re going to need a lot of photos. Here, you’ll have to go around the outside, the upstairs door locks automatically on the inside.” She held out the key ring to Emily, who grabbed it with her right hand, in which she was also holding Bella’s potty. Potty training, what a pain. She had succeeded in getting Bella out of diapers, which was a substantial savings for their young family, but she hadn’t yet weaned her off the little plastic potty. Bella was too easily afraid. She could be so quiet and serious, very much an old soul, but when she was frightened she was so tiny, a fragile creature, and Emily couldn’t bear to push her. Thus, Emily carried the little plastic potty everywhere, in case Bella needed it.

And she and Jack would have another, go through this again. The diapers, the accidents, the tears. But Emily had been an only child and she didn’t want that for Bella. Being the center of attention when her parents were around was fun, and she joked that it was great that she never had to share, but Emily knew she would gladly have traded every single toy she owned to have one friend to talk to. More than a friend: a brother or a sister. When she was little, she had imaginary friends, or so her parents told her. They weren’t imaginary for Emily; they were the only conversations she had some days when her parents would go to work and leave her, telling her she was such a big girl. She had those friends, and then. Well, then one day, she didn’t have those friends anymore. Emily remembered… well, this wasn’t the best time to think about those things, now that she was all grown up.

Emily’s parents were dead now, and there was nobody to share her memories with, nobody to confirm how things had or had not happened. She’d made some friends since she and Jack had moved to California, but now with the pandemic, Emily’s friendship circle had dwindled and vanished. Marianne was the closest thing to a friend Emily had, and she was Emily’s boss. Jack was sweet, but he was so stressed right now, it seemed wrong to complain about being lonely. Emily knew Bella needed a little brother or sister, close to her own age.

Emily walked around to the other side of the house with Bella, past a pile of old tires, and went up the stairs. She expected to see more mess, boxes, a couch with too many cushions. The usual. She opened the door and stepped back, surprised to find it fully occupied. She was about to issue apologies and make a hasty and awkward retreat before she realized that the dozen women standing in the room were not real. Well, they were real… just not real people. They were all mannequins. Elegantly dressed, realistically posed mannequins. Even Bella could tell this was something unusual.

“Mommy!” breathed Bella, as Emily lowered the girl to the teal carpet, which seemed fairly clean compared to the one downstairs. “Mommy, such BIG BARBIES!”

Emily walked into the room as if in a trance. Glittering sequins on ballgowns caught the light through the windows and the shadows as Emily passed by them. It was like walking into a party. No: It was like walking into a window display for a store selling ballgowns. Colorful dresses. High heeled shoes. Make-up. Painted nails. Jewelry. Wigs. All posed around the room, which was decorated with religious icons, richly overstuffed furniture, ornate gold mirrors, and glass pumpkins. Pumpkins?

Right, to business. Photos. Where to start? Start with this: Who has a dozen fully dressed mannequins in the living room, ready for a dinner party? Emily knew that with most hoarders there was a profound loneliness at the base of it. People who had lost family, friends, their jobs; people who had made a bad decision and lost something they loved then became unable to make decisions about letting anything go – first, things with obvious value, and then later, unable to let go of anything at all. When Emily’s mother died, Emily had stood in her kitchen holding the plain white melamine sugar bowl, thinking that was all she needed. And then, her mother’s favorite coffee mug, with the picture of a unicorn and the chipped handle. Her mother’s pillowcase, still smelling faintly like her. Emily knew it could be hard to let go. Whoever had owned this house, according to the downstairs, had been unable to let go of furniture, car parts, broken electronics, sleeping bags, piles of newspapers. Typical hoarding. But the upstairs told a story of a different kind of loneliness. This was a person who, in the apparent absence of friends, had created a world in which he was surrounded by lively, unique individuals. Did he imagine they were real? Did he act out scenarios, witty cocktail chatter, dancing?

How do you take pictures to sell a place like this? Emily knew by now that the best place to start was the kitchen or the bathroom. Marianne had taught her “Clean kitchens bring home the bacon” – in fact, a clean kitchen could mean a three percent change in the price of a house. Emily found a garbage bag and a spray bottle of cleaner under the sink and started wiping down the counters. She expected them to be crusted with that distinct dusty grease so common in older houses, but they were fairly clean. There wasn’t even a lot of clutter to throw away in the room. She wiped the counters and the fronts of the cabinets in the kitchen, and then shifted to the living room. First, started moving things off the floor, to make the room look more spacious. She used Marianne’s trick of designating a “landing room” and starting moving things into there. She moved a pile of blankets. Pillows. A lamp without a lampshade. Some of the mannequins. Then Emily realized she’d left her camera in the car. “Stay here,” she instructed Bella, who was playing with absorbed contentment with the buckles on one of the mannequin’s high heeled shoes. “Mommy will be right back.”

Emily dashed down the inner stairs, annoyed at her forgetfulness. She went out to the car to retrieve the camera bag. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood, but she still felt the relief, familiar from her years of living as a poor student, to get to the car and find the windows unbroken, her valuable camera still in its bag on the seat. She went back into the house through the open sliding door, calling as she went up the stairs “Bella, can you open the door for mommy?”

“Mommy, I have to pee and I can’t reach my potty!” Emily rushed to the door, but Bella hadn’t opened it. On the one hand, Marianne was tolerant, and to be fair the house already smelled like urine. Still, if Bella made a mess…. “It’s okay, Mommy I can go here!” Emily raced back down the stairs, ran out through the sliding door and up the outer stairs, banging the door against the wall as flung it open. Emily’s heart sank. The potty was on a chair, not on the floor where she’d meant to leave it. No wonder Bella couldn’t reach it.

“Tell Mommy where you went,” said Emily.

“I peed in the big girl potty!” replied Bella proudly, pointing at the bathroom. Emily frowned. Bella had always been afraid before. But the evidence was in the toilet. Emily turned back to Bella, who was now holding the hand of the mannequin in the purple dress, which was posed as if seated on an overstuffed lounge chair. “The pretty lady told me to,” said Bella, looking up at the face of the mannequin, its painted blue eyes, the slight dent on its nose, the angular cheekbones framed by hair that had been carefully styled to appear artfully windblown. The dress was slit to mid-thigh, an off-the-shoulder glittery design, more appropriate for a figure skater than a potty trainer.

Emily looked at Bella, at the mannequin, around the room. A memory came back to her, unbidden and unwanted, and the room around her started to shimmer with the forgotten and suddenly familiar combination of fear and excitement. “A shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent on the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.” Another thing she’d read in college. How had she forgotten; how could she forget? “Such a marvelous imagination,” her mother had said. Emily did not want to say this to Bella. But she did not know what else to say.

When Your Train Comes In

ARRIVING 17:45 RJ TRAIN TO BRNO, said his text. LOVE YOU.

“When your train comes in, I’ll be standing on the platform,” I texted back. I didn’t want to sound overly eager, but I felt like a part of me was missing when he was gone. It was the first time we’d been apart for more than a few hours since March. Not like we were obsessive! Just that right after I’d moved in, there’d been the lockdown and we’d both started working from home. Our home. The way we slid into such a comfortable rhythm seemed like some kind of sign. When we had a conflict, we would briefly retreat to our corners of the cozy apartment. After a few hours he somehow always knew exactly what to say. I’d relax, the tension melting from me as I folded myself back into his arms. “We fit like two hands,” he’d say, and we did.

That August morning he’d left early for Prague for an important meeting. I wanted to go with him but he said he’d be back in time for a romantic dinner. “Just the two of us,” he’d said, which was funny because it had been just the two of us for months. I’d been in touch with my friends of course, but mostly by text. And some of them had seemed to evaporate after the first month – replying to my messages only sporadically, or not at all. Well, who needed them? Somehow things with Joe... we had a little world. Insular, warm, secure. Just the two of us.

I wanted to clean the apartment before he came home, a surprise for him. I hated housework and Joe found it relaxing, so I really hadn’t cleaned much at all since we moved in together. Plus he was kind of fussy about how things got done, and any time I tried to do much beyond loading the dishwasher, he would take the broom or the sponge from my hands. I appreciated finally living with a guy who liked to clean, and he kept things a lot tidier than I would. Still, I wanted to pull my weight! As soon as he was out the door, I stripped the bed and put the sheets in the wash, opened all the windows for some fresh air, and started on the bathroom. By noon I had moved to the kitchen. Blasting Missy Elliot’s most recent album, which I hadn’t listened to yet properly, and thinking about dancing with my friends, I felt a pang of longing for them, but it wasn’t like being lonely. I’d been lonely, and this was just… nostalgia. I didn’t need them, not now that I had Joe.

I stopped for lunch, a quick sandwich that I ate over the sink, the hum of the dishwasher just below me, now on the rinse cycle. Hang up the last laundry load, I said to myself, making a mental checklist. Put clean sheets on the bed. Then empty the dishwasher. Then it will be time to go to the station and get Joe.

The hot summer sun was the best clothes dryer, the crisp smell of sunshine on cotton, but it was clear the sheets wouldn’t be dry in time for me to make the bed before I went to the station. I knew there were two sets of sheets, but Joe had always made the bed and I wasn’t sure where they were. I started opening drawers, surprised at how well I knew my way around the apartment, how much it felt like mine. Previous boyfriends I’d lived with had cleared out a drawer or given me a few bent hangers. Joe had immediately made me feel like I belonged with him, in our castle, together. I just didn’t know where the sheets were!

Finally I found a box under the bed. Aha! A bright pattern I recognized from our trip to IKEA in February, when we were just starting to sleep together, before he’d asked me to move in. As I pulled them from the box and shook out the folds, the smell of lavender drifted through the air. And then something fell onto the floor, something that had been hidden in the folds. Setting the sheets on the bed, I knelt down to find what I’d dropped. A cell phone! How… my old cell phone. I held it in my hands, completely confused. It was certainly my phone; the spiderweb crack across the screen from when I’d dropped it last year was as familiar as the lines on my hand. But I’d lost that phone on New Year’s, eight months ago. I remember still how oddly disconnected I felt the whole day, waiting for the restaurants to open on the 2nd so I could ask if I’d left it there; standing in the long line at the store to buy a new phone with my new tech-savvy maybe-boyfriend Joe helping me re-install all my accounts and make sure that everything was secure. Why was my old phone under the bed? Why was it fully charged? And why was it still logged into my old accounts?

I sat on the floor with my back against the bed, my mind reeling. It was 4 o’clock. I couldn’t think. Had he been reading the messages I’d been sending my friends for the last eight months? What if we didn’t get along at all, and he was just… constructing himself based on private thoughts I’d expressed elsewhere?

When your train comes in, I started to text. When your train comes in… what? Where could I go? I found a blue IKEA bag in a drawer in the kitchen, tore open the wardrobe and started to shove my clothes into it, but there was too much. I looked helplessly around the room. My perfumes lined up on the dresser top. My favorite coffee mug in the dishwasher, waiting to be put back in the cupboard. My life already entangled with his.

The True Cost*

The ready-made garments sector in Bangladesh has grown into a $20 billion business that accounts for nearly 80% of the country’s exports. The industry has created four million jobs, most of which are for women. This industry has helped millions of young girls from poor families break out of a life of grinding poverty.

Asha sighed and stretched, arching her back away from the sewing machine. The morning light was poor, the room was already too warm, and she could feel the sweat gathering on the nape of her neck, trickling through the tendrils of hair that had escaped from her braids. She wanted to take a minute to braid it again, but her fingers were already starting to hurt, though she had six hours of work yet to go, and the mere thought of weaving her fingers in the thick black ropes of her own hair exhausted her. Her fingers were always swollen now, and she knew by the end of the day it would be painful to touch anything. Better to just ignore the small discomfort of her hair. Asha bent back towards her work and the ring on the chain around her neck swung briefly forward, glinting softly in the dim light.

That ring! She couldn’t believe it. Of course she couldn’t wear it; nobody was allowed to wear jewelry on their hands in case it got caught in the machines. And then it felt somehow terrible to put a thing of such beauty on her ugly fingers. Most of all, she wasn’t sure she wanted to talk to her parents about Pachai. He loved her, she was certain. The ring must have cost him a fortune, not something he would have bought unless he meant it. And she loved him, too. But the promise they’d made each other had so many steps and turns, a complex dance. First to make some money by putting in extra hours. Then to marry. Find a place together. Start working for themselves, quit the jobs at Rana Plaza, and finally be free. She believed in it. But she was afraid if she told her parents, it wouldn’t come true, and she needed it to come true.

Ugh, this horrible, ridiculous sleeve. Again and again, folding the fabric around her finger, running it past the needles. Fold, push, fold, push. Sleeves were tricky and she usually liked the challenge, but the ruffles were so much work and so inelegant. When she had her own shop, she would make only beautiful clothes. Clothes from good fabric, clothes that would last more than a few months, clothes that people would want to wear. She felt the thread tighten painfully around her fingers and tears leapt into her eyes. Focus! Asha told herself. This isn’t work that does itself, no matter how simple and repetitive.

Asha knew that some people thought that she didn’t know the work was bad. Khaleda, who worked at the other end of the row, was constantly telling her that she needed more spine. “We can’t let them push us around!” Khaleda said. She spoke of unions, worker’s rights, protection. “This building is a disaster” and “they only care about profit” as if Asha was too stupid to know that. Of course they only cared about profit. What else would they care about? Not beauty, clearly; this hideous flower pattern was bad enough, and then nobody cared about lining up the images along the seams. Broken flowers. And the fabric was flimsy, good for maybe a few months before it would start to stretch and tear. And some woman somewhere who made 350,000 taka a month would spend money on this! So who was stupid? If Asha had that much money, that would be sixty times her salary. She would pay for the wedding herself, no need to ask her parents. She could pay for it in just one month! Then she could open her own store, and she would make and wear only dresses that would last for years, good fabric, where the patterns aligned on the seams, and no silly ruffles. The idea that someone with money would want anything less baffled Asha. That the bosses wanted to take money from such fools made sense. People like Khaleda just didn’t understand. This morning on the way in Khaleda had pointed at the cracks along the front of the building’s facade, but Asha wasn’t worried. She saw the news crews yesterday, too, same as Khaleda. But the bosses wouldn’t let the factory fall, because that would be a loss of profit. Besides, Asha would lose a month’s pay if she didn’t work.

At 8:57 am, on April 24, Rana Plaza collapsed. The upper four floors, built without a permit, were completely destroyed. Only the ground floor remained intact. Over 1000 people died and 2500 were injured.

Sabbir loved the new orange helmet. The mask made it hard to breathe so he had pulled it down to his chin, figuring he could pull it up if something smelled bad, which sometimes it did. It had been seventeen days. He and Rafi had flashlights and they were moving through the wreckage, listening for any sounds, watching for any movement. His flashlight caught a glint of metal near his sandal. He bent down to look, but it was just a simple silver ring on a broken chain. It must have come off someone during the collapse. He put the ring in his pocket and swung his flashlight around to catch Rafi in the beam. “They’re all dead by now anyway,” he said. Rafi nodded, and they walked out across the rubble, back into the daylight.

*In response to a writing prompt, I wanted to see if I could learn about something I didn't really know about and then write sort of standard fiction about it. Dunno, it's a stretch.