It all started when little Katherine Quincy was colouring in a picture of Santa Claus at her round kindergarten table. She decided to put the red crayon, with which she was colouring in Santa’s mittens, into her mouth. This was unfortunate as, not only did it not taste like cherry as she had hoped, but it had previously been in someone else’s nose. That person happened to be Arthur Mulligan, a dim-witted, red-headed boy, who, for no particular reason, shoved the end of the red crayon up his left nostril. What made this worse was that Arthur Mulligan had a terrible cold and as soon as the crayon entered his nostril, the virus spread like wildfire over the red wax. Later, when Katherine put the crayon in her mouth, the germs from Arthur’s nose infected her mouth, and thus, her body.
The symptoms didn’t come until later in the day, however. Katherine went about her regular business at school, not knowing that she was sick. She continued to colour, quickly removing the crayon from her mouth as it didn’t taste very good. Shortly after that, she left the table and went to make puzzles with some of the other girls.
Finally, at the end of the day, Katherine was taken home by her babysitter, Barbara Stevenson, as it was every other day. Katherine’s mother worked late on weekdays, and Katherine’s father had left when she was very young. However, on this particular day, Barbara and Katherine did what they usually did. They walked home, where, upon entering the house, Katherine sat down in front of the television to watch Dora the Explorer and Barbara made her a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Barbara brought the sandwich over to Katherine, who ate everything but the crusts.
When Dora the Explorer was over, Katherine turned off the television and sat down at her dollhouse to play with her Barbies. Barbara watched her periodically while flipping through a magazine and munching on Katherine’s left-over crusts. It was because of this that Barbara caught the cold.
Later, Katherine began feeling funny. Her nose started to run and her eyes became red. Her skin was tender to the touch and she was suddenly very tired. Barbara recognized these symptoms and made Katherine chicken noodle soup in a coffee mug for supper. She wrapped Katherine in blankets on the couch and placed a tray with the soup and some crackers on her lap. Then they watched Thomas the Tank Engine, before Barbara sent Katherine to bed. Barbara tucked her in, said good-night, then returned to the main floor to wait for Mrs. Quincy to come home.
After informing Mrs. Quincy that Katherine was not feeling well, Barbara walked down the street, around the corner, and down another block to her own home. Barbara walked up the steps to her front porch, unlocked the front door to her townhouse, and pushed it open, entering into the narrow, cramped back hall. She flicked on the light to reveal her empty, small house, and sighed. She looked around and was disappointed, not only because there was a thin layer of dust on all flat surfaces or because the inside of the building was so messy it looked like it belonged to several frat boys, but because she had always expected more to come of her life.
For starters, she never thought she’d grow up and become a professional babysitter. She had originally only thought she’d be doing that while in high school. Then she planned on going to college and getting a real job. Unfortunately, highly unmotivated as she was, there was always a reason for Barbara not to go to school, and she ended up looking after other people’s children while they worked at their impressive careers and great amounts of wealth. She also never thought she’d end up alone. But then again, she was still young.
Barbara walked to the fridge and pulled open the yellowing door to find something to make for supper. She was disappointed yet again, as all there was in the refrigerator was moldy cottage cheese, half a jar of process cheese called “Cheese-tastic”, about an eighth of a jar of process cheese called “Process Cheese Spread”, and an empty bottle of ketchup. In short, there was a lot of inedible cheese. She groaned to herself, picked up her purse, and set off for the grocery store at the end of the main street.
It took about half an hour to walk to the store, and when Barbara got there, it was just about closing. Without enough time to do grocery shopping for the entire week, Barbara settled for buying only what she would need to make a decent meal. She hurried throughout the aisles, searching for something not involving processed dairy products, vowing to throw out all her many forms of cheese when she got home.
On her way up the cereal aisle, Barbara sneezed rather violently, taken so aback that she didn’t have enough time to cover her mouth. The result of this was that she accidentally sprayed the elderly woman in front of her with her germs. The woman spun around, glaring at Barbara.
“I’m so sorry,” Barbara apologized to the woman, positively mortified. The elderly woman glared at her and began yelling.
“In my day, young lady, we used to cover our mouths before we sprayed our spittle on everyone in the near area!” The older woman ranted, and while Barbara was pleased at being referred to as “young”, she was also incredibly embarrassed, a feeling which only increased when she sneezed again, just as suddenly, but far worse. This time, she sneezed right into the woman’s face and, though the stunned grimace on her face was amusing, the following shouting was not.
“Well I never! I’ll tell you something, missy; when I was your age, I had more respect for my elders!” And with that, the woman turned on her heel to leave, but unfortunately, she tripped on her own foot and ended up doing a face plant on the shiny, buffered floor. Barbara stifled a laugh, and reached out to the help the woman to her feet. The woman pushed it away, however, and picked herself up off the floor, straightening her coat and brushing off invisible dirt in a distinguished manner.
“Mabel MacFarlane doesn’t accept anything from insubordinate, rude people,” the woman said and turned again, more carefully this time, and stomped off. She carried her basket of groceries to the check-out and had all of her jams and bran cereal rang through. She paid and walked out, still embarrassed from the incident in the cereal aisle. She wished she could be more graceful, but that was the story of Mabel’s life.
As Mabel loaded her groceries into the back of her large, beige car, she found herself recalling the time when she had been trying to impress Bobby, a senior, in the ninth grade. He, of course, was the most sought after boy in the school and on about every school team. He was also leaving for the war overseas, ready to become a fighter pilot. They had been at the skating rink and Mabel was trying to do a fancy jump, the name of which she couldn’t even remember now. She thought she could do it, having taken quite a few figure skating lessons, but, in classic Mabel fashion, she had fallen right on her behind. All of Bobby’s friends had laughed at her, and she had raced off the rink, face flushing.
Nothing much had changed since then. Mabel was still the biggest klutz, a fact she was fully aware of. She was also aware of her age and had decided quiet a long time ago not to grow old in the mental sense of the word. This, of course, was ridiculous, as everyone grows old eventually, but she didn’t want to be the stereotypical “old person”, which is why she was even more mortified by the sneezing incident. She was appalled at herself for saying, in particular, “in my day”. Mabel drove extra fast and carelessly on the way home to make up for it.
When Mabel arrived at her home, a nice big house, rather than a condominium, she grabbed the groceries out of the trunk of her car, something her husband had forced her to buy; she had wanted a jaguar. She walked up the front walk cautiously avoiding any icy patches. Even though she was still holding on to her youth, a broken wrist would do no one any good.
“Hello, sweetheart,” her husband called from his armchair as she entered the house. He was reading the newspaper, sucking on his pipe, warm slippers on his feet. Unlike Mabel, he had fully embraced old age, claiming that it was his turn to relax and have other people do things for him.
“Hello, Bobby,” Mabel replied, walking into the kitchen. She put all the groceries away in their correct spaces and sat down on the couch to watch “Lawrence Welk” with Bobby, a guilty pleasure she had that she only shared with her husband.
The thing Mabel was most afraid of was not aging itself or even death, but being put in a home. She was afraid of showing any sign of her age in case one of her busy children happened to look in on her and decide that she was unfit to look after herself. She was frightened of being locked up in a nursing home with senile people who drooled and couldn’t recall their own names, let alone the names of everyone around them. Mabel wanted to never to become one of those elderly people, especially the ones that drooled, and wished to die in the comfort of her own home, maybe even a hospital, but certainly not surrounded by lunatics in a far too controlled environment.
After the television program was over, Mabel and Bobby moved to the bedroom where they dressed in their sensible pajamas, another thing Mabel would never show to any of her children, and read in bed for a while. Eventually, the two settled down for sleep, Mabel flicking off the lights. She stayed awake for a little bit longer, listening, as usual, for the soft, reassuring snores of her husband. Then she, too, drifted into a deep slumber.
Jan 31, 2010
Novella-ella-ella
The next few posts are going to be parts or bits (whichever you prefer) of a novella I wrote called "Germs". Just so you are aware or wondering why it stops in seemingly random places. This is why.
Jan 30, 2010
Penny's Purple Pants
“Man, I’d sell my soul for those pants,” Penny said one day, staring awe-struck into a shop window. She was on her way to work, passing through the busy downtown chaos as she usually did. While she usually passed by “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel”, Penny rarely saw something she liked. These pants, however, must have been part of the new fall line because she’d never seen them before. They were perfect in every aspect, as far as Penny was concerned. They sat snugly on the mannequin’s smooth plastic legs, tight enough to be accentuating, but not too tight so as to cut off circulation. They were the right length and the right style, modern yet classic. But what Penny really loved about them was the colour. Never in her life had she seen such a dazzling and rich shade of purple, and it was for that reason that she had uttered the words, “I’d sell my soul for those pants.”
However, it appeared as though the pants were not meant to be Penny’s for, as she raced into “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel”, or tried to at least, she discovered that the store was not yet open. Penny, of course, realized this too late and ended up running, quite painfully, into the glass door of the shop, leaving hand and nose smudges on the clean glass panes. Rather embarrassed, Penny tried to collect what little dignity she had left and hurried on her way to work, glancing back once more with a longing gaze. She vowed that those glorious pants would one day be hers.
But yet again, Penny was foiled, for when she was returning home from work, marching purposefully towards “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel”, Penny found that the store had already closed. Frustrated, Penny approached the main window in the storefront and looked upon the pants once again. Standing about two inches away from the purple-clad mannequin legs, separated only by a sheet of glass, Penny was more relaxed, put to ease by the entrancing, beautiful fabric. And then she realized that standing pressed up to the window of a closed store, staring at a pair of pants might seem odd to some people, even if they were the most stunning pair of pants ever made, and reluctantly backed away. She left the pants behind to continue on her way home, thinking about how to obtain the elusive material.
At home, the pants continued to occupy Penny’s thoughts. They monopolized her time so greatly that she couldn’t even concentrate on the episode of The Bachelor she happened to be watching at the time. This was truly shocking because the bachelor was a gorgeous astronaut, who was also sensitive and a Harvard graduate. Nevertheless, Penny couldn’t concentrate and eventually gave up on television to settle down in bed, letting thoughts of the purple jeans pour into her head, swirling around like some sort of violet whirlpool. On and on this went until Penny was forced to concede to sleep and drifted into a light slumber in which she dreamed of thousands of white, plastic legs, all clothed by violet denim, dancing the can-can to the rhythmic sound of “Purple Rain” playing softly in the background.
The next morning, Penny awoke with a rejuvenated sense of longing. She had come up with a plan sometime between can-can dances the previous night. She had decided to call her office and pretend to be sick to get the day off work. Next, she would stakeout “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel” until the store opened. Then she would swoop in and purchase the pants that had occupied her mind for the past twenty-four hours. And so, that’s exactly what Penny did. Luckily the office believed her feeble lie, though the fake cough sounded more like a beached whale than a common cold, and Penny set off for the store.
Unfortunately, again it seemed like Penny was not to have the pants. When she had reached the shop, Penny realized that, with a feeling of utterly horrendous disappointment, the pants had been taken out of the shop window. No longer were the unnaturally perfect mannequin legs covered by the vibrant jeans. Penny’s heart sank far past her stomach and ended up somewhere closer to her colon. For a moment, she refused to believe that what she was seeing was actually true, choosing to believe that it was just her eyesight playing a cruel trick on her. But she couldn’t deny it for long and Penny was forced to face the fact that the jeans were no longer sitting proudly in the main window of “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel”. The sight of the burgundy, velvet smock hanging in place of the purple pants almost made Penny weep. But, she had ditched a day of work for this, so Penny stayed dutifully in front of the store, waiting rather impatiently for the staff of “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel” to arrive, at least to get an answer, if not the pants.
Eventually, after Penny had become so antsy she had practically bore a hole in the sidewalk with all her fidgeting, a saleswoman arrived to open the store. She gave Penny an odd look, which Penny chose to attribute to the probability that there was likely no one waiting for the shop to open on most days and that it had nothing to do with the fact that she slightly resembled a drug addict four days into withdrawal.
“May I help you?” The young saleslady asked Penny, who had burst into the shop before the saleswoman had even had a chance to remove the key from the lock.
“Yes, I’m looking for the pants that were in the window yesterday,” Penny said quickly, looking around the store in search of the purple pants she so badly desired.
“Oh, I’m sorry, we’re sold-out of those,” the saleslady replied politely. Penny nearly ripped her head off, but luckily, the tears of rage welling in her eyes prevented her from seeing well enough to do any bodily harm.
“What do you mean ‘sold-out’?” She demanded. Apparently, the mixture of anger and greed created a rather heinous personality change in Penny. While she was usually a very pleasant, well-mannered young lady, like her mother had always taught her to be, she was currently a hot-tempered, violent young lady with an unnatural amount of aggression and a burning urgency to buy a pair of purple jeans.
“Umm...that they’re gone? Because we sold all of them?” The saleswoman replied, not really sure of what to say and slightly afraid of Penny, a sensation Penny had never caused in anyone before in her life. Fortunately, Penny realized that she beginning to frighten people and managed to get her emotions under control.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” the saleslady said, now confused by Penny’s sudden mood fluctuations. “I think we have another shipment coming in.”
“Oh really? And when would that be?” Penny asked lightly, speaking cautiously so as to avoid any more unpleasant, Hulk-like outbursts. The woman walked over to the main desk and checked a large notebook to see when the shipment would be in. To Penny, it seemed like she was taking forever and she was just about to lose it again when the saleslady returned with an answer.
“The next shipment will be in about a week from now,” she replied. Penny thanked her and left the shop. She may have been mistaken, but she could’ve sworn she heard the saleswoman sigh with relief.
Penny returned to her home and spent the rest of the day struggling to keep her mind on task. No matter what she happened to be doing, her thoughts always slipped back to the splendid pants. More than once, she caught herself imagining what she would look like in them, always a picture of perfection. When Penny went to sleep later in the evening, she found herself having the same dream over and over again. It wasn’t the same purple-legs-doing-the-can-can-to-Prince dream she’d had the previous night, but it certainly wasn’t any less spectacular. It was a loop of Penny proudly walking back and forth in the magnificent jeans, like they were the solution to every problem she’d ever had. This, of course, was ridiculous, which Penny realized as the night wore on, but it was nice to think of it like that in any case. For the next couple of nights, the dream became habitual, something that Penny looked forward to. She began settling down for bed earlier and earlier each day, hoping to see herself in the jeans at least one more time. Everyday she went to work, she checked the window at “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel”, hoping to see the pants, even though she knew they wouldn’t be coming in for a while.
Later in the week, the day before the shipment of pants would be coming in to “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel”, Penny was at work, daydreaming about how nice her new pants would feel, so excited she was practically shaking. She, however, was interrupted from her daydream when she got the most awful shock of her life. Standing by the cubicle opposite Penny’s was Donna Mellicent, Penny’s arch nemesis. It wasn’t as though they were constantly in fights to the death or anything; they just didn’t like each other. In fact, they both knew that they didn’t like each other, yet they pretended to be friends, though it really didn’t benefit either of them. However, Donna was standing in the entrance to the cubicle across the aisle from Penny, chatting casually with their mutual co-worker. That in itself was not shocking as Donna often did this. What was shocking was that Donna was wearing Penny’s purple pants. Of course, they weren’t technically Penny’s, but she had spent so much time pining over them that she felt they might as well have been. In any case, Penny was livid. She was gripped with the sudden urge to rip them off Donna’s body, but that didn’t seem plausible. And then Penny’s eyes fell on the half-empty cup of coffee sitting on her desk. A plan twined itself into Penny’s brain, manifesting its twisted and gnarled roots deep into the back of her mind until it occupied every space available.
Penny took action. She picked up the cup of coffee and stepped out of her cubicle. Using everything she’d learned, or could remember, from grade nine drama class, Penny pretended to trip on something invisible. Just to make it seem even more realistic, she actually fell to the ground, landing clumsily and painfully on the hard tiled floor. The coffee mug, meanwhile, tossed its contents on the bright purple denim of Donna’s pants and then shattered into hundreds of pieces as it hit the shiny floor. While the mutual co-worker raced forward to help Penny to her feet, having believed the whole incident to be an accident, Donna swore loudly, as coffee ran down her jeans, enlarging the brown stain quickly spreading on her left thigh.
Penny was not proud of what she had done to Donna, though she wasn’t too bothered, and not only because she disliked Donna so greatly. She was actually quite pleased with herself, but in an appalling, atrocious kind of way. There was no way Penny could have stood to have the same pants as Donna, especially the brilliant purple pants she had longed for. She had seen the pants on Donna’s lean frame and was instantly stricken with an intense jealousy. On the one hand, Penny was envious because Donna had the elusive pants Penny sought and longed for. On the other hand, Penny was jealous of Donna because the pants looked excellent on her. Though Penny hated to admit it, Donna’s legs looked almost identical to the mannequin’s in the violet jeans and for the first time in over a week, a shadow of doubt was cast over Penny’s perfect purple pants. Penny realized that the pants may not look so good on her and that her dream may not come true. This was a horrifying revelation for Penny and she didn’t allow it to change anything. She shut the doubt out of her mind and refused to accept any possibility that the pants may not become hers.
And so, the next day, Penny arrived at “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel” early in the morning. She, of course, had to wait for it to open, but she had ditched another day of work so she wasn’t concerned, though, considering that she was skipping work to buy a pair of pants she had been obsessing over, she probably should have been at least a little worried. In any case, when the saleslady arrived, Penny was shaking with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. The saleswoman, the same one as the first time Penny had entered “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel”, eyed Penny nervously, obviously having remembered her from the last time. Penny ignored this, however, and shot into the store to try on the purple jeans.
She found them hanging on a rack in the middle of the store and Penny immediately grabbed her size. She hurried to the back of the store to the dressing rooms and changed out of her ordinary, lack-luster blue jeans and into the new dazzling, impressive violet ones. Penny was instantly disappointed. She looked herself over in the mirror several times, turning to see the back of her denim-clad legs. The effect was nothing close to the effect of the mannequin’s prefect, plastic legs in the jeans, or even Donna’s. Penny, in fact, looked quite terrible in the purple pants. They were far too long, yet not wide enough, and made it look as though she was about to burst out of the seams. Ten pounds of bologna in a five-pound bag, as her father used to say. Penny stood in the dressing room in the purple pants, ignoring the inquiries of the saleslady, until she couldn’t stand to see herself in them anymore. Swiftly, she changed back into her comfortable, reliable old blue jeans and left the changing room, throwing the purple pants back on the rack. Penny left “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel” that day without those marvelous purple pants and, though she had wasted more than a week of her life on them, obsessing over the intense, fabulous shade of purple, Penny hardly thought about them, save for the days Donna wore them to work, the hint of a brown coffee stain still visible on the left thigh.
However, it appeared as though the pants were not meant to be Penny’s for, as she raced into “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel”, or tried to at least, she discovered that the store was not yet open. Penny, of course, realized this too late and ended up running, quite painfully, into the glass door of the shop, leaving hand and nose smudges on the clean glass panes. Rather embarrassed, Penny tried to collect what little dignity she had left and hurried on her way to work, glancing back once more with a longing gaze. She vowed that those glorious pants would one day be hers.
But yet again, Penny was foiled, for when she was returning home from work, marching purposefully towards “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel”, Penny found that the store had already closed. Frustrated, Penny approached the main window in the storefront and looked upon the pants once again. Standing about two inches away from the purple-clad mannequin legs, separated only by a sheet of glass, Penny was more relaxed, put to ease by the entrancing, beautiful fabric. And then she realized that standing pressed up to the window of a closed store, staring at a pair of pants might seem odd to some people, even if they were the most stunning pair of pants ever made, and reluctantly backed away. She left the pants behind to continue on her way home, thinking about how to obtain the elusive material.
At home, the pants continued to occupy Penny’s thoughts. They monopolized her time so greatly that she couldn’t even concentrate on the episode of The Bachelor she happened to be watching at the time. This was truly shocking because the bachelor was a gorgeous astronaut, who was also sensitive and a Harvard graduate. Nevertheless, Penny couldn’t concentrate and eventually gave up on television to settle down in bed, letting thoughts of the purple jeans pour into her head, swirling around like some sort of violet whirlpool. On and on this went until Penny was forced to concede to sleep and drifted into a light slumber in which she dreamed of thousands of white, plastic legs, all clothed by violet denim, dancing the can-can to the rhythmic sound of “Purple Rain” playing softly in the background.
The next morning, Penny awoke with a rejuvenated sense of longing. She had come up with a plan sometime between can-can dances the previous night. She had decided to call her office and pretend to be sick to get the day off work. Next, she would stakeout “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel” until the store opened. Then she would swoop in and purchase the pants that had occupied her mind for the past twenty-four hours. And so, that’s exactly what Penny did. Luckily the office believed her feeble lie, though the fake cough sounded more like a beached whale than a common cold, and Penny set off for the store.
Unfortunately, again it seemed like Penny was not to have the pants. When she had reached the shop, Penny realized that, with a feeling of utterly horrendous disappointment, the pants had been taken out of the shop window. No longer were the unnaturally perfect mannequin legs covered by the vibrant jeans. Penny’s heart sank far past her stomach and ended up somewhere closer to her colon. For a moment, she refused to believe that what she was seeing was actually true, choosing to believe that it was just her eyesight playing a cruel trick on her. But she couldn’t deny it for long and Penny was forced to face the fact that the jeans were no longer sitting proudly in the main window of “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel”. The sight of the burgundy, velvet smock hanging in place of the purple pants almost made Penny weep. But, she had ditched a day of work for this, so Penny stayed dutifully in front of the store, waiting rather impatiently for the staff of “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel” to arrive, at least to get an answer, if not the pants.
Eventually, after Penny had become so antsy she had practically bore a hole in the sidewalk with all her fidgeting, a saleswoman arrived to open the store. She gave Penny an odd look, which Penny chose to attribute to the probability that there was likely no one waiting for the shop to open on most days and that it had nothing to do with the fact that she slightly resembled a drug addict four days into withdrawal.
“May I help you?” The young saleslady asked Penny, who had burst into the shop before the saleswoman had even had a chance to remove the key from the lock.
“Yes, I’m looking for the pants that were in the window yesterday,” Penny said quickly, looking around the store in search of the purple pants she so badly desired.
“Oh, I’m sorry, we’re sold-out of those,” the saleslady replied politely. Penny nearly ripped her head off, but luckily, the tears of rage welling in her eyes prevented her from seeing well enough to do any bodily harm.
“What do you mean ‘sold-out’?” She demanded. Apparently, the mixture of anger and greed created a rather heinous personality change in Penny. While she was usually a very pleasant, well-mannered young lady, like her mother had always taught her to be, she was currently a hot-tempered, violent young lady with an unnatural amount of aggression and a burning urgency to buy a pair of purple jeans.
“Umm...that they’re gone? Because we sold all of them?” The saleswoman replied, not really sure of what to say and slightly afraid of Penny, a sensation Penny had never caused in anyone before in her life. Fortunately, Penny realized that she beginning to frighten people and managed to get her emotions under control.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” the saleslady said, now confused by Penny’s sudden mood fluctuations. “I think we have another shipment coming in.”
“Oh really? And when would that be?” Penny asked lightly, speaking cautiously so as to avoid any more unpleasant, Hulk-like outbursts. The woman walked over to the main desk and checked a large notebook to see when the shipment would be in. To Penny, it seemed like she was taking forever and she was just about to lose it again when the saleslady returned with an answer.
“The next shipment will be in about a week from now,” she replied. Penny thanked her and left the shop. She may have been mistaken, but she could’ve sworn she heard the saleswoman sigh with relief.
Penny returned to her home and spent the rest of the day struggling to keep her mind on task. No matter what she happened to be doing, her thoughts always slipped back to the splendid pants. More than once, she caught herself imagining what she would look like in them, always a picture of perfection. When Penny went to sleep later in the evening, she found herself having the same dream over and over again. It wasn’t the same purple-legs-doing-the-can-can-to-Prince dream she’d had the previous night, but it certainly wasn’t any less spectacular. It was a loop of Penny proudly walking back and forth in the magnificent jeans, like they were the solution to every problem she’d ever had. This, of course, was ridiculous, which Penny realized as the night wore on, but it was nice to think of it like that in any case. For the next couple of nights, the dream became habitual, something that Penny looked forward to. She began settling down for bed earlier and earlier each day, hoping to see herself in the jeans at least one more time. Everyday she went to work, she checked the window at “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel”, hoping to see the pants, even though she knew they wouldn’t be coming in for a while.
Later in the week, the day before the shipment of pants would be coming in to “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel”, Penny was at work, daydreaming about how nice her new pants would feel, so excited she was practically shaking. She, however, was interrupted from her daydream when she got the most awful shock of her life. Standing by the cubicle opposite Penny’s was Donna Mellicent, Penny’s arch nemesis. It wasn’t as though they were constantly in fights to the death or anything; they just didn’t like each other. In fact, they both knew that they didn’t like each other, yet they pretended to be friends, though it really didn’t benefit either of them. However, Donna was standing in the entrance to the cubicle across the aisle from Penny, chatting casually with their mutual co-worker. That in itself was not shocking as Donna often did this. What was shocking was that Donna was wearing Penny’s purple pants. Of course, they weren’t technically Penny’s, but she had spent so much time pining over them that she felt they might as well have been. In any case, Penny was livid. She was gripped with the sudden urge to rip them off Donna’s body, but that didn’t seem plausible. And then Penny’s eyes fell on the half-empty cup of coffee sitting on her desk. A plan twined itself into Penny’s brain, manifesting its twisted and gnarled roots deep into the back of her mind until it occupied every space available.
Penny took action. She picked up the cup of coffee and stepped out of her cubicle. Using everything she’d learned, or could remember, from grade nine drama class, Penny pretended to trip on something invisible. Just to make it seem even more realistic, she actually fell to the ground, landing clumsily and painfully on the hard tiled floor. The coffee mug, meanwhile, tossed its contents on the bright purple denim of Donna’s pants and then shattered into hundreds of pieces as it hit the shiny floor. While the mutual co-worker raced forward to help Penny to her feet, having believed the whole incident to be an accident, Donna swore loudly, as coffee ran down her jeans, enlarging the brown stain quickly spreading on her left thigh.
Penny was not proud of what she had done to Donna, though she wasn’t too bothered, and not only because she disliked Donna so greatly. She was actually quite pleased with herself, but in an appalling, atrocious kind of way. There was no way Penny could have stood to have the same pants as Donna, especially the brilliant purple pants she had longed for. She had seen the pants on Donna’s lean frame and was instantly stricken with an intense jealousy. On the one hand, Penny was envious because Donna had the elusive pants Penny sought and longed for. On the other hand, Penny was jealous of Donna because the pants looked excellent on her. Though Penny hated to admit it, Donna’s legs looked almost identical to the mannequin’s in the violet jeans and for the first time in over a week, a shadow of doubt was cast over Penny’s perfect purple pants. Penny realized that the pants may not look so good on her and that her dream may not come true. This was a horrifying revelation for Penny and she didn’t allow it to change anything. She shut the doubt out of her mind and refused to accept any possibility that the pants may not become hers.
And so, the next day, Penny arrived at “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel” early in the morning. She, of course, had to wait for it to open, but she had ditched another day of work so she wasn’t concerned, though, considering that she was skipping work to buy a pair of pants she had been obsessing over, she probably should have been at least a little worried. In any case, when the saleslady arrived, Penny was shaking with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. The saleswoman, the same one as the first time Penny had entered “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel”, eyed Penny nervously, obviously having remembered her from the last time. Penny ignored this, however, and shot into the store to try on the purple jeans.
She found them hanging on a rack in the middle of the store and Penny immediately grabbed her size. She hurried to the back of the store to the dressing rooms and changed out of her ordinary, lack-luster blue jeans and into the new dazzling, impressive violet ones. Penny was instantly disappointed. She looked herself over in the mirror several times, turning to see the back of her denim-clad legs. The effect was nothing close to the effect of the mannequin’s prefect, plastic legs in the jeans, or even Donna’s. Penny, in fact, looked quite terrible in the purple pants. They were far too long, yet not wide enough, and made it look as though she was about to burst out of the seams. Ten pounds of bologna in a five-pound bag, as her father used to say. Penny stood in the dressing room in the purple pants, ignoring the inquiries of the saleslady, until she couldn’t stand to see herself in them anymore. Swiftly, she changed back into her comfortable, reliable old blue jeans and left the changing room, throwing the purple pants back on the rack. Penny left “Minnie’s Fashion Apparel” that day without those marvelous purple pants and, though she had wasted more than a week of her life on them, obsessing over the intense, fabulous shade of purple, Penny hardly thought about them, save for the days Donna wore them to work, the hint of a brown coffee stain still visible on the left thigh.
In the Beginning...
A little while ago, I discovered that people think I'm funny (looking! Ahahaha. No) and that they like to read my writing, which is great for me because someday, I would like to make money doing this (and if no one likes it, I won't be making very much money). So, to benefit the literate world, I have graciously decided to post my writing online for people to read. Essentially, it'll just be some of my friends and I can probably count them all on one hand. Oh well, I'm doing it anyway.