An Ad

You read the ad in the local paper:

Auction: All bids accepted. Everything must go.

Something struck you about that ad. You didn’t know what. A tickle of your fancy. No items were listed, just a time and an address. You knew you had to be there. Something greater than you compelled you. With shaking fingers, you cut out that ad and placed it prominently on the refrigerator door with the little magnets your sister sent you from Omaha. Nothing meant more to you. You saw that ad every time you walked past the door and shivered in anticipation, but of what you were not sure. There was something in that ad you could almost taste, but couldn’t quite put your finger on. Maybe a hint of paprika and cumin mixture. Ginger perhaps. And what good was ginger anyway? Sure smelled weird enough. You sensed something like a pulse. A beating somewhere. Somewhere undefined and unreal. A beating that called you like a lover. A beating that you didn’t understand. A beating you wished would go away, but only grew stronger. You welcomed it as it grew stronger.

You were proud. You didn’t know whether you were proud of the ad itself, or of yourself for being able to engage so successfully with a piece of paper you knew so little about. You felt like you had an understanding. An understanding of how the universe worked as long as that little piece of paper stayed glued beneath the magnets on your refrigerator. This moment in time, this minute, this second, were the reason the universe was created, specially and specifically for you and this little scrap of newspaper. Of course no one would understand. And why would you expect them to? No one ever did before…and this…this was something out of this world.

You gathered your pennies. Broke the little bank your brother gave you when you were sick. You dug through couch cushions. You cleaned underneath the stove. You rummaged through the pockets of clothing you forgot you owned. As the date grew closer, you became more frantic. You needed cash like a junkie needs a fix. You rummaged through your vehicle. You sold things. You denied yourself food and the usual trinkets of your fancy.

When you had gathered all you could muster, you drove to the address on the paper. You had driven by many times before in anticipation, plotting out the perfect parking space, the most efficient travel plan, and nervously made sure there was enough gas in the tank and twine in the trunk to tie down whatever it was this ad was calling you to purchase.

The morning you arrived, it was cold. It was autumn. The leaves had already fallen and there were stacks of them lining the sides of the streets and a big machine was making it’s way up and down the street as it sucked them up.

The driver of the truck waved to you. You had no time for such pleasantries. He must not have known something special was going to happen for you today. If he had, he would have left you alone. No need to wave. He should have just gone about his business making money to give his college age students who were ungrateful anyway and were probably just going to use it for weekend drinking money that would eventually lead to a problem down the road. But he was sweet in his innocence. You just wished he would go about his business and leave you alone.

There was no sense in dwelling on it. He couldn’t have known.

The beginning time was listed as ten AM. At a little after nine, you wondered where all the vehicles were. Your car was parked on the side of the road by itself as if anticipating others in the way a poverty stricken child’s matchbox car sat alone on a blanket waiting for playmates. The playmates would have come if the parents of the child had just picked some up at the second hand store, but they were too concerned with germs and they were too good to shop at second hand stores. Nothing but the best.

You wondered if you had made a mistake. Perhaps you had written the address down wrong. A mistake. It had to be something. You kept checking the address you had written on a little scrap of paper. The original article was too important to be taken off the refrigerator. You would have died rather than take it down.

Then, a brown truck pulled up. A regular old truck. A regular old truck with a cab on the back. Nothing fancy. Not even a bumper sticker advertising a political party. A man with a grey beard gingerly made his way out of the vehicle. A bit of a beard. More of just a hasn’t shaven in a few weeks, unkempt looking whisker collection than a beard. A few locks of grey hair hung out the sides of his beat up baseball cap.

Your heart was pounding. Who was this man? If there was supposed to be something special about him, you sure as hell weren’t feeling the vibe.

You fumbled with the door before exiting. You approached the man, and he responded kindly, “Looks like you’re it..” he said. “Want to get this thing started?””

Of course you did. What kind of stupid buffoon question was that anyway? Perhaps he had been stricken with some sort of mutant brain eating worm that made it difficult for him to understand how important this was to you. Couldn’t he see you were here early. Couldn’t he see you were the only person on this bright blue earth who had taken notice of his ad, which could have been more informative, but you knew he probably didn’t do this type of thing very often. He couldn’t have. You would have been able to tell. His words would have been more succinct, perhaps more descriptive. They weren’t. That told you something. This wasn’t some expert selling something he knew he could get top dollar for. This was some lame, uneducated guy who probably tilled his parent’s soil for most of his life. A man who didn’t understand people or their motivation. Just crops. And manure. And how to spread it, and how to make corn grow really fast, and how to prevent a total crop loss if the weather was uncooperative. You knew the arms that pushed that door open had certainly been up a cow’s a*****e in the last week, but you tried not to dwell on it. You let out a sigh, and you thought to yourself, “He couldn’t have known.”

You responded, trying to conceal your excitement. “Let’s do it.” Your voice cracked and you knew it would. It always did when you were excited. The crack haunted you, and it made special appearances whenever a woman with a pretty face was in the vicinity. The crack must have loved you because it never took a vacation. Not even on the holidays. Not even when your Aunt Gladys came to visit and handed you an elaborately wrapped present that you knew was the horrible tasting lollipop from the expensive store in the mall where she lived. She always thought they were special for you because you couldn’t get them where you lived. The only bonus to the lollipop you thought was for surely hand crafted by a hot girl. You sometimes imagined she did that thing where she pushed her hair back over ears as she made the lollipop specially for you. It had to be with the little hand wrapped bow and candy cane twist tie. But deep inside, you knew it wasn’t.

You wanted to tell her you hated them, but you never did out of respect for her and your mother. Your mother would have been flat out devastated if you said something like that. You sometimes imagined when she came over with the little package, with her fake smile and over powdered face that you would set her straight. You would just tell her. “I hate these f*****g lollipops! Stop f*****g buying them for me! I hate you and your f*****g perfume!” You wanted to just tell your mother you weren’t interested in visiting. “Knock on my door when they leave” is what you wanted to say, but you didn’t. It was too much bother, even it would have been emotionally gratifying. It was better to suffer through the nightmares where the lollipops manifested themselves as giant man eating plants with a particular taste for your blood than to make waves.

The man motioned you to follow him. You complied. He led you through a sprawling backyard. There was a broken down swing set. An unoccupied dog house. A big dog. You knew the type. The type you always wanted. A big, shaggy, don’t f**k with me, but I will be nice and let you scratch behind my ears and I just might bring you a toy and play fetch with you if I feel like it type of dog. The kind of dog that didn’t need a chain. The kind of dog that knew better than to s**t all around his dog house so you couldn’t make your way to the food bowl without stepping in it. This was a dog, who sometime in the past, knew where to s**t, and did his business quietly and in places where you never had to think about it.

The house, you couldn’t have cared less about. Didn’t even notice the red brick exterior, the broken shutters the cracked chimney, or the flipped over satellite dish rusting in the weeds along side the backyard. If you had, you would have known the dog was buried below the dish. You wouldn’t have known how you knew, you just would have known. You always knew these types of things.

A shed lay directly ahead of your path. An old, dirty, rundown, should have been knocked over, but no one felt it important enough so they simply stopped mowing the lawn around it shed. The insurance adjustor would have complained about it, but he hadn’t been led this far into the backyard for years. It was once an item that was on his agenda, but he had quite frankly forgotten about it, and if he hadn’t, he just wouldn’t have given a s**t to make it an issue anyway.

Your palms grew sweaty, and little beads of sweat were blowing off of your face in the wind. You could feel anticipation in your stomach, right up to your heart. It was a tingle. You could feel your lips were growing that white stuff that they often do on windy days, but you didn’t care enough to wipe it away. In the past, you would have been aware of it, and you would have done something about it. Wiped it on a sleeve. Then you would have been self conscious all day wondering who noticed the white film dried up in the sleeves of your hoodie. Drove you crazy to a point where it was all you could think about. It made you want to hide. You wondered if anyone else in the world suffered the same affliction. You often found yourself looking at other people’s sleeves to discover their horrible white lip secret. You wished you were like your sister. If she had suffered the same affliction, which she probably did, you would have never known. She was private about those kinds of things, and she definitely wasn’t the type to wipe lip paste on her sleeves. After long deliberation on the matter, you decided you were the only person in the universe who did. Today, though, it was the last thing on your mind. You felt a sensation. A sensation you had never experienced before. The time was drawing near.

“Aint got much in here,” the man mumbled as he pried open the stubborn metal door. The edges were twisted, and if the insurance adjustor had been privy enough to see them, he most certainly would have protested their jagged, rusted edges. But he wasn’t. It was just you, and old man, and a shed. And a pocket full of cash you had frantically put together for this noble endeavor. The door was clearly pissed and uncooperative. Whatever secret it was holding, it was going to make damn sure you paid the price of admission to see. You nervously lent a hand. All twenty of your fingers combined, and with a great heave ho, the two of you were able to nudge the stubborn hinges far enough to let light shine into the shed.

There it was. This was what you had come for. A box. A box so mysterious it plagued your mind. You had visions of the opening scene from the Twilight Zone. Not the newer ones. The older ones with the creepy looking doll that floated by the door in outer space that wasn’t quite so creepy after the 1960’s. You expected to see Rod Serling somehow resurrected inside the shed, pressed suit and all, comfortably smoking a cigarette and wrapping on about you were on a collision course with destiny.

In the corner, wrapped sloppily with the flaps clumsily folded over and held down with yellowing duct tape, you could sense something great exuding from a brown cardboard boxes’ edges. Something you couldn’t put your finger on.

“What is it?” you asked.

“Don’t know,” he replied.

“How much?,” you queried.

“What do you got?” he asked. He obviously was in no mood to haggle today. You knew you had to have it. He probably sensed your nervousness. You had apparently not hidden it well enough. It was the white stuff on your lips. D****t!

You pulled out your pockets and a wad of bills fell to the ground. The man nodded. You picked up the cash and handed it to him. Some coins jingled in your pocket. He looked at your pocket as if demanding you hand it over. You complied.

“I’ll leave it open. Get it out of here before tomorrow,” he said as he turned away and made his way back to the truck.

You had a million questions. You always did, but sometimes in your anxious stupor, those questions never found their way to your lips. Like when you wanted to ask Aunt Gladys if the lollipops were made by hot girls, but you never did. It would have ruined it if she had explained that they were made by a Hungarian hair net wearing lunch lady with a moustache anyway, so it was better that you never did ask.

The box was flimsy. You quickly pulled the tape off to reveal a metal box, once painted black, but now heavily worn and tarnished. Alongside it lay a pile of gear looking things and some screws. There were little buttons with letters, others had numbers. Some remained attached to the metal box. Others lay scattered about. There was no rhyme or reason to their lay out. It appeared random. There was a box of little pointy metal pieces. Some were shiny, some tarnished. It was fantastic to you. Unfathomable. For whatever reason, you loved the broken down device in the box. You had to understand it. Make it work. Bring it home. Care for it. You knew if you fixed it, you could leave it in the yard and it wouldn’t s**t where it wasn’t supposed to. You knew if you could make it work, you may just understand the whole god damn universe. Sure nobody else wanted it, but it was their loss.

You dragged the contraption across the lawn, past the broken shutters, the broken chimney, the satellite tomb and crooked porch. The box was heavy, and your lips were crusting up in the wind. You didn’t care.

When you got it in the car, you drove. You drove like a teenager on a booty call. You zipped through stop signs, almost hit a squirrel, and tooted the horn at some hooligans playing in the street. This was important.

When you got home, you took all the pieces out of the box. There were no instructions, and you didn’t even know what the device was designed to do. That didn’t deter you. Sure, this might have been an enigma, but it was your enigma. The phone rang. You didn’t answer. Why didn’t anyone just understand there were bigger things than them happening in the universe and that you just didn’t f*****g have time for them? They couldn’t have know. It was probably just your Aunt calling to tell you she had mailed some lollipops or your mother to tell you your Aunt was going to be calling because she sent you some lollipops and you had better be nice to her, or your sister, who was calling to gloat because she doesn’t grow white film on her lips on windy days, or to let you know that you should be more prepared for the weather because she knows of your affliction and was often embarrassed for you when she went shopping with you and when you paid the cashier could spy your crusty sleeves.

You dug out all the tools you had purchased over the years. The ones that were for bigger jobs than you actually intended to use them for. You always had to overdo everything. Always.

There were all kinds of little sprockets and gears, and many of them fit in more than one place. You fingers quivered. You were becoming someone else. Someone who could think of nothing else other than the assembly of the enigma.

Nothing else mattered, only the machine. Your lollipop plant eating nightmares were replaced with visions of gears, and sprockets, and how they fit together with the little letters and numbers. You didn’t need anything else. You felt no need for sleep, or warmth, or food, or especially lollipops and telephone calls.

When you finally came to grasp the workings of the mechanism, you were a shadow of your former self. But who was judging anyway? F**k them. You placed the final gear into place. The final piece that would make the machine work, make it do what it was meant to do. How the machine must have loved you. After all the polishing, winding, screwing, tapping, and cajoling, you knew what the machine was for.

As you pulled the little black lever forward and the slick, polished gears clicked into place, locked into your wrists, you had no regrets. You and the machine had become one. The blood drained freely from your wounds, and flowed into the machine. There would be no more nightmares. No more human eating plant lollipops. No more calls reminding you to do the right thing. No more lip paste plastered against your sleeves. No more worrying who made your lollipops. The fulfillment of knowing that little slip of paper that had made its way through the vastness of the f*****g universe to the paper that you were going to purchase at your favorite convenience store which you happened to walk into at just the right moment in time, just after the guy with a suit who looked like he had somewhere important to go, and the woman with food stamps with the gigantic purse who was going to hold up the line while she paid separately for her lottery tickets and food items, which was printed on the tree, which happened to sprout at just the right moment in time to mature enough to achieve the honor of being tagged by an inspector with a can orange spray paint which designated it ready to harvest and turn in to newspaper print, the oxygen and nitrogen, and angle of the sunbeams supplied by the great ball of fire in the sky over the years which fed and nurtured the tree. The way that time, space, the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe all conspired to bring about the little peace of mind for you, etched lovingly on a small scrap of paper advertised in the free section of a local newspaper you were fortunate enough to get a hold of.




Jason Engebos 12/03/13

Reviews

[Tricessimus]

Writing in the second person is difficult but you've accomplished it here as well as I've ever seen. The dark ending is wrapped in a run-on sentence so long that the reader can't even mentally get a breath, such an artistic way to kill a reader that has been the subject of the entire piece. Using the unknown to draw the reader through the piece is a great device, perhaps too good as I glazed past some of the eccentricities out of anxious desire. A very good write.

[Ranger Kessel]

Thanks for the read and review