A Certain State of Mind

(work in progress) Virginia Bishop learns the art of hypnotism by experimenting with her late father's stopwatch. She then uses her newfound talent to hypnotize Lucas into thinking she is beautiful.

 

Logan Bishop was a b*****d. A dead b*****d, maybe, but dead b******s are better than lives ones.

If the man had possessed any kind of decency, he would have left his only child with more than an ancient quilt and a broken stopwatch.

Unfortunately, Virginia Bishop greatly resembled her late father. She had the same rounded nose and small, watery eyes. Logan had not looked especially charming; neither did she.

The stories after his funeral service had been bitter. Too many vodka binges, too many unsettled loans. Logan Bishop would be remembered with spite.

Virginia had never liked her father, but she did not think of him as a b*****d. He had never taken her to the zoo or helped her build a snowman, had never recited Hansel and Gretel until she fell asleep, had never admonished her for the Marlboros she smoked after dinner since the age of twelve. But he had left her alone.

 

The quilt was threadbare and garish, sewn in army green and rusty orange. Virginia had kept it in the sitting room for a few months, then in her bedroom as a makeshift curtain, and finally in the coat closet. She didn’t know that her father had sewn it in Hungary before carpal tunnel set in.

Virginia was nineteen. Her apartment was above a vacant bookstore, which had been mortgaged and remortgaged and finally foreclosed. The store had not held a paperback in years, but even so, she thought her apartment had a kind of library smell.

She kept her kitchen in perfect order for visitors. Her living room, on the other hand, was a hoarder’s heaven: soda cans, envelopes, various plugs and chargers, catalogues, dead batteries, ash trays, coasters, half-burned candles, dirty clothes, and clean clothes that looked dirty.

Her bedroom was not much better. At eleven in the morning, Virginia lay in a mass of used tissues, blankets, decongestants, painkillers, and cough syrup.

She thought the cough syrup was misleading. “Cherry” implied that the syrup would taste like cherries. Not something you might lick from the floor of a public bus.

Virginia blamed her strep throat on the sniffling man who had shaken her hand in church last week. She’d had a terrible day, too uncomfortable to sleep and too sleepy to be comfortable. It was a miracle that she’d been napping for a mere ten minutes.

She didn’t hear Lucas knock on her apartment door. He held a daisy in one hand, though he began to regret it. Bringing a flower was too romantic for the purpose he served.

Lucas had often been described as sharp. He had already dated four sorority girls, but he did not intend to date Virginia.

“Gin?” he called, and tried the broken doorbell.

Even in his college sweatshirt and running shoes, Lucas was good-looking. And Virginia…well, Virginia resembled her father too much to be any kind of knockout.

But Jenna was out of town, and Norah hadn’t answered the phone. He was getting desperate.

 

 

Virginia was in the middle of a lucid dream. She felt the pain in her airway at every inhale, heard her congested nose whistle at every exhale. But neither of them would matter until she woke up and let them matter again.

She saw her father’s face. It was paler than she remembered, but that was probably the result of laying in a coffin for six months.

Logan held the stopwatch. Its hands were forever stuck at 3:00, Virginia’s favorite time of day.

“Daddy,” she said fondly. She had never called him daddy in her entire life.

Her father said nothing at all, but the stopwatch continued to swing from his decomposed hand.

 

 “Damn it,” Lucas grumbled. He dropped the white daisy on Virginia’s doormat and crushed it under his Nike shoes.

Ugly girls were usually home on weekends.