The City-Island

a jaded writer navigates a friendship in a new city while clinging to a routine based on comfort and fear of change.

“People who talk to their dogs in public creep me out.”

            “Yeah?” She looked back at me defensively, her eyes suddenly squinting as if looking down the barrel of a gun.

            “Yeah,I don’t know,it’s like a special kind of loneliness, one that doesn’t originate within oneself, but enters the system like a pathogen and takes on a life of it’s own.”

            I took a second to collect my thoughts. I stuffed my hands into the pocket of my hoodie sweatshirt as we walked over limp, dead maple leaves. She said nothing, only looked back at me pensively. She was hard to look at in times like these; times when I wanted to express the unpopular opinion on issues I hadn’t really thought out. Her porcelain-white face and prominent cheek bones made her otherwise plain, brown eyes look exotic, almost noble. Strands of her silky, medium-length blonde hair tasseled in the wind underneath her knitted white beanie like the thinnest tentacles of a wayward jellyfish. She was beautiful, yet edgy. I kept my eyes on my faded-blue vans shoes instead of her, so as not to be disarmed or distracted.

            “It’s just weird, ya know; you walk past some middle-aged woman on the street, and you  both have to wait for the light to cross, only she’s got two little shampooed, fluffy sheep-dog-poofs, and the first thing she does as she’s waiting there is to yell, No! We have to wait for the light, Samantha! Then she starts tearing into Samantha, this thing, this dog, berating her with accusations. Bad girl! You’re a bad girl, Samantha! And you’re wondering why this woman is letting her own, one-sided conversation get her all worked-up.”

            Kyra snickered lightly, her voice hushed by a mild summer breeze.

            “And it makes you want to defend the dog, who doesn’t get to have a say. Samantha is innocent, she doesn’t know any better. She’s a dog! But you don’t really want to get involved because you suspect that this lady needs this. She’s lonely, I mean, she’s anthropomorphizing dogs!”

 I kicked a pebble to see how far it would go: kind of far, but not like I had expected.

            “It’s not like that,” she finally said. She took a long drag on her vape-pen. Her entire head disappeared behind a pink, cloudlike veil extending to her shoulders.

            “You have to command your dogs, especially if there’s more than one. They get pack mentality, and you have to show them you’re the alpha. It isn’t lonely to talk to dogs, dude, its necessary.”

            Now I was the one to look back quizzically.

            “Articulated speech…” she said definitively, her lips pursed forward with silent wisdoms yet-unspoken, “is the only thing we have over them. They’re wolves, by lineage, after all.”

           

            It’s the only thing she said for the duration of the walk, and the most insightful and concise thing said all evening. Mostly, she just let me talk myself into holes, which is an apt description of the other times we’d gotten together, too. She never said much, it made me nervous, and so I’d attempt to fill the dead space with chatter. Problem is I never knew when to stop. I was like a computer-generated algorithm, coded to spawn other algorithms, with an error that grew exponentially with every generation. One thing to be sure, though, is that Kyra would always correct my errors.

            Objectively speaking, I didn’t like Kyra. I wasn’t trying to hook-up and I certainly didn’t want to be her man. In fact, I think we both annoyed each other, but we kept hanging out anyway. Mostly because we shared in two big coincidences: we both grew up on the island, and we both (by separate circumstances) lived in the city now. Though we hadn’t been friends before, those aspects alone were reason enough to stick together now, and so I kept inviting her out.

It didn’t seem to me that Kyra had much going on in terms of responsibilities.

            The next time we talked, though, she said that she was working, and that I could join her so long as we went someplace where we could walk.

            “Dude, you know there’s a better, bigger park even closer to the neighborhood, don’t you? Can we please go there?” She spoke through the phone. Her tone was exasperated, but meek like she was hiding something.

            “I didn’t know there was another, oh, wait, yes I do, the athletic park, there’s too much going on there. Lots of active stuff; Pilates, jogging, flag football. I don’t want to be made to feel like an underachiever, I just want to walk somewhere nice and I feel like I, “

            “Fine,” she interjected, “meet me there.”

            “Where?”

            “The same place we’ve met every time before. The dog park.” And she hung up.

            Dog Park?

 It was hardly a park, even, just a slightly forested walking path, really, or a short-cut to the mall that offered park-like respite from the city, and it definitely wasn’t the type of place you went to get work done.

            Unless, of course, the “work” intended was dog-walking.

            Kyra was there to walk dogs. Five very large dogs. Dogs… that she talked to, publically.

 

            “No, hey! Settle down! I said, SETTLE DOWN!” She commanded her hounds with surprising authority. Hers was the type of booming voice that quieted every person in proximity, garnered upright attention from the handful of lone-souls in the park.

            “It’s alright,” I told her, “I get it: strange male walking towards you, the doggies are just being protective. Get along, little doggies, get along.”

 I knelt down to pet them and they all frenzied toward me, tongues flapping, paws pit-pattering in place, unable to conceal their excitement. I tried to divvy out my affection evenly, but I didn’t have enough face for five tongues to slather, and it wasn’t long before the dogs were barking and nipping at each other. So I backed off.

            “Can I take a few of their leashes, give you a hand?” I offered. It was an overwhelming image, and I was worried for her.

            “No, I’m proving a point.”

            We started walking up the path, which smelt like rain and citrus and pine-needles.

            “Okay…how long have you been doing this, anyway?”

            “Since three days after I got here!” Her words had a certain disparaging tone to them, as if I was expected to have known.

            “But how… did you find this kind of work?”

            “I responded to postings online, dude, chill. Don’t hurt yourself thinking too hard about it.”

            “And strangers, people who know nothing about you, just entrusted you to take care of five fricken’ dogs at once?”

            She beamed at me with another death-glare, the same sniper’s eye I’d become accustomed to as of late.

            “Don’t shoot! I don’t mean that because you’re a woman,” the words nearly got caught in my throat as her expression turned from mean to sour, “I just mean…” I didn’t know what I meant.

            Right then, as if in response to my cynicism, the St. Bernard on her right started nipping at the two black terriers, and the other two dogs, two very dissimilar dogs that I didn’t know the breed of, began to bark uproariously. A multitude of crows sprang out from the quasi-forested canopy, alarmed by the commotion.

            “HEY!” her voice struck like a whip. A quick retaliation from the larger of the terriers was thwarted by her grip on the leashes. “Settle down, NOW!”

            And all five dogs did. I kept my distance.

            Her command over the pups wasn’t even the most surprising thing. When we got to end of the walk, where the park turns into a sidewalk leading into the Westfield mall, there was, in fact, a small enclosure for dogs labelled: Bark Park, with a silhouetted image of two dogs at play. How have I never seen this? I wondered.

Kyra insisted that we unleash the dogs and leave them there while we went for coffee. I tried to plea with her on the grounds of that being irresponsible, careless even, and brought up the very real possibility that the dogs could get loose, or that they might bite somebody.

“Shhhhhh…” is all she had to say to my very rational argument. She reached into her purse and took out 5 milk-bone dog treats. She made the animals settle down and with some work, they all did. Waiting in turn, incredibly, each dog stood on its hind legs, or jumped into the air to receive the treat. Each beast gobbled their biscuit, the way dogs do, with zero amount of savoring; they only licked their lips and wagged their tails, looking towards Kyra for more.

“Nope. Not unless you behave yourselves and STAY HERE while I go get coffee. STAY HERE. SIT. STAY. Good dogs.”

They responded to her every command with utmost loyalty. I was hesitant to leave them there, but she pushed me out through the gate and told me to COME ON in the same dog-commanding tone she has just been shouting in. I was a good boy, and I listened.

Now of course, of course I suggested that we get our coffee to-go. Nope, Kyra wasn’t having it. They’ll be fine. She told me over and over about the five dogs we had abandoned. She insisted we take our regular seats at the café. I began to mumble a plea for the stranded hounds, but Kyra snapped at me.

“SIT!”

I rolled my eyes incredulously and shrugged my shoulders.

“They’re your responsibility,” I said. But she didn’t care.

We found our seats and a tall, lanky server, dressed all in black with his hair in a ponytail, gave us two menus. I glanced at the listed sandwiches as if out of habit, but didn’t start to make any considerations. Kyra, seated across the booth from me, clutched her menu with tight knuckles, absorbed by it like it were a treasure map.

“How’s work going? She asked from behind her Xeroxed divider.

“I’m spending more money than I’m making. I’m riding the train up to North County to interview plain-Janes and having to sit through bad, bad movies so I can write manipulated reviews. Like the jungle book…”

 “You can’t just have animals talking. It’s stupid. Animals don’t talk, and you don’t need a talking animal to convey the things that we love about them, or the things that they’re thinking.”

“But The Jungle Book is a literary classic,” she refuted, “and what works in a book isn’t always going to work in a movie. How else was Rudyard Kipling going to write about the connection Mowgli had with the beasts that raised him?  I don’t think he was literally saying that Mowgli was speaking English to these creatures, but they did have a way to communicate.”

The server came back over to take our orders. I got the same as always: a ham croissant with Muenster cheese and two cups of coffee with cream, no sugar. Kyra, on the other hand, took eons to order. Poor Kyra, indecisive in her nature, always tried something different on a whim and never had much to say about whether she liked what she ordered or not. She ordered like a game of roulette, flipping menu pages rapidly, asking what the last person ordered, closing and re-opening the specials list before finally settling on an item at apparent randomness. It was baffling, just a stupid, stupid system.

We got on with our conversation.

“It’s just stupid, animals don’t talk, so they shouldn’t talk in cinema,” I said.

“Oh hush. Everything is always so stupid with you. What about Space Jam? Didn’t you just say, last week, that it was one of your favorite movies? I don’t know if you noticed, but Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck sure do a lot of talking in that movie.”

“Yeah but they’re the fricken’ Looney Tunes, and they’re talking to Michael Jordan; M.J. can make underwear look cool, so he can sure as hell make talking to animals cool. Plus, they’re cartoons! The same rules don’t apply to them.”

“See, now you’re just being biased,” she said, “and you’re forgetting about target audiences. You like Space Jam because you saw it for the first time as a child. You were the target audience then, and your opinion is still based in that nostalgia. Now, you’re an adult, and the live-action Jungle Book is not intended for you. You’re not the target audience, because you’re not a kid. I’m sure the children love the talking animals. Kids generally do, and that’s why you’re wrong. Fallacies, Laine, you’re argument is riddled with fallacies.”

She took a sip of her tea and let me seep in my defeat.

I excused myself and told her I had an article to write, which I did. Really, though, I left because I had run out of things to say. I didn’t know how to talk about silly things without criticism and bias, and I knew I’d just embarrass myself further. I tried to put cash down to pay for the bill, but she wouldn’t let me. She let me leave half of what it cost, but no more. I was not allowed, in any measure of the definition, to be a classic gentleman with her, ever.

“Aren’t you coming?” I asked her, “Aren’t you worried about the dogs, all alone, kept in place only by a 2-foot fence? Don’t you think they’ve hopped over it by now?”

“I’m gonna finish my falafel-thing, whatever it is. They’ll be fine. You’ll see when you walk past, they’ll all still be there because I told them to be.”

“With your ‘articulated speech,’” I said mockingly.

“Mmmhmm. Text me if I’m wrong.”

I never got to send that text though, because she wasn’t wrong. Not only were the dogs still all waiting obediently at the Bark-Park, they were all still sitting. I hated how right she was. She was amazing.

 

ï

It was early on a Monday when I got off of bus 50 to downtown at 5^th and Broadway. I had closed my eyes in a half-state between rest and stupor for most of the duration of the trip.

Emerging off of a bus in the heart of the city, when you’ve mostly closed your eyes the whole way, turned out to be unsettling. I went from seeing maybe three people walking the sidewalks to an area with more bodies walking by than one can quantify. It’s possible to be absolutely engulfed in a sea of people while feeling entirely alone.  It’s a s**t-show, and everything smells like piss, because people piss here. Nose turned away in resistance, I pressed on.

A minute later and further down the street, I made eye-contact with a woman who was seated with her back pressed against the wall of a towering building, wrapped up homely in a dirty yellow blanket. The only people I ever really notice, are the homeless people. There are so many of them. They’re like VW beetles, once you see one, you start to see them everywhere.

A mentally ill man in pink jeans power-walked past me, then switched directions and darted the other way. He repeated the round several times, and all the while, he spun his arms forward like a waterwheel. By turns, he tossed his head back and wailed into the air with ambiguous emotion, it could have been anger, joviality, intense anguish, I had no idea what. As if birthed from the very chaotic collision course of attitudes stirring around him, this wild man made more sense than anything else in the city; for he was the city.

A mile onward, just past some dungeon-like apartment stacks, I came to the glass door of Boomers & Family Publishing Co., and made a swift entrance, leaving all of the madness behind me.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Good morning,” I said to Brian, the effeminate receptionist.

 Still doesn’t recognize me, I thought to myself.

“Do you have an appointment?” He asked.

“I’m one of the new-hires. I’m just gonna go to my desk…”

“Oh, right. Of course. Can I just see your ID badge?”

“Here,” I told him, after fishing around in my pants pockets.

“Laine. Laine Peterson. That’s right. That coffee smells tantalizing. Thanks, Laine.”

I spent all morning polishing up my article: Retiring in Carlsbad: Carl’s Good-choice. The subject, a guy named Carl Hemswick, had been a particularly boring subject. Clad in denim overalls, Carl sure had a lot of admiration for the bars in the area and the coastal views. He had spent most of our interview recalling his run-of-the-mill life working for a lawn mower assembly factory up north, and detailed with pride the fishing boat he had managed to purchase with his earnings. The things baby-boomers want to read about and the assignments I had been given with this company really bummed me out on a daily basis.

 It occurred to me that an article about my life would be even more featureless.

At any rate, sprucing up the piece, I thought, was probably going to have me working through lunch.

ï

I got through the work week and called Kyra as soon as I was free. She answered after seven rings.

“…Come over to your apartment?  That’s different. Are you sure you don’t want to just meet up at the park and go to the café?”

“No,” I told her. Only I didn’t mean for it to sound so sudden and defiant. “I mean, we can if you want to, I just want to do something different…to break up my routine.”

I looked around my kitchen, where I had been standing, hoping that I would find something that might prompt a more alluring invitation.

“I was thinking we could make something. Like, we could bake a pie from scratch, or maybe I could make you dinner or we could watch a movie, or like, I don’t know… listen to music or something.”

Still she said nothing. She didn’t seem sold and I was starting to feel more desperate.

“Kyra, I…” I could feel my sentence dying in my mind and no longer remembered what I was going to say. “It’s been a weird week for me, and I’d just really like to take it easy and have some company. So would you like to come over and have dinner with me?”

The line was silent. I walked out to the balcony with my phone still pressed to my ear and looked out over the neighborhood. I saw a woman struggling to hold her dog back while a band of skateboarders rumbled past.

And then, Kyra said, “What kind of pie?”

 

ï

I didn’t hear her come to the doorway because I was blasting Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors pretty loudly. She started banging at the steel grill of the security door and I ran over.

“Sorry, I was just getting started early.”

She wore a denim jacket with a blood-red dress underneath which ran to just above the knees. She carried a plastic grocery bag in her right hand and her purse was tucked feebly under her left armpit.

“Do you always play this song when girls come over?” She said with a suspicious stare.

“No! You just walked up at the perfect time. I was playing the whole album and ‘Dreams’ just happened to be the next track.”

“Hmmm.”

I led her in and took the grocery bag from her. It was a bottle of wine.

“What’s this?” I said, taking the frosted glass bottle from the bag.

“Merlot. We’re gonna drink it. You said all Merlot sucks but you’ll see. It’ll go well with the pie and you’re gonna love it so much, you’ll be tipping the bottle to get every last drop.”

“You love to prove me wrong, don’t you?”

“You’re wrong a lot,” she said with a surprising jab to my solar plexus, “let’s get cooking.”

She complimented my home and I showed her into my tiny kitchen. We divided up the work evenly: I’d deal with the filling, she’d make the dough for the crust. I took to pealing the taro (which I had been heating in the oven) then cutting it up in to small cubes. I then set them in a pot to boil with coconut milk, kalo syrup, sugar and salt. I started to tell Kyra about how much I hated work.

Meanwhile, she struggled with the process of making the dough for the crust.

“Dude, where’s your food processor?” She asked.

“Food processor?” I had honestly never heard of one before.

“Well do you at least have a large bowl and a whisk I could use?”

But I didn’t, not hardly. She made due with a soup bowl and a fork. She constantly let out sighs and moans of dissatisfaction, but in the end, she had a nice solid lump of dough like that which you would use to stretch out a pizza.

“Where’s the pie tin?”

“S**t,” I said, realizing I had overlooked that detail.

“Seriously? What do you have in this kitchen?”

“Wine, thanks to you.”

“That’s not a bad Idea. Pour me a glass. Then we’ll think about what else we’re going to use.”

“Hey,” I said as I fumbled around with my wine key. An Idea had sprouted in my mind.

“What?” She said.

“I have some cooking oil and a pot. What if we roll the dough flat, cut it into smaller pieces, fill them with taro, and then fry them, dumpling style?”

She flashed me a squinty-eyed, tight-lipped smile and reminded me that she doesn’t like fried foods.

“Well I don’t like merlot,” I said as I popped the cork. I poured us a glass to share.

In the living room we sat down and ate the taro pie dumplings we had made, along with a plain, mixed-green salad thrown together with the random vegetables from my fridge. We drank two more glasses of merlot each until the bottle was nearly empty. Kyra was 100% correct, it did go well with the taro, and I loved it. I wasn’t about to admit it, though.

“I don’t know about you,” I told her as I searched YouTube for more Fleetwood Mac, “but I think their self-titled album, the one that came out right before Rumors is a lot better of an album. It’s got Rhiannon, Landslide, Warm Ways, Crystal… It’s a fantastic collection of songs! People herald Rumors because people like drama. But Rumors is just ‘okay’ and everybody knows it.”

“Well Rumors had a story to go along with it, and the music had feeling. Real feeling. That’s why it’s better,” She refuted, “God. You’re so wrong, all the time, with everything.”

The hiccupping moan of the apartment’s a/c unit filled the room with a subtle roar that ate up all of the ensuing silence between our conversations.

“Don’t you ever listen to anything else?” She said, and she poked me repeatedly in the ribs. It was clear that she was tipsy now. We sat just next to each other on my couch, so closely that I could feel the warmth of her breath and smell her sweet musk. She wasn’t wearing any deodorant, or if she was, she had sweat it off. But I thought she smelt nice.

“Do you like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers? That’s my dad’s favorite band. He likes the Heartbreakers and my mom likes Fleetwood.”

“So that’s all you listen to?”

“Pretty much. I don’t know, it’s comfort music. Why, what do you want to hear?”

“Hole!” she proclaimed, and she threw a fist up in the air, a sort of grunge-rock salute.

“Are you serious? You like Hole? You know they’re only popular because Courtney Love was a playmate, right!?”

This really set her off. Turns out, once again, I was wrong. She moved her body away from mine on the couch and started turning red in the face.

“No she wasn’t!” She said defensively, “that was Debbie Harry from Blondie and that is NOT why Blondie was popular.”

“Bet’cha it was,” I said firmly. I was doubling down.

“No, dude. They were popular because they were eclectic, and because they made damn good music! And there’s nothing wrong with a woman being proud of her body. So what if she modeled for Playboy!?”

“What’s more plausible: female vocalist with zero-talent finds a group of amazing musicians who, for some crazy reason, want her to sing all of the songs that they had worked hard on, or that a playmate got a little too old for her modeling gig, but wanted to stay in the spotlight, so she used her looks and her popularity to join her boyfriend’s already successful band, hmm?”

“Ughhh!” She said in disgust. She shook her head in disbelief. “You are unbelievably sexist.”

“I’m not, sex sells! And, look, I just don’t like it when people use their pre-established fame to do something that they absolutely lack the talent for.”

We sat in silence for an awkward couple of seconds. I used my fork to smear the last dumpling on my plate in the left-over vinaigrette from my salad. I didn’t mean for things to go south. I searched my mind for something to say, a way to change the topic, but my mind was bubbling with merlot.

“I’m sorry,” I finally said, “I don’t mean to be sexist.” I made a move to touch her on the shoulder, a sort of clumsy gesture to show my docile side.

“No,” she pouted as she turned away from me. “If you want my forgiveness, you have to sing Blondie.”

I laughed through my nose. I let my arms fall at my sides in defeat. Looking up at the popcorn ceiling, I gave in. I told her I would do it. I was desperate for an opportunity to turn the mood around.

She chose the song and in the next moment, I was up in front of my coffee table, singing “call me” into a candle like it was a microphone.

Call me (call me) on the line

Call me, call me any, anytime

Call me (call me) oh love

When you're ready we can share the wine

Call me.

It was the first time since knowing her that I had seen her full-blown laughing. She clapped emphatically. I sat back down next to her until she caught her breath from having laughed so hard.

“If you don’t like Blondie,” she said between laughs, “than why do you know every word by heart!?”

She had me there. I didn’t know what to say. I guess I never realized that that was a Blondie song.

“That was good. Ahhhhhhhh! Wow. Pffft!” She put her hand on my head and ruffled my hair with her fingertips.

I made the move to kiss her while a headband wearing Blondie sang “Die young, stay pretty” with a group of troll-faced Rastafarians.

We kissed exactly twice. The first kiss, I could tell, caught her by surprise, but the second one was completely mutual. For a moment, every bit of acidity between us softened and evaporated on each other’s plush lips. Yet, before a full-on make-out session could break out, she pulled away sharply.

“F**k off, dude, are you serious!?” She protested, “Is that what this was all about?” She physically pushed me off of her.

I looked back blankly, unsure of what to say for once.

“You invite me over on some innocent pretext that you want company, then you complain about your job to me, then you insult my musical tastes, you stereotype women and then you think you get to kiss me!?”

She was clearly very mad, offended even, and I didn’t know what to say. Mostly, I mumbled.

“Damnit Laine! Every time I agree to hang out with you, all you want to do is criticize people and make me listen to the never-ending list of things you don’t like! You never ask me anything about me or my life, you never compliment me and you think all that is somehow getting you somewhere? Is that supposed to be good conversation? Do you think you’re flattering me?”

She grabbed her vape pen and stormed off to my balcony, knocking the screen door out of the doorframe on the way out.

I sat for a second but then I got up and walked out to her. She puffed a deep drag of strawberry smelling vapor into the air and knelt her arms against the railing, folded them thoughtfully.

“Just…” she said, acknowledging that I was now leaning besides her. She passed me her vape pen and I took a puff.

“What the hell is wrong with you? Can’t you just f*****g be sincere and want to be my friend? Isn’t that enough?”

Then, before I could answer, “Or do you have to be such a guy? A typical, I-hate-everything-that-isn’t-macho, and I-deserve-everything-I-want-guy?”

“I don’t hate you.” I said, and it dawned on me that I meant it. “And I don’t hate everything, I just have strong opinions. And I like talking to you about them.”

She looked at me with honest eyes. Then she hung her head and looked the other way.

I went and sat inside. I picked up my PlayStation controller and turned off the system. I switched to cable and let whatever was on be on.

Kyra eventually came and sat down next to me. I looked over at her, told her again that I was sorry. She hid her face, but then scooted closer to me.

“I didn’t plan for tonight to be like this,” I swore to her, “I really just wanted company; but it ended up being really nice, you know?”

“Yeah,” she said, showing some sympathy, “you did a really nice job with the taro filling. I was impressed.” She poured the last two ounces of wine into a glass and took a sip. She then passed the glass to me to finish. So I gulped it down, and silently wished there were more. A sudden breeze came through the open-door and caused me to shiver.

“I do like you, you know.”

I swung my head towards her, looking to her in painful confusion.

“I like you a lot, actually. But you’re an a*****e.”

“Yeah.”

 

I couldn’t refute her words, yet they didn’t sting like I thought they probably should have. I only felt caught, discovered and trapped in place.

“And I just can’t be that person for you,” she told me.

We looked into each other’s eyes, scanning for understanding.

She rested her head on my shoulder. We stayed like that for some time, just sitting and watching the tail-end of Disney’s Treasure Planet.

 

ï

The following morning was the first day of the new month. We had a sit-in conference at the office of Boomers & Family, the second such meeting I had attended since being hired on. The managing editor, circulation director, art editor, all of the ad-sales agents, all of the supervisors and all of the writers were together in the main conference room drinking coffee and taking notes. We discussed and listened to plans for the upcoming issue of the magazine and were each given our subsequent roles. It was in meetings like these that key-players were given honorable mention. Occasionally, a promotion was awarded. If a particular worker needed to be reassigned, it would happen at a beginning-of-the-month conference.

In a fleeting moment bereft of any room for discussion, I, along with two others, was reassigned to editing.

            “Laine, Yuri, Aileen, don’t take this as an insult, or a demotion,” the writing supervisor told us empathetically, “take this as an opportunity to revisit the elements of what makes good writing good. It’s just a different side of the same coin. Things change here every month. Look at is as a chance to hone in on a different aspect of the magazine, while building up your résumés. Okay?”

            He flashed a cunning half grin and offered up his hand to shake, which was cold with deceit and despair.

 

Outside, on the roof of the office, I smoked a cigarette. I didn’t have my own, but the other disbanded writer, Yuri, offered me one and I pressed it to my lips without hesitation, like a tourniquet to a gaping wound.

            “It sucks, huh?”

I looked at Yuri, who was struggling to light his cigarette in the wind.

            “Yeah, man, it does. No two ways about it, it’s a demotion. Forget that guy.” He cut himself off in order to take a drag.

“Right!? Different sides of the same coin? What an off-base f*****g analogy. You know what’s on the opposite side of heads? F*****g tails. Tails sucks!”

            “Yeah, man,” he said daftly, looking off into the distance, over the bay. He launched a stream of spit through his teeth, onto the spackled rooftop floor.

 After moments of detached silence, he continued, as if he had been chewing on the same sentiment over and over. “I can’t say I didn’t deserve it, though. I was writing like s**t. I can’t pretend to be the expert on hedge funds, or that I really know anything about good quality storm shutters… It came through in my writing.”

“Yeah…” I laughed earnestly, “me too. Did you see the review that was published for The Replaceables?”

“Oh, Christ. What crap, that movie was awful. Easily the worst action movie of all time. What did they rate it, like four out of five stars?”

“Four-and-a-half. Which is four more stars than my review gave it. They took the article away from me before it went to print.”

“Hahahaha!” he laughed. “S**t, man. That’s why we’re out here. We’re too f*****g real for these old-timers.”

Below on the street, several stories beneath the heights of our self-righteousness, the city bustled on in the same controlled pandemonium it always had. Businessmen and woman kept their heads low and their feet lunging ahead of unaware tourists while student volunteers, poised on the corner of each block, tried to stop what few charitable souls they could for sponsorship of children living in impoverished countries. Yet very nearby and regularly interspersed within the crowd, ragtag street-dwellers made incoherent ruckus without any validation whatsoever. Restaurants echoed with sports news from TV’s that nobody watched, and the screeching breaks of city buses bellowed as loudly as the engines themselves.

I fixed my gaze away from the sprawling city and out over the thin slice of ocean, where I could just barely see Coronado. Coronado; not quite an island and not a thing like the one I knew, but I decided it would do. It was hard to be sure exactly where the tied-island was on the horizon, but the constant presence of fighter jets and V 22 Ospreys more or less outlined its general vicinity.

ï

When I was nineteen, I worked as a stocker at an oceanfront restaurant. It was on the south shore of the Island, and out past all of the sandcastles, parasols and family picnics, dotted on the horizon, one could spot Kahoolawe, Molokini crater, and the very tip of Lanai. We, the waiters, back-waiters, bussers and I, would set tables in the late afternoon and prepare for dinner service. Between tasks we would engage in short conversation, and sometimes we would just gaze out upon the azure, glistening pacific in curious admiration.

“You see the western part of the island over there, out past Lahaina?” a waiter named Steve had said to me once.

I followed his gaze to see, just barely, what he was looking at. From the south, the western portion of the island almost looked separate, an island unto itself.

“I love how Ka’anapali looks like a little city-island, bustling with commerce, like something out of a travel magazine; like Maldives or something.”

I turned the image around in my mind, and adopted the idea as my own. I had never thought of the words “city” and “island” as words that could possibly be conjoined, but the idea of such a thing deeply enthralled me. I thought of the city-island as a sort of make believe place, like the image in a snow globe. I even pictured it years later, a sparkling city-island, this place between paradise and productivity. I didn’t truly believe that a place like this could ever exist…

Now, however, as I puffed on the tail-end of a cigarette, I thought of Kyra and our debates; coffee and croissants; dog parks and maple leaves; Tom Petty, Fleetwood Mac and Blondie, and all of the things I loved about my little corner of the city. The place where I could live out my routine and cling to regularity, living as featureless of a life as I so choose.

My City-Island beckoned to me, and I knew, wherever I went, that it would be there, too, sparkling in the horizon: a make believe place inside of a snow globe inside of myself.

�'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reviews

[Francis Bernath]

Hello!
I like to do pros and cons lists so I hope this helps.

Cons:
1. Some grammatical errors and such. Spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure will have to be looked at but those are easy fixes.
2. Choppy sentences and tense dialog seem to suggest that this character just isn't very outgoing. Perhaps this was intended and if so then it works. But I feel like I can't connect with the character because of that. My suggestion would be to make the interaction between the friend from his home town and him more important, meaningful. I mean, sure he just knows her from way back and that is the only reason he is talking to her now but perhaps you can enhance the character's personality with this interaction. It just seemed very unimportant to the story as a whole.

PROS:
1. The dialog overall is relatable. I felt like it could have been a conversation I had with a friend so that is good.
2. The dogs in the beginning seem to have a personality all their own and I think you wrote that well. It is quite interesting to see the protagonist faced with something he wasn't expecting. Gave him some depth.
3. Great tone. He's a glass-half-empty kind of guy I can already tell and it speaks through the narration most. That is nice to be able to picture this person without knowing them quite yet.

Hope this helps! Great job overall.