RJR Basimilus
Arceus is nice I suppose...
- Location
- the Lovely Planet
- Partners
-
Awakening from a junk food haze brought on by post-Butler enlightenment, I found that I had somehow written one of those one shots that's in vogue these days.
It doesn't really mean anything and it doesn't particularly say anything. At heart, it's a little narrative about things that I don't explain well in the context of things I don't understand. It's kind of funny I guess.
Anyway, it sucks, but here it is.
---- A Little After Hours -------
Every time I passed someone on the street, I reached into my pocket, feeling the pink slip as if it suddenly it would disappear. I couldn’t tell what the reminder of my former job meant to me, nor what it would mean to a pickpocket. But somehow the feeling remained that the little sheet of paper with my full name meant something, that the empty pleasantries thanking me for years of work were a good luck charm for an uncertain future.
I realized that I was not really wandering aimlessly, I was in front of the deli. Everyday after work I spent two dollars and forty seven cents plus seven cents sales tax on a pickle and egg sandwich. It had taken me five years to learn the tax on my meal, but only three days for the pickles and the eggs to entrench themselves in the back of my head like a delicious symbiotic worm. I loved it’s taste and simplicity, it loved my money.
There was even a pattern in the preparation. On Wednesdays, Mondays, and Fridays, Peter would make the sandwich, his gnarled hands betraying years worth of culinary grit, but none of the associated age. I learned to appreciate the unwavering elegance, another constant in the process that I followed to the letter. The singular spice in my life came from Tuesdays and Thursdays. Busy with a particular regular who changed his order so often that I had long since learned to block the cadence of his voice from my mind, the task of my sandwich fell to his assistant, a perpetually drowsy Chesnaught named Walt. Walt’s slow, deliberate movements were maddening. There was no reason to his movement. Would the pickles come first, or the egg? Peter often joked about my inane attention to meaningless things as he made my sandwich pickles first, then egg, never changing. Routine was my savior. People would often be astounded by the rote and form by which I conducted myself. Even I could recognize how ridiculous I was with my oddities. But it was a vice I accepted because without it, I would have nothing.
Walt looked at me strangely as I sat down, his eyes flickering to the clock on the wall. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the time.
“The usual, right?” Peter called from the other end of the counter. I nodded hurriedly, fearing the question that would follow.
But it never came. Snapping out of my panic, I looked down at my sandwich. Bread, egg, pickles, bread. I felt nothing for a moment, then a small, nearly intangible fear washed over me.
“Thanks,” I said, trying to sound casual. The wait was eating away at me, my imagination going wild. I finally decided to answer the unsaid question myself. “I’m a bit early today.”
“I guess you are,” Peter replied nonchalantly. He stared at a freshly brewed decanter of coffee as he gathered a small pile of jam packets.
I ate my sandwich, the savory taste of the pickles mixing with a growing unease. Wasn’t he going to comment on how strange I was? I had broken the routine, I was committing a violation of the known and accepted. I looked over to see Walt making a worried expression. I stared back at the Chesnaught until he turned away to carry off a stack of plates.
I sat in silence for the rest of my meal.
[]
I’ve never had a pokemon in my life. There was an uncomfortable uncertainty in the relationship that I had feared since my mother’s Finneon bit my finger. What did pokemon do for people? What was the difference? The bread was the same. The pickles were the same. The egg was the same. The only thing that was different was me. I ate when I shouldn’t have, and now I walked a road I would never walk. People passed. I clutched the pink slip, thinking of pickles.
“Hey mister!” a voice called from my left. I looked over to see a young man standing under an umbrella in the sun. He leaned on a small kiosk filled with brochures for far off places that I had only heard of in passing, places that had never interested me that might as well not exist at all. My insular world was as large as the distance from my house to my work. Some days I hated it with a passion, the sameness, the simplicity. But I could never leave it, pickles never let you down. Until they did that is.
“Hi-” I said uncertainty as I faced him, “How are you?”
“Great, thanks,” he said with a peculiar aplomb. “Are you interested in seeing some of our deals? We have the lowest rates on this side of the seaboard!”
I could never say no. It was a job, a profession. He didn’t truly care about whether or not I was interested, but that was a fact I could never admit to myself.
“Sure, what do you have?” I looked over them, my eyes glazing over at the multitudes of names and places. I realized that I desperately wanted to travel. I looked up, my eyes tracing the sky. For so long I hadn’t let myself consider the possibility because it would be a litany of unknowns. The thought of filling out a request for time off terrified me, actually handing it in was a nightmare in and of itself. So I forgot about it. Over and over again, believing in my routine.
“What do you think?” the man said hopefully.
“Some of these places look interesting,” I said truthfully, feeling a strange giddiness. “I’ll look into it.”
“Alright! Do you want to spin the wheel before you go for a prize?” I looked up, seeing for the first time a large partitioned wheel. In the back of my mind, the allure of a free t-shirt was just funny enough to make me smile. I nodded to him, and grasped the edge of the wheel, pulling it downwards with the most force I had used in years.
I watched the spinning, thinking that I would be at the diner about now, eating the sandwich I had eaten half an hour ago. The unknown scared me, but now I felt almost a little excited. Slowly the wheel stopped, landing on a tiny purple spot that I imagined would win me a lifetime supply of pickles and eggs. The man looked at the wheel and suddenly became very excited.
“Oh congratulations! You won the special prize.” He walked around the back of the kiosk, rooting around in it for a moment before returning to me and extending his hand.
I didn’t recognize the object at first. Small and round, it was completely alien to the world I had known.
“A pokemon?” I asked, looking at him slightly panicked. “Can you really give this to me?”
“Don’t be shy, take it,” the man goaded, gesturing with his other hand. “I’ll be frank with you, the vast majority of people book on the internet these days, so we had to step up our game. It’s a really exotic pokemon, I think you’ll enjoy it.”
“Right,” I said slowly. I thought of a Finneon’s teeth and a Chesnaught’s sandwich technique. The fear felt silly yet achingly real, a reminder of my small world. Fighting the imagination of a forlorn future, I reached out and grabbed the pokeball.
“Thanks,” I said, putting it in my pocket. I felt the pink slip again and my hand froze, caught between the past and the future. An uncanny heat raced across my face, a maddening prickly itch covering my chest and arms. I walked away as fast as I could.
[]
I sat in front of my television. The screen was dark, my hand opening and closing around the objects in my pocket, unsure of which one to pull out first. My schedule was in ruins at this point, when I arrived home, I would watch my favorite show. But the figures on the screen were foreign and happy in a way I could not comprehend; I was home early, the light streaming through the window a brighter yellow than I had ever seen.
Eventually I pulled out the pink slip. It had never left my pocket once during the day. Again and again, I had been afraid that it would. But I realized that as I walked home, the urge to grasp it had faded. Reaching into my pocket, I had found myself grabbing the pokeball repeatedly. I was scared of it, but it was mine, and in that I could not let it go. I let the piece of paper fall to the cushion, pulling out the pokeball. Turning it over and over again in my hands, I felt a chill. The pokeball fell to the cushion like the slip. I couldn’t open it yet.
I watched a show I had never seen before about a man searching for ghosts, only to run screaming when a brick flew through the air. It was strange, but I smiled.
The light was fading when I looked at the pokeball again. It was still there unmoving, and I felt relieved. I stared at it for a moment. Then another. In an instant, I suppressed the sinking feeling in my chest and grabbed the pokeball, pressing the button on the front. In a flash of light, the pokemon was released.
I sat on my couch, feeling my breath. A single eye attached to a colorful wheel with a hanging grimy anchor stared at me. I wondered to myself what was supposed to happen next.
“What is your name?” I asked.
The anchor blinked, not seeming to have an answer.
I thought for a moment. “Am I supposed to do that?”
It bobbed in the air, it’s expression unchanging. I felt lost and confused.
“Uh- your name is Pickle?” I said, shrugging slightly. For the first time the anchor moved, leaning slightly forward before returning to its position. Did it approve?
“Alright Pickle, nice to meet you,” I said, making a small smile. Pickle seemed to tire of me, it floated idly around the room. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I returned to watching the show.
After a while, a small clink distracted me from the television. Pickle was pressed up against a small table, it’s singular eye staring intently at a line of framed pictures I had. It was a litany of the usual stuff, graduation, vacations from my youth, a formal family picture. I watched Pickle curiously as it moved from picture to picture, grinding against the side of the table as it moved. For some reason, I wasn’t annoyed, I simply watched. Once it reached the end, it turned to look at me, the same inscrutable expression on its face.
It occurred to me that maybe Pickle was lost like I was. I didn’t know where Pickle came from, and Pickle didn’t know where I came from. We were strangers, together for no reason, expecting nothing. I had spent my life waiting for sandwiches, but now I was waiting for Pickle.
“Do you want to watch a movie?” I asked, gesturing at the screen. Pickle made no indication, but it floated over to the couch. After a moment, it lowered onto the cushion, crushing the pink slip that I had left there. It looked at me, as if it were waiting.
I was at a loss for words for a moment. “How about a documentary?” I finally said.
There was no response, but strangely I felt like Pickle agreed.
[]
We watched four movies late into the night. Occasionally I glanced over at Pickle; it was engrossed in every movie we watched, looking at me after each one as if to tell me to put on another. I realized with a start I was having fun with someone else, the first in a long time.
“It’s late now so I’m going to sleep. We can uh- we can watch more tomorrow. Do you want that?”
Pickle repeated the gesture that I had come to recognize as a nod. As I slowly walked to the bedroom, I turned to see it hovering in place, still staring at me.
“Do you need to sleep?” I asked. Pickle didn’t respond. “Are you gonna come with me or are you going to stay out here all night?”
After a moment, Pickle floated towards me, and I was sure it was looking at me expectantly. I walked down the hall, Pickle following silently. Sitting on my bed I let the day wash over me. I didn’t know what to do next. I had more than enough saved up that I didn’t need to worry about money for some time. But my life had come apart at the seams, I was out of work, and now I had an anchor that was my own. Pickle was looking at the bed, its eye slowly making its way from the base to the head. A funny thought occurred to me then, maybe Pickle thought about fixtures and routine the same way I did. I smiled to myself.
As I pulled the covers over myself, I looked at Pickle, who was hovering over the bed.
“Don’t you lay down or something?” Pickle looked at me as I said this, and eventually lowered itself onto the base of the bed. I watched it for a moment.
“You’ll get cold like that,” I said. Pushing the covers off, I reached down and gently grabbed Pickle. It’s eye flickered to me, but it didn’t protest. I placed the wheel down on the pillow next to me, pulling the covers back over us.
“That’s better isn’t it?” I said quietly to Pickle. It’s eye looked at me for a moment longer, then closed. I felt a sense of tension leave the air, and found myself marveling at where I was.
Turning out the light, I still felt confused. I still felt uncertain about the direction my life would take. Years of the same thing that had engraved itself upon my mind had been shattered in a single day, and I wasn’t sure if it would turn out to be a good or bad thing. But deep down, I knew above all else that I couldn’t ignore that it had happened, and so here I was. With Pickle.
What came next was a mystery. But in the darkness, among my fear and my doubt, I could feel a little excitement, and even a little hope. What happens happens.
That night I dreamed of ripping apart long sheets of pink paper.
It doesn't really mean anything and it doesn't particularly say anything. At heart, it's a little narrative about things that I don't explain well in the context of things I don't understand. It's kind of funny I guess.
Anyway, it sucks, but here it is.
---- A Little After Hours -------
Every time I passed someone on the street, I reached into my pocket, feeling the pink slip as if it suddenly it would disappear. I couldn’t tell what the reminder of my former job meant to me, nor what it would mean to a pickpocket. But somehow the feeling remained that the little sheet of paper with my full name meant something, that the empty pleasantries thanking me for years of work were a good luck charm for an uncertain future.
I realized that I was not really wandering aimlessly, I was in front of the deli. Everyday after work I spent two dollars and forty seven cents plus seven cents sales tax on a pickle and egg sandwich. It had taken me five years to learn the tax on my meal, but only three days for the pickles and the eggs to entrench themselves in the back of my head like a delicious symbiotic worm. I loved it’s taste and simplicity, it loved my money.
There was even a pattern in the preparation. On Wednesdays, Mondays, and Fridays, Peter would make the sandwich, his gnarled hands betraying years worth of culinary grit, but none of the associated age. I learned to appreciate the unwavering elegance, another constant in the process that I followed to the letter. The singular spice in my life came from Tuesdays and Thursdays. Busy with a particular regular who changed his order so often that I had long since learned to block the cadence of his voice from my mind, the task of my sandwich fell to his assistant, a perpetually drowsy Chesnaught named Walt. Walt’s slow, deliberate movements were maddening. There was no reason to his movement. Would the pickles come first, or the egg? Peter often joked about my inane attention to meaningless things as he made my sandwich pickles first, then egg, never changing. Routine was my savior. People would often be astounded by the rote and form by which I conducted myself. Even I could recognize how ridiculous I was with my oddities. But it was a vice I accepted because without it, I would have nothing.
Walt looked at me strangely as I sat down, his eyes flickering to the clock on the wall. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the time.
“The usual, right?” Peter called from the other end of the counter. I nodded hurriedly, fearing the question that would follow.
But it never came. Snapping out of my panic, I looked down at my sandwich. Bread, egg, pickles, bread. I felt nothing for a moment, then a small, nearly intangible fear washed over me.
“Thanks,” I said, trying to sound casual. The wait was eating away at me, my imagination going wild. I finally decided to answer the unsaid question myself. “I’m a bit early today.”
“I guess you are,” Peter replied nonchalantly. He stared at a freshly brewed decanter of coffee as he gathered a small pile of jam packets.
I ate my sandwich, the savory taste of the pickles mixing with a growing unease. Wasn’t he going to comment on how strange I was? I had broken the routine, I was committing a violation of the known and accepted. I looked over to see Walt making a worried expression. I stared back at the Chesnaught until he turned away to carry off a stack of plates.
I sat in silence for the rest of my meal.
[]
I’ve never had a pokemon in my life. There was an uncomfortable uncertainty in the relationship that I had feared since my mother’s Finneon bit my finger. What did pokemon do for people? What was the difference? The bread was the same. The pickles were the same. The egg was the same. The only thing that was different was me. I ate when I shouldn’t have, and now I walked a road I would never walk. People passed. I clutched the pink slip, thinking of pickles.
“Hey mister!” a voice called from my left. I looked over to see a young man standing under an umbrella in the sun. He leaned on a small kiosk filled with brochures for far off places that I had only heard of in passing, places that had never interested me that might as well not exist at all. My insular world was as large as the distance from my house to my work. Some days I hated it with a passion, the sameness, the simplicity. But I could never leave it, pickles never let you down. Until they did that is.
“Hi-” I said uncertainty as I faced him, “How are you?”
“Great, thanks,” he said with a peculiar aplomb. “Are you interested in seeing some of our deals? We have the lowest rates on this side of the seaboard!”
I could never say no. It was a job, a profession. He didn’t truly care about whether or not I was interested, but that was a fact I could never admit to myself.
“Sure, what do you have?” I looked over them, my eyes glazing over at the multitudes of names and places. I realized that I desperately wanted to travel. I looked up, my eyes tracing the sky. For so long I hadn’t let myself consider the possibility because it would be a litany of unknowns. The thought of filling out a request for time off terrified me, actually handing it in was a nightmare in and of itself. So I forgot about it. Over and over again, believing in my routine.
“What do you think?” the man said hopefully.
“Some of these places look interesting,” I said truthfully, feeling a strange giddiness. “I’ll look into it.”
“Alright! Do you want to spin the wheel before you go for a prize?” I looked up, seeing for the first time a large partitioned wheel. In the back of my mind, the allure of a free t-shirt was just funny enough to make me smile. I nodded to him, and grasped the edge of the wheel, pulling it downwards with the most force I had used in years.
I watched the spinning, thinking that I would be at the diner about now, eating the sandwich I had eaten half an hour ago. The unknown scared me, but now I felt almost a little excited. Slowly the wheel stopped, landing on a tiny purple spot that I imagined would win me a lifetime supply of pickles and eggs. The man looked at the wheel and suddenly became very excited.
“Oh congratulations! You won the special prize.” He walked around the back of the kiosk, rooting around in it for a moment before returning to me and extending his hand.
I didn’t recognize the object at first. Small and round, it was completely alien to the world I had known.
“A pokemon?” I asked, looking at him slightly panicked. “Can you really give this to me?”
“Don’t be shy, take it,” the man goaded, gesturing with his other hand. “I’ll be frank with you, the vast majority of people book on the internet these days, so we had to step up our game. It’s a really exotic pokemon, I think you’ll enjoy it.”
“Right,” I said slowly. I thought of a Finneon’s teeth and a Chesnaught’s sandwich technique. The fear felt silly yet achingly real, a reminder of my small world. Fighting the imagination of a forlorn future, I reached out and grabbed the pokeball.
“Thanks,” I said, putting it in my pocket. I felt the pink slip again and my hand froze, caught between the past and the future. An uncanny heat raced across my face, a maddening prickly itch covering my chest and arms. I walked away as fast as I could.
[]
I sat in front of my television. The screen was dark, my hand opening and closing around the objects in my pocket, unsure of which one to pull out first. My schedule was in ruins at this point, when I arrived home, I would watch my favorite show. But the figures on the screen were foreign and happy in a way I could not comprehend; I was home early, the light streaming through the window a brighter yellow than I had ever seen.
Eventually I pulled out the pink slip. It had never left my pocket once during the day. Again and again, I had been afraid that it would. But I realized that as I walked home, the urge to grasp it had faded. Reaching into my pocket, I had found myself grabbing the pokeball repeatedly. I was scared of it, but it was mine, and in that I could not let it go. I let the piece of paper fall to the cushion, pulling out the pokeball. Turning it over and over again in my hands, I felt a chill. The pokeball fell to the cushion like the slip. I couldn’t open it yet.
I watched a show I had never seen before about a man searching for ghosts, only to run screaming when a brick flew through the air. It was strange, but I smiled.
The light was fading when I looked at the pokeball again. It was still there unmoving, and I felt relieved. I stared at it for a moment. Then another. In an instant, I suppressed the sinking feeling in my chest and grabbed the pokeball, pressing the button on the front. In a flash of light, the pokemon was released.
I sat on my couch, feeling my breath. A single eye attached to a colorful wheel with a hanging grimy anchor stared at me. I wondered to myself what was supposed to happen next.
“What is your name?” I asked.
The anchor blinked, not seeming to have an answer.
I thought for a moment. “Am I supposed to do that?”
It bobbed in the air, it’s expression unchanging. I felt lost and confused.
“Uh- your name is Pickle?” I said, shrugging slightly. For the first time the anchor moved, leaning slightly forward before returning to its position. Did it approve?
“Alright Pickle, nice to meet you,” I said, making a small smile. Pickle seemed to tire of me, it floated idly around the room. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I returned to watching the show.
After a while, a small clink distracted me from the television. Pickle was pressed up against a small table, it’s singular eye staring intently at a line of framed pictures I had. It was a litany of the usual stuff, graduation, vacations from my youth, a formal family picture. I watched Pickle curiously as it moved from picture to picture, grinding against the side of the table as it moved. For some reason, I wasn’t annoyed, I simply watched. Once it reached the end, it turned to look at me, the same inscrutable expression on its face.
It occurred to me that maybe Pickle was lost like I was. I didn’t know where Pickle came from, and Pickle didn’t know where I came from. We were strangers, together for no reason, expecting nothing. I had spent my life waiting for sandwiches, but now I was waiting for Pickle.
“Do you want to watch a movie?” I asked, gesturing at the screen. Pickle made no indication, but it floated over to the couch. After a moment, it lowered onto the cushion, crushing the pink slip that I had left there. It looked at me, as if it were waiting.
I was at a loss for words for a moment. “How about a documentary?” I finally said.
There was no response, but strangely I felt like Pickle agreed.
[]
We watched four movies late into the night. Occasionally I glanced over at Pickle; it was engrossed in every movie we watched, looking at me after each one as if to tell me to put on another. I realized with a start I was having fun with someone else, the first in a long time.
“It’s late now so I’m going to sleep. We can uh- we can watch more tomorrow. Do you want that?”
Pickle repeated the gesture that I had come to recognize as a nod. As I slowly walked to the bedroom, I turned to see it hovering in place, still staring at me.
“Do you need to sleep?” I asked. Pickle didn’t respond. “Are you gonna come with me or are you going to stay out here all night?”
After a moment, Pickle floated towards me, and I was sure it was looking at me expectantly. I walked down the hall, Pickle following silently. Sitting on my bed I let the day wash over me. I didn’t know what to do next. I had more than enough saved up that I didn’t need to worry about money for some time. But my life had come apart at the seams, I was out of work, and now I had an anchor that was my own. Pickle was looking at the bed, its eye slowly making its way from the base to the head. A funny thought occurred to me then, maybe Pickle thought about fixtures and routine the same way I did. I smiled to myself.
As I pulled the covers over myself, I looked at Pickle, who was hovering over the bed.
“Don’t you lay down or something?” Pickle looked at me as I said this, and eventually lowered itself onto the base of the bed. I watched it for a moment.
“You’ll get cold like that,” I said. Pushing the covers off, I reached down and gently grabbed Pickle. It’s eye flickered to me, but it didn’t protest. I placed the wheel down on the pillow next to me, pulling the covers back over us.
“That’s better isn’t it?” I said quietly to Pickle. It’s eye looked at me for a moment longer, then closed. I felt a sense of tension leave the air, and found myself marveling at where I was.
Turning out the light, I still felt confused. I still felt uncertain about the direction my life would take. Years of the same thing that had engraved itself upon my mind had been shattered in a single day, and I wasn’t sure if it would turn out to be a good or bad thing. But deep down, I knew above all else that I couldn’t ignore that it had happened, and so here I was. With Pickle.
What came next was a mystery. But in the darkness, among my fear and my doubt, I could feel a little excitement, and even a little hope. What happens happens.
That night I dreamed of ripping apart long sheets of pink paper.
