a day in the life of...

(short story by Courtney Weakley)

Today, while I was still sleeping, the world woke up. I would say it happened gradually and with grace. I would compare it to a tired toddler peeping over the edge of the cot, or a swan emerging from a black lake. I would, only I wasn’t there to see it, and cawing hadidas at my window is anything but graceful.

Today was January 16th 2011, and today was a day in the life of an ordinary person. It was an ordinary day in the ordinary life of an ordinary girl. It started when I woke up with cell-phone alarm bell bees buzzing into my ears and stinging my dreams. Today I woke up blinking dusty eyelashes to push back a vision of the moon opening her mouth to swallow a fiery seraph and thinking that if today was a movie, the dream would mean something. It would be an ominous warning to ruin a regular morning , or a subconscious expression of my obscurely hidden emotions. But today it was just a dream.

Today wasn’t ‘a day in the life of a teenage archetype’ or ‘a day in the life of a cliché’. It was not a day of ‘I-know-what’s-going-to-happen-next’. Today was a day of finding sour milk in the fridge and drinking it anyway. It was a day to think ‘I’m starting Grade 10’ and not being traumatized when my parents didn’t care. It was a day to realize that in a matter of hours, it would be gone and then I would see it didn’t really mean anything anyway.

So today I climbed into my navy skirt fatigues and my bodyguard school shoes, and shivered with my bag of icy stationary on my back, because it smelt like potential and potential is so much more delicious than reality. I sat in the car with headphones on my ears and pretended I was silent, when really my head was drowning. I looked out the window as the landscape slipped up on concrete feet, and wished that my whole life came with background music, rather than just my morning car rides.

“How fare thee this morning?” my friend asked, her voice fizzing across a porous cell-phone line. “Why are you talking like that? Stop talking like that.” “I want to lie on pavements this weekend,” she answered, ignoring me. “That sounds funny,” I smiled, “phone me again later, I feel too much like the colour purple this morning.” “The colour purple?” she repeated incredulously, “what does that feel like?” “It feels like I’m hanging up on you now…”

And because it was a day in the real life of a teenage girl, it meant talking to people I didn’t know and asking everyone how they were when I didn’t really care. It meant smiling at things that sometimes weren’t funny, and laughing at things that wouldn’t have been funny in a movie. And I laughed at people that were funny without realizing it, because in real life, people laugh at that instead of pretending it’s par for the course.

Today I opened up a crisp notebook, and succumbed to the divine lure of a blank page. I grasped at half-revealed words and cursed at the shadows they threw on the wall. Today, when I wrote, I dug my fingers into my cheek, because only clichés bite their pencils and pencils don’t taste like inspiration to me. Today I sighed and smiled at the back-to-school reunions, and at the teachers scolding me for not paying attention. Today my thoughts ran away, but they left me behind. Today I wrote out a whole new life in my diary. Today I fell asleep in maths. Today I met a new teacher. Today I cleaned my desk. Today I ate lunch. Today school ended. Today-

Today turned into tonight, and after I waded through the oceans of white and navy to my chariot of rusted metal and squeaky fan-belts, I got home, and released my muscles into relaxed abandon, slashed away the puppet strings. I melted onto the couch and was abruptly held in stasis by the talking box in my lounge. Tonight it was cold, but I have to say that Jack danced around the house, stabbed grappling frosty fingers underneath the door and tried to scratch at my feet, because it sounds better. Tonight, I would say that the sky split apart as if God released his embrace on Heaven and started crying, but really it was nothing more glamorous than rain. Tonight, when I leant my cold cheek to a colder pillow, I tilted towards the sound of drops on my window, because it’s always been my lullaby. Tonight the Sandman snuck up on me, and released handfuls of dust over my head. Tonight was the closing circuit of an electric day.  

And today wasn't an allegory or a metaphor. You won’t find any grapes of wisdom fallen from the prophet's mouth, nor secrets whispered in-between the perfect inky lines. There was nothing more to read than what was on the surface, because sometimes all we are is living and nothing else, and sometimes plot holes swallow us up. Sometimes real life flies past without mattering, and sometimes living it has no meaning. Sometimes real life is only real and nothing else, and sometimes the only thing with any gravity is just living and staying alive.

And sometimes… well, sometimes that's enough.

a shortshort story with no name

It was hot. It was the type of heat that smothers you under a blanket of thick mist until you’re not really sure whether you’re awake or asleep. It was on this hot night that she dreamed about beach balls and salty sea and Mark From Down The Road. It was a confusing dream which wasn’t confusing at the time she was dreaming it, but puzzled her for a long moment afterwards.

It didn’t just puzzle her, either: it hung around her like a pretty, Indian scarf she saw in the shop window once. She was acutely aware of its presence for the entire week, feeling its soft weight on her shoulders and back.

“Hey, let’s go to the beach.”

It was Saturday and so they went. The thick, gloopy sunscreen made her skin turn white-ish and made the grains of sand stick to her in a not unpleasant way. She looked down at the chipped blue nail polish on her toenails. I must, she said to herself, do something about that. She looked up, up – and felt her breath catch in her throat. It was Mark From Down The Road.

He was looking down at her, his eyes sparkling in an agreeable way. He smiled a slow, sandy smile and said intelligently, “Hey”. She felt the pretty, Indian scarf of a dream slowly lifting from her shoulders and saw it flutter away, carried by the warm breeze. She thought of following it, but then remembered that Mark From Down The Road was talking to her. “Hey”, she said back.

It was the best conversation she had ever had. She talked about ice cream and music and break-dancing while Mark From Down The Road smiled his sandy smile and nodded in a most adorable way the entire time. She was already planning their wedding in her mind and wondering if Mark would still look sandy, even in a suit, when he spoilt it all.

“I hate that guy,” he said. She was startled by the malice in his voice, and she was even more startled by the sudden realisation that this was the first time he’d said something in the past fifteen minutes. She followed the line of his glaring eyes to an unassuming young man who was engaged in burying a girl’s legs in the hot sand. “He just thinks he’s so cool – but he’s such a loser.” The words looked ugly as they came tumbling out of his angry mouth. The sound they made grated painfully against her ears and she covered them with her hands quickly. Her beautiful, sandy dream of a boy was flying away, just like a pretty, Indian scarf she’d seen once in a shop window.

“I think I should go home now.” The words, as she said them, brought her back to reality. Reality, she thought as she walked back alone, is not such a bad place to be.

a funny little story called love

She had always harboured the secret suspicion that Mr. Vernon was a vampire. She didn’t know why, exactly. She couldn’t pin it down on one particular thing. Rather, it was a combination of factors: his extremely pale, almost luminous white skin; his shiny white incisors, which seemed to her somewhat sharper than one would expect; his soft, deep voice, which she imagined was exactly the sort of voice a vampire would use to lure unsuspecting females into his lair… She shuddered. Mr. Vernon, the vampire…she thought to herself, as she had many times before. Of course, he had a first name, but “David, the vampire” was inferior to “Vernon, the vampire” for many reasons. To her mind, one of the chief reasons was the distinct lack of alliteration. As a high school English teacher, Miss Carolyn Waters was quite partial to alliteration.

Mr. David Vernon was not a vampire. He was, however, a high school Maths teacher with a secret talent: he played the bagpipes. Not frightfully well, I might add, but well enough that he could carry a tune. That is, if he played a song, one could generally recognise it, or at least vaguely recall it being in That Movie With The Famous Actor In It. Mr. Vernon also had another secret which was far more embarrassing: a fairly large crush on Miss Carolyn Waters. Of this secret she could never know for he was sure that his chronic awkwardness when talking to her was evident, and slightly repulsive.

But some women find awkwardness endearing, don’t they? Miss Carolyn Waters, though she did not know it at the time, was one of these women. And so it transpired that on the afternoon of Friday, the 12^th of April at around five minutes past five, a meeting between the two took place. The meeting took place – as all meetings of importance do – in the staff kitchen of the school they both taught at. The Friday afternoon staff meeting had just ended, and they were, conveniently, the last people left. Mr. Vernon was rinsing out his dark green coffee mug, while surreptitiously glancing at Miss Waters every now and then. Miss Waters was rummaging around for another Royal Cream biscuit in the biscuit tin, completely unaware of Mr. Vernon’s shy glances. When, at last, she found one of those delightful biscuits at the bottom of the tin, she turned to face Mr. Vernon and nibbled on it with a gleeful expression. “Mmmm… Don’t you absolutely love Royal Creams?” she mumbled, through a mouthful of sweet crumbs. The thought occurred to Mr. Vernon that this was perhaps the most romantic moment of his life, and that Miss Carolyn Waters was perhaps the most elegant, charming woman alive. It was as he was thinking these very thoughts that his mind somehow managed to string together a coherent sentence, which he repeated to Miss Waters. “Yes, indeed. They are far superior to other biscuits, aren’t they?” These few words affected Miss Carolyn Waters deeply and unexpectedly, and she knew that she had found a kindred spirit.

The two teachers looked at each other for a long moment, each thinking their own thoughts. Mr. Vernon was thinking that Miss Waters’ eyes were the bluest he had ever seen, and that they were roughly the colour of the sky at twilight. He was also wondering if he should tell her this, or if maybe she knew already. (She did, in fact, know already. Many people had told Miss Carolyn Waters that her eyes were the bluest they had seen, but Mr. Vernon did not know this.) She was looking at his incisors, and wondering if they had ever bitten human flesh. No, she decided, they had not. She then looked at his very pale skin and decided that there was a certain charm about such fragile, delicate-looking skin. By the time Mr. Vernon spoke in that soft, deep voice of his, Miss Carolyn Waters had firmly made up her mind to like him. “Your eyes are the bluest I have ever seen, Carolyn” he said. Somehow, she thought to herself, when Mr. Vernon said this sentence, it sounded different from all the other times. Different, and more beautiful.   

“I play a bit of piano,” she was saying on Monday afternoon in the staffroom, “Do you play anything, David?” (She had quite taken to the name David lately, for reasons she herself did not understand, but which we understand completely.) David Vernon had not told anyone about his secret talent, as he was rather embarrassed by it. The bagpipes are not, after all, a particularly fashionable instrument to play. It wasn’t as if he was a closet electric guitarist, you know. Now, though, he surprised himself by declaring the truth: “Actually, I do play an instrument, Carolyn,” (he had always been fond of the name Carolyn, for reasons he knew entirely too well.) “Meet me in the music room after school, and I’ll show you.” A little bubble of excitement – the kind that only arrives in anticipation of a surprise – welled up in the chest of Miss Carolyn Waters, and stayed there the entire day. It didn’t even pop when she was forced to correct the numerous grammatical errors of her Grade 11 essays.

The school music room had never held such appeal for Carolyn, and she hurried towards it eagerly. David was already inside, she saw through the window, standing awkwardly with something large and bulky in his arms. Never before had an awkward stance and an unidentifiable, large object been so utterly charming. She opened the door.

“Carolyn!” he walked over to her with a large smile on his face. His incisors glinted cheerfully. The object, she noticed now, was made of old tartan material, and had long pipes sort of sticking out… “Bagpipes?” she asked, disbelievingly. He grinned impishly and proceeded to blow into the pipes with gusto. What happened next is a curious thing indeed: the music notes, as he played them, grew wings and fluttered around the room. They landed on Carolyn’s shoulders, they tugged playfully at her hair, and when they entered the ears of Miss Carolyn Waters, they were infinitely sweeter than when they left the bagpipes of Mr. David Vernon. A curious phenomenon indeed, and one generally called “love”. The love, when it arrived, did so quietly and innocuously so as not to disturb the two teachers. Love, after all, is not intended to offend. After David had finished playing, however, they were both hit by a wave of intense affection for one another, which caused Miss Carolyn to exclaim, “Oh, dear!” David looked at her questioningly, “What is it, Carolyn?” he asked, innocently enough.

“David Vernon, I believe you have stolen my heart” she answered, quite out of breath.

The wedding, when it happened, was not a grand affair. Inexpensive and uncomplicated, it did not demand attention as weddings so often do. But when Miss Carolyn Waters walked down the aisle, the backs of the chairs straightened, and the organ’s notes became crisper: the love shared by her and Mr. David Vernon was tangible. To everyone present, the air suddenly tasted of vanilla ice cream and fresh strawberries (because, as we all know, this is what love tastes like) and they knew that the marriage they were witnessing was as pure and beautiful as love itself.

Love is a simple thing indeed. All it takes for love to occur, you see, is two unremarkable people, and some very special biscuits.