There is no moon tonight through her college window. Outside, winter is a playground bully, roughing up the trees, loitering with intent in the gardens. Darkness barges in to sort it out, the blackest kind.
She's been sitting at her desk, staring at her reflection in the window, watching the drama of herself unfolding in the glass. A face is one big miserable puff. Yes, she thinks, she has a pom pom face on top of everything else. She has been weeping incessantly since 3pm. She looks alternately at her face and at the essay on her desk, the last number a zero becoming another kind of face; the first number a one becoming a stick, a very dirty one. She reads them together
There are so many dishes to do. Greasy pans and plates with dressing and sloppy food debris and sauce mixed in that she'll have to dispose of and she never knows what to do with. Liquid and solid moulded together on to plate after plate. She doesn't, if she's honest, like even touching this with the cleaning sponge because then it's on the sponge like congealed blood. Sauce in the bin is messy, and requires a second bin bag because more often than not, there's another unidentifiable form of liquid that also gets on the outside of the bin bag, probably mixed with the sauce, and when you're taking it downstairs it smells to high heaven. But also food clogs the sink. and then you need to use a teaspoon to remove it or your fingers.
And then you have to clean the teaspoon or your fingers.
Of course she is supposed to dispose of her food in a food waste facility but she doesn't have one and doesn't know who to ask for one and is scared of everybody including janitors and other people who might have information about this.
She doesn't know what she is going to do. She can't see the end of the dishes and she can't see the future.
They are hers, only hers, the dishes, but she hasn't done them for weeks. She hasn't done them since she started the essay. The essay has been her life for three weeks. She has created a little door in a varsity note pad by ripping back a little piece of paper, opened it, and crawled inside. She has had to shrink a good deal to fit inside, so she has no longer become a large person on the Earth. She has become tiny and flat. She has had to become flat to fit. She has ignored almost everything else on the outside of this world, including the dishes. And everything on the inside of herself, including love, drawing, painting, friends and playing the cello.
Grease and finely chopped onion- then a shocking part. An awful part. The skin of a fish in fact. Oh no! Bits of lettuce where there's also tomato ketchup and mayo and there's olives sliming around. There's a bowl with 'impossible to remove', dried up cereal, welded to the bottom in peaks like the architecture of a tiny new civilization.
Her thin green jumper, warm in an ominous way – from dirty water; grim, grey. Stagnant like a waste disposal unit. It spreads, and there is too much of it and soon it will be cold on her stomach. She keeps on assaulting the dishes with the cleaning sponge anyway, the glasses are safest so she engages with those first. But more and more slops out and on to the floor.
Batten down the hatches, says winter, for the hatches are not battened down and there is a gale blowing around the place.
Laughter rolls around the next room. of the College, crowded into the kitchen like unwanted guests. Too hot, too hot, she opens a window. The white noise inside her head drains out. Her belief that she was invincible curled back around to bite her. Jewelry wanders in an out of the shadows. Sunset curled around the mountains, dripping into eventual night. In Moscow the colourless buildings were briefly set in gold by a sun that hadn't shown its face all day, absent until it had made up its mind to leave. The night was the beginning of a bruise, revealing only enough of its colour for you to anticipate the oncoming ache. When we first arrived in Moscow, all he wanted to do was ride the train.
Even the ticket halls had chandeliers, paintings on the walls. The performance that follows is matched only by the volume of the screams of approval from the awe struck crowd.
Something is blocking the sink-hole.
A mushroom with the consistency of a slug,
a particle of pepper.
She sees it written as a poem in her mind.
Tomato sauce has formed an orange scum on the top of the dishwater. Chunks of sodden red onion and a single olive is also swimming around in the swampy water. It has become sinister. She hates touching it. It affects her spine or something.
Her strategy is to keep the tap running over the remaining dishes that she showers the soap from them one by one.
The scummy water is disguise by the bubbles from the fairy liquid. She can't drain it out, because that would involve putting her hand in. This morning she received an envelope with a number that seems to determine her worth. 2.2. Not 2.1. She doesn't want to die – but she is not quite sure how much she wants to live either. She picks up a plastic ladle and fishes in the o
YOU ARE READING
Tales of Disturbance
Science FictionA young teenage girl, haunted by the memories of her father's execution, attempts to escape a cruel regime by night. A solitary woman, abandoned by her husband, inadvertently plays into the cruel hands of 'the state'. In another totalitarian regime...
