Those Who Spoon

Chapter Eight

Samantha Limestone’s heels clicked against the tiles in her apartment, a tapping that was in tune with the ticks of the grandfather clock in the hallway. Fiddling with the car keys in her one hand and humming one of her favorite tunes absentmindedly under her breath as she made her way over to the door, she tried to smooth down her hair – which was being uncommonly rebellious today – with her other. The black skirt she was wearing was uncomfortably tight around her waist (the saleswoman had called it “slimming”), and Samantha found herself stretching uneasily to try and fit into it properly. In the process of doing so, her blouse stretched and billowed over the front of her outfit once again – a stubborn habit the article of clothing seemed to insist on every time she wore it, just like it somehow always seemed to crease (Samantha had lost count of the times she had taken it to the drycleaner to get it ironed). It wasn’t that she had not been told to get a new shirt (Ebenezer Soon, that bastard, said it whenever she wore it); Samantha had thought of that simple option herself. The problem was that this blouse of hers brought her good luck – on every occasion that she had been wearing it, her day had gone as she had planned or better. You could not very well explain to your employer that you went to a press conference in a shabby-looking blouse because you superstitiously thought it brought you good fortune, however, and so she had bought a blazer and scarf to cover up the dreaded thing (in a way, she supposed it counted as cheating, but it worked and that was what mattered to her).

Samantha tucked the blouse back into her pencil skirt with the patience of a mother. Throwing a last glance over her shoulder to see if she had left anything (her bra, her case, tissues, post-it notes, a pen), her hand reached out and folded around the crystal knob of her door. As tempting as it was to stay home, talk to her cat Chloe and watch Love Actually, she needed money to keep the chimney going, so to speak (never mind that her house was not in possession of a chimney). Therefore she let out a sigh and opened up the portal to the dreaded outside world, wincing as the sharp, cold wind bit her face at once. Samantha skipped outside and, clutching the briefcase, shuddered, drawing the shawl more tightly around her neck. It offered little protection against the cold. Beauty was pain – something her aching heels knew only too well.

Once inside her car, shifting in her seat to try and warm it up, Samantha checked her make-up a last time and ignited the engine. The vehicle silently came to life – electric cars had more pros to them than just boosting her media image – and she turned the heater higher up, teeth clattering. Damn the fall. As beautiful as the warm potpourri of leafs were and charming as this season could be with its fairytale-like peace, the damp coldness it brought was downright unbearable to those who preferred the summer; it seemed to sink right into the core of one’s bones and eat away at the marrow.

When she turned the radio on, it was tuned to some evangelical station. Samantha quickly changed the channel. Although raised by strict catholic parents, she herself preferred to take religion with a grain of salt. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to believe in a God who thought homosexuals should not be allowed to marry or thought that female adulterers should be stoned. Granted, that was what only what the Bible said – which was why she told herself that the real God would not want things like that; that the real God had given the world a son who would have accepted all with his great love, whether they were straight, gay, black or white. In the end, they were all made of the same stuff after all. With a soft chuckle, Samantha realized that the very stuff that made them all equal – aka, genetics – had also provided science with a chance to proof they came from monkeys; a theory her parents still refused to believe and usually caused a few uproars when she brought it up every year at Thanksgiving in a fruitless attempt to convince them of its truth. Her grandmother would always snap that it was God’s way of testing humanity’s faith in him (if it was, then the majority of the Earth’s population was pretty screwed), while her father merely looked sour and shook his head in disapproval (honestly, what did they expect? Thanksgiving was every family’s special recipe for disaster – old arguments surfaced, disagreements worsened and irritation burned so high it could roast a turkey).