Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 16

Small Beer Press
www.lcrw.net

Copyright ©

First published in 2005, 2005

You and I in the Year 2012

We Lived in a House

village of wolves

Moon, Paper, Scissors

Dear Aunt Gwenda:

The Pursuit of Artemisia Guile

Reality Goes On Here More or Less

Three Urban Folk Tales

The Monster Wore Reeboks

The Red Phone

Scorpions

Little Apocalypse

The Grandson of Heinrich Schliemann

Scenes

Cat Whisker Wound

The Perfect Pair

Gears Grind Down

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet 16

Gavin J. Grant: Still.

Kelly Link: Outtern. Tap.

Jedediah Berry: Intern. Distilled.

Gwyneth Merner: Intern. Effervescent.

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
Iteration 16, July 2005. This zine is supposed to go out each June and November (but wasn't this also supposed to be an occasional outburst? What's the occasion?) from Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Ave., Northampton, MA 01060 [email protected] www.lcrw.net/lcrw $5 per single issue or $20/4. Misspellings, Common Misperceptions, & Contents all © the respective authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, requests for guidelines, &c all good things should be sent to the address above. No SASE: no reply. Color covers are a dream for now. Apologies for the lack of margin space. We keep expecting to increase the margins and page count. The economic bullet that would entail refuses to be bit. Please take your copy of this zine apart and paste on an extra inch of paper all round. This issue brought to you by reduced personal freedoms, a scandal proof monkey, and water, rising waters. As ever, thanks. Paradise Copies, 30 Craft Ave., Northampton, MA 01060 413-585-0414 d

Eric Gregory

Me, Myself, and I—

You'll notice it on CNN or MSNBC or one of those—I can't remember. It's not the main story, not even
a
main story, just a fun little tidbit on the scroll at the bottom. Go look. Did it catch your eye? The space rock the size of Norway? Noticed it immediately, didn't you? When worlds collide, and all that. We've got a tendency to stockpile the morbid.

What does it call to mind, the notion that four years from now everything you know could be so much dust and debris? I'll bet I can guess: Mike, from high school. Remember Mike? Sure you do. The kid with the curly red hair and all the weird shit he was into. Vampires and ghosts and ancient astronauts. Guy practically ran on the stuff.

You're thinking about what he told you, sitting in Subway with five or six others, you chomping on your pizza sub while airy conversations danced around your head. He leaned across the table, getting a little mayonnaise on his shirt, and he said, “You know, the world's going to end in 2012.” And you chuckled uneasily, asked him where the hell that came from, but he was persistent. “I mean it, man. 2012. Everyone predicted it. The Mayans, the code in the Bible, everyone.” You dismissed his prophesying with a sarcastic comment, something like, “The Mayans and the Bible are everyone?” But the idea appealed to your sense of doom, and it stuck with you.

Mike was right in every sense that mattered, sorry to say. Pisser, huh? Big pisser. I'm sitting in a cold apartment with only a bed, an outdated desktop, and that ratty old black and white TV you got from your mom (still works!), typing like mad and hoping I can make it to the laboratories. Don't even have any ramen noodles, because I'm afraid to go anywhere near a grocery store, or even a gas station. Talk about
riots
.

So a chill just ran down your spine, right? I hope so, I really do. I mean, I understand that my tone has to this point carried a certain degree of levity, but trust me: When the days get dark you scramble for whatever levity you can find. So I apologize if I come off as a smartass in hysterics. We just get that way, right?

I can tell you exactly what will happen if you laugh this away. I can give you the Cliff's Notes on what happens if you trash or ignore this. You will change the channel and watch a documentary on the three-toed sloth, for one thing. You will stare at the television and slowly decompose for an hour, and when Liz finally calls and invites you to lunch, as she inevitably does, you will refuse her, as you inevitably do. And why? Out of some bizarre loyalty to Jean? I hate to be the one to break it to you, man, but she's been sleeping with the mailman. Doing quite a bit more than sleeping, to tell the truth. You walk in on them around October 2012, and by then, of course, it is too late.

Is it laziness? Some idiot malaise that prevents you from doing things that would actually make you happy?

No ... I guess the truth is a little dirtier. Worship is a sallow, shallow business. You know that. Worship is blind dependence on something that may or may not be there at all. Dependence disguised as adoration, dependence as abortion. Faith, on the other hand, is trust in something more than yourself.

But you know that.

Pick up the phone when it rings, and leave the house. Leave it for good, if you can manage. Do not leave me to rot in this apartment alone. You don't want to carry any regrets when the world ends. I should know.

—You and I in the year 2012

(P.S. Watch the mailman. He's crafty.)

The letter is crammed into my mailbox, clad in an envelope addressed to, “Jeff-May 1, 2008.” In the upper left hand corner, in a tinnier, hastier scrawl: “Jeff-December 27, 2012.” I reread it twice and stuff the creased yellow paper into my pocket, closing the mailbox and waddling inside. The world feels sharper and stronger and sadder. Enervated with that certain electricity sparked by a breach in routine.

Jean lies sprawled on the couch perusing a
Reader's Digest.
“Any mail?” she asks, not bothering to look up.

I finger the letter. “No. There's a sale at the mall. Someone wants to stop the coffee place from coming in down the street."

"Ah.” She turns the page.

It isn't outright belief, exactly, that leads me to make a pilgrimage to CNN Headline News. Nor is it really curiosity. Mostly it's a sense of pessimism; an unfulfilling decade or so was not precisely unforeseen. If somehow a letter from my future self has managed to navigate the various channels and tributaries of time—and hey, who am I to call that crazy?—it fits that said future self is down and out in Porterville.

I walk into the kitchen, make myself a cup of tea (oolong), and flip on our runt of a black and white TV. It shudders and whirs for a moment, taking the machine equivalent of a deep breath, and the TV Guide Channel fades cheerfully into being.

TBS, for the curious, is playing
The Shawshank Redemption
(part of a Morgan Freeman marathon), and the Discovery Channel features an hour-long documentary on the three-toed sloth. I navigate through the flotsam and jetsam of basic cable until I reach CNN.

"—though Kennedy denies the allegations prosecutors formerly tied to the case contend—"

Ignoring the top story proves to be an arduous affair, requiring all my considerable cunning and guile. I scan the news scroll at the bottom of the screen for several minutes, my finger hovering over the mute button.

"—a public statement, but analysts remain doubtful as to—"

Most of the stories on the scroll are “public interest” factoids, employing puns or painful attempts at wordplay in order to justify their existence at all. A celebrity's anniversary, a senator who vomits all over a second grade classroom, trivial stuff.

And then:

"
We Will Rock You:
Australian Astronomer Discovers Asteroid the Size of Norway—Four Years Off."

I turn off the television, finger the letter once more, and rummage through the refrigerator. Failing to find anything that would ease the rapidly sinking feeling in my stomach, I settle into my chair at the kitchen table, turn the TV back on, and stare thoughtlessly into a rambling documentary on sloth.

The phone. I glance at it uneasily, Steve Irwin's lecture on the feeding habits of rattlesnakes momentarily forgotten. It rings again, and I have more than half a mind to let the little bitch complain.

"Get it,” Jean calls irritably. I don't have to see her to know that her eyes never leave her magazine. This does not seem offensive. This seems appropriate.
Reader's Digest
publishes riveting material.

Another ring. “Get it!” she cries, this time with an edge of temper. I really ought to get it. What the
hell
is wrong with me? Really.

I pick up the receiver midway through its fourth ring, and pray feverishly for the voice on the other end to be anyone but Liz. Brian, or someone from work. A telemarketer. The asshole lawn service that continuously spreads shit over our yard without our asking. Anyone. I don't care. It seems vital that the letter be wrong about
something
. I am in full panic mode, replete with heavy breathing, clenched stomach, and loose bladder.

My prayers receive the “DENIED” stamp, and the letter is three for three. Liz notices that I sound like one who has attempted to run a triathlon and failed in the final twenty meters.

"Wow, you been out jogging or something?” she asks. “You sound ready to drop dead."

"Yeah, um, I guess I am."

She laughs. We've known each other since prokaryotes ruled the Earth, and she has long since learned not to take me too seriously. I escorted her to more than one Sadie Hawkins (even if we only sat in the corner, sipped Cokes, and felt superior), and she eventually introduced me to Jean. Somehow we maintained contact through college—her doing, I never liked calling anyone—and as both of us moved back to Porterville, we have spoken fairly often even through adulthood. At least in comparison to everyone else I know.

"Well, hey, you want to go out and get some lunch or something?” she asks.

The letter's right about me as well. Four for four? Typically I would find an excuse, sound or otherwise, and boil a pack of ramen noodles. I am perfectly content to talk to Liz on the phone, probably need the human contact, but I always feel uneasy about doing things without Jean. It seems like a small betrayal. Something unsafe and uncertain.

I agree to eat with Liz not because the letter told me not to, but to prove it wrong. See? I can still go out and order a Big Mac. I'm still in charge. The logic is this: if I do something that you (you playing the mysterious postcard from a doomed place) say I didn't, I have proven you wrong. Meaning that hypothetically—and I'm sure quantum physicists will back me up—you could be wrong about other minor details. Including the everyone dying bit. Which would be enormously reassuring, really.

I am not prepared for an end, the end, my end, any end. I cannot accept that, and making a choice that the letter tells me I did not feels like an important rebellion. I'm not certain what I should feel toward it—gratitude, jealousy, horny?—but I want to spite it. Scream at it. I want to prove that it doesn't know everything, doesn't know
anything
.

So I agree to meet a pretty girl at Starbucks. Naturally.

I could do anything. Filch a muffin, thank Mr. Roboto, steal candy from a baby. Anything. I'm smoke, I'm a ghost. I do as I please in broad daylight and no one sees me, no one cares.

The flip side of this, of course, is that no one sees me, and no one cares.

Liz is late. I hate that about her; she's always lagging. I hate waiting alone. I sip my frappucino—multimillion-dollar megacorporation flavored, with whipped cream—and make a half-hearted attempt to tap the rhythm of “Hey Jude” with my foot.

I've never known the words to that song. Hey Jude, don't make it—hard? Bad? Silly? Stupid?

Liz sits down across from me with a smile that is a greeting, mea culpa, and embrace. I reply with a smile that is reproach. She apologizes verbally and sincerely, however—she was detained by a sidewalk, a fat man, and an umbrella—and my resolve to be righteously irritated dies with a whimper.

"How've you been?” she asks, her eyes darting from my own to the menu and back again. “It's been awhile. Man. What? Two or three months?"

"Yeah.” I stir my frappucino unnecessarily. “I've been okay, I guess. You know. The usual."

I wonder if anyone has noticed that I am no longer alone. I wonder if they snickered at or pitied the poor soul hunched solitary over his frappucino, and now find themselves feeling silly or stupid or shamed.

Of course not. I'm silence. Smoke, a ghost.

I remember that I've forgotten to be polite. “And you? How've you been?"