Super-late story in under an hour

This is really late, for which I apologize, and it's not that great, for which I also apologize! But at least it was a little fun to write? At any rate, there are no Star Trek/Star Wars references in this one, sadly, but there are lesbians, which is more awesome.

The Only Thing I Could Never Lie About

The bar was smoky and loud, which Janet hated. Peter was somewhere else, listening silently and seriously to someone's explanation of a new TV pilot that he wanted Peter to watch with him. She was bored, but she didn't want to join in Peter's conversation because it seemed unlikely that it would make her any less so. Even Peter couldn't do much with such material. Instead, she turned to the girls sitting next to her, who were talking about the roller derby last night.

“I elbowed the chick in the face.”

Janet snorted into her drink and decided that she would make an effort to work herself into this conversation.

“What'd you do that for?” asked the other girl, an old roommate of Janet's named Mary.

“She had it coming.”

“Why?” asked Janet.

The girl turned to Janet and seemed to size her up. “When the ref's back was turned,” she started to explain in a not altogether unfriendly way, “this chick and her two flunkies ganged up on me. Of course, when I retaliated, the ref had seen it.”

“Of course,” said Janet with real sympathy even as she wanted to laugh. “I wish I could have gone.”

The girl nodded. “It's the little ones like you that you really got to watch out for. I think you'd be good if you joined us.”

Now Janet did laugh. “Oh no, not as a player. My boyfriend Peter usually goes there. His cousin sells shirts there and he usually goes just for fun.”

“Or the T and A,” offered the girl.

“Excuse me?” asked Janet, and the girl had such a good-natured, pitying look on her face that now Janet wasn't laughing.

Mary turned to the girl and muttered, “Drop it, Lee.”

Lee didn't drop it, though. She leaned over and put her face close to Janet's, who was too taken aback to withdraw. She smelled like cigarettes and a strange, musky kind of booze, and strangely enough Janet wasn't perturbed by it, even as Lee almost whispered, “Listen. I know you. I see you around here. Mary knows you. She says you're sweet. I think you're sweet. I think you're stupid, too.”

Janet's eyes widened. “Excuse me?” was all she could think to say, and she felt stupid as she said it.

“That boyfriend of yours. You're always together when I see you, and when you're not you do nothing but talk about him. Why is that?”

Her face was so close that Janet suddenly felt that there was no one else in the bar but the two of them. She's drunk enough that Lee's broad face taking up her vision is comforting rather than intimidating. “Why do you think? Good lord, I don't even know you--”

“But I know you. I know you because I've seen you all the time, and I'm like everyone else. I can see what you can't see.”

Janet snorted. “Oh, really? And what the hell is that?”

Lee shook her head. “You're blind. Everyone else can see it, and everyone else talks about it behind you're back because they're afraid for your feelings. Janet, your boyfriend wasn't anywhere near the roller derby last night. He got out of there early with Pike City's pivot--”

“Pivot?”

“It's a roller derby term. Forget it. Her name's Lisa. Everyone knows. I think even you know and you just keep letting him--”

“Stop it,” said Janet, finally drawing away. She looked around and realized that no one else in the bar seemed to have noticed their little confrontation. Mary was talking to someone on her other side and Peter was still listening stoically to the recounting of the TV pilot. “Peter,” she called to him, raising her voice to be heard over the din of the bar, “let's go.” By the time she had caught his attention and they had gathered all their things, Lee was telling Mary more about the chick she had elbowed in the face and did not look up as Janet and Peter left.

~

As they entered the dim cave that was her apartment's entryway, Janet stopped and turned around to Peter, who was standing in the doorway. “Have I ever told you how much you annoy me?”

“No.” He slipped out of his coat and yawned.

“Well, let me start now. I – wait. You're lying. I tell you how much you annoy me all the time. That's one of the things that annoys me about you; you lie. All the time.”

“I do not.”

“You do! You just did! You lie continuously and succinctly. I wish you would stop.”

“Sorry.” He leaned against the doorway and grinned at her in the way that usually made her laugh. This time, she scowled.

“Is that a lie too?”

“No. I really am sorry I lie so much. Sometimes. Sometimes, though, lies are almost therapeutic. After all, is a dream a lie that doesn't come true, or is it something worse?”

“That's kind of poetic.”

“Thank you.”

“One of your own?”

“Yes.”

“No, it's not. You're lying again. It's from Springsteen.” The song was called “The River,” and it was about a failed relationship and unplanned pregnancy. She knew it by heart because she and Peter used to spend Sundays in bed together listening to old albums on the huge converted stereo he had dragged up to her apartment one afternoon.

“Oh. Well, I really did think it was one of my own. Honest.”

“Uh-huh.”

“An unintentional lie doesn't count as a lie, not really. It's an untruth.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Please stop saying 'Uh-huh.' It annoys me, and I really am not lying this time.”

“Uh-h—oh. I believe you. I guess.”

“I know you'd believe me. It's why I love you.”

“Oh, shut up.” Suddenly she was very tired and just wanted to get this over with. She had decided what to do on the walk home from the bar, when Lee's smelly face and a million innocent explanations had run through her mind.

“For truth. I'm serious. I love you so much. It's the one thing I could never lie about.”

“But why?”

“Why do I love you?”

“No, why do you lie so much? Something about dreams, you said?”

“Dreams are what we call lies we tell to ourselves.”

“And do we believe in them?”

“I certainly do. They're the reason I'm still here talking to you.”

She put her hands over her face and wondered how she was going to be able to do this while looking at him. His face was that horrible mixture of seriousness and hilarity, and she could not stand it. “Are you saying that the only reason that you haven't offed yourself is because of lies that you've told yourself?”

“Well, when you put it like that--”

“You're lying again.”

“I'm not. I can't lie to you, I've told you that. No, the reason I'm still here, alive and talking to you, isn't just because of lies I've told myself, it's--”

“What kind of lies?”

“You've interrupted me. That annoys me, as long as we're being frank in this conversation and detailing each other's faults.” He always got annoyingly picayune and wordy when he was drunk.

She removed her hands from her face and stared him down, calmly and directly into his surprised face. “I don't care. I want to know what you've lied about, to whom, and for how long. You can tell me the lies you've told yourself, but first I want to hear all the lies you've told me. I especially want to hear the lies about where you were last night.”

“I was at the roller derby last night.”

“Oh, honey. Don't lie to me.”

“I was at the roller derby.”

“Oh, honey. You were with Lisa last night.”

“I was at--”

“Save it. The next lie I want to hear from you is the lie I'll hear over the phone nights from now when you call me and try to tell me you're sorry. When you try to tell me that it's only because of lies that you've kept yourself living so long. I don't need cheaters, and I don't need any of your melodramatic suicide crap.”

“Janet, I love you. That's the reason I'm alive, because of lies and because I love you.” But even he seemed to realize the uselessness of his plea, because he was grabbing his shoes and coat.

“Like I said: save it. Save it for Lisa, if you like. She's probably never heard it before.”

“That's it? You're kicking me out?”

“That's it exactly. Good-bye, Peter.”

~

The next Friday Janet went to the roller derby by herself. She saw Peter's cousin and waved at him when he nodded in her direction, but did not go near him even to buy one of his shirts. Instead she went down to the track after it was over and caught a hold of Lee's arm.

“Hey,” she said, deciding to jump right into it.

Lee, in accordance, it seemed, with her strange policies on personal space, didn't seem abashed in the slightest. “Hey!” she said, as if they had just seen each other on the street and were about to go for coffee.

Janet considered. “Do you want to go somewhere for coffee?” she asked, panicking.

Lee looked like she wanted to laugh. “I probably should change first.”

So she did. Janet followed her into the locker room and it was a bit weird because Janet couldn't help it and started pouring her heart out to Lee while Lee was in various states of undress. By the end almost everyone else had filtered out of the locker room and Janet was nearly sobbing so Lee hugged her, and that was kind of weird and then it kind of wasn't. They pulled apart and looked at each other for a second before walking out of the locker room.

There was something to be said, Janet thought as Lee grabbed her hand, for honesty in extreme situations.

children's story

I watched "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" with my best friend the other night, which is, quite literally, the greatest movie of all time. Additionally, it gave me the idea for this assignment: a magical Vulcan man who who teaches children about how awesome whales are. And he travels around the countryside with, like, an educational exhibit and teaches a little girl valuable life lessons and also a lot about whales. Because whales are, quite literally, the greatest sea mammal. (Yeah, SCREW dolphins. And porpoises can eat me too.)

ANYWAY! That was the idea, but then it occurred to me that it's kind of hard to take whales around the countryside in a traveling educational exhibit/circus sideshow kind of thing, so I changed it and after reading a couple of Wikipedia articles about the order Lepidoptera, here we are.

The Butterfly Man

The butterfly exhibit came to my mother's town during the last month of summer in 1965, when she was nine years old. The butterfly man, as he was invariably known, set up shop in the now disused building that was, in better days, her father's furniture store. My mother watched in fascination as the strange man transformed her father's old work and show rooms into well-lit leafy paradises for the dozen of species of butterfly he was keep stored in small wire cages in his truck. First he took out the doors and installed thick plastic curtains instead. Then he installed vents over the door frames that blew down air and kept most of the butterflies from flying outside, and heaters that mimicked most of the butterflies' warm natural climate. Then he strung bright yellow spotlights in the corner so they would illuminate the high ceilings and brought in a great many tropical plants with wide green, rubbery leaves. All of this he undertook alone. He was a solitary man who ran the entire operation by himself, except he let my mother sit at the door and sell tickets for a quarter each. He almost never smiled and while many of the neighborhood children laughed at him behind his back, secretly they were intimidated by him.

The day the butterfly man freed all the insects from the prison he'd built them was the most glorious thing my mother had ever seen, even greater than the huge stained glass windows at the big Catholic church in New Prague. There were reddish golden monarchs, bright blue iridescent Morpho hecubas, brown owl butterflies that were as big as my mother's hand, and swarms of others and they all fluttered about the room and eventually landed on the walls, the floors, the plants, and the banana peels my mother had so carefully set out earlier under the chairs. Parents sent their children to learn from the butterfly man, who was a well-known professor of natural history at the University and occasionally took groups of the younger children to the creek with butterfly nets in order to teach them taxonomy and entomology. The rest of the time he sat in the desk in the corner of the butterfly with a crossword puzzle, occasionally chastising someone for running or for touching the butterflies' wings.

When my mother wasn't selling tickets, she would sit next to the large plants and let the butterflies land on her. She would carefully pick them up by putting her finger in front of their two front legs, and then gently she would push them so they sat on her fingers and looked like gaudy, beautiful rings. She would sit there and watch the other children running and playing and trying to catch butterflies. Once a small child was being chased by his younger sister and in his haste stepped right on a bright blue Morpho hecuba resting on the floor. The children had thoughtlessly run away, but my mother had rushed to the scene of the crime. The butterfly was flattened on the floor. One of its beautiful blue wings was almost torn off. It reminded her of the time when she had broken one of my grandma's china plates, only now the regret was tinged with great sadness. She looked up and saw the butterfly man staring down at her. He was very tall and thin like a rail. His dark eyes and angular face were impassive. He showed her where the dustbin and brush were and asked her to clean it up. She did but felt oddly chastised, even though it had not been her who had killed the butterfly.

Juxtaposition

Title is from here, if you were curious.

I'll love you more than you'll ever know

The snow kept coming down too hard that night. Cam didn't like the slippery, oily feel of the road beneath the wheels as he guided them with his hands. Johnny was in the backseat on his cell phone.

"Michelle," he said, "you know I love you. I love you more than you'll ever know." But he continued shouting at her, at the phone, at Cam, though Cam could not pay attention to him. A song came on the radio, a metal song unintelligible to Cam except as a percussive beat directly on his eardrum. The snow rushed past the windshield. It reminded him of when he was a child, when he and his sister would sit in the backseat and pretend that their old minivan was the Millennium Falcon and the snowflakes blowing past in the black night were stars in the cosmos, whooshing by. Cam took a deep breath through his nose, but instead of smelling that clean childhood scent of cold snow and the metallic smell of the zipper of his winter jacket, he smelled the alcohol on his breath and the vomit rising in the back of his throat. He closed his eyes and swallowed. When he opened them again, the twin beacons of the truck in the oncoming lane of traffic blinded him. He swerved and the world turned itself upside down several times. When it had stopped and all was still except for Johnny's wheezing sobs from the backseat, Cam stared at the bottle of Karkov vodka that had rolled into his line of sight and listened to the velvety strings of bass that rang throughout the car as the blood rushed to his head.

9/11/09