Bird

I don't encounter a lot of wildlife at work. Once a friendly puppy bounded into my office, but it was promptly removed. Another time I caught a giant venomous spider in a plastic cup - perhaps a suitcase stowaway originating from the American west - and set it free in our parking lot. Last night was one of those rare brushes with the animal kingdom. The lull in incoming phone calls was interrupted by a bird thumping against our picture window.

My co-worker Heather and I leaned close to the glass to get a good look, hoping it was not dead. The bird tumbled back onto the concrete, its wings flung awkwardly to the side and the wind knocked out of its lungs. Soon it began twitching, its chest heaving violently.

"That's it. The bird's fizzling out," I said sadly.

Our picture window is tinted like a pair of FBI sunglasses. During the day, you can't see in from outside unless you are pressing your nose to the glass. Heather speculated that the bird might have been somehow impaired before the impact. Such a collision seemed otherwise unlikely.

"Maybe it was having a stroke as it was flying by the window," she suggested.

"Or a brain aneurysm," I offered. "It probably has all sorts of neurological damage now."

I kept trying to envision the bird straightening out and flying away like it was nothing. In reality, the quick little pulses of the bird's chest did not make the situation look more hopeful. Now its tail was pointing upwards, it seemed to be curling into a ball. It's gauzy bird-soul was rising to the deck of the ship, trying to balloon its way to the avian heavens.

"I think it's having a seizure," I said. "What can we do? Should I give it CPR? What if it has a family?"

I imagined how mouth-to-beak resuscitation might work and what sort of diseases I might get from performing it on an accident victim. I considered going on break and bringing it breadcrumbs from the kitchen. Maybe the resulting sugar rush would give it the energy it needed to resume flight. I felt so helpless just watching and not taking action.

I left the office for a few minutes to use the copy machine. When I returned, the had bird flipped upright, looking tired, slouched, and hung-over. My hopes were skyrocketing.

"I wish it would just fly away like nothing happened," Heather said. We were still hovering at the window with our eyes on the concrete ledge below. I kept picturing the bird fluttering into a nearby tree. Suddenly, the bird straightened its posture, took a few hops in place, and flew into the bushes.

Perusing

All I want to do is leave the country. I have been daydreaming about it often since the last time I left the country. On a weekly basis, I torment all of those around me with stories of Romani kids and cheese-toting anarchists in the Czech Republic. Then I think about having another adventure. This all-consuming wanderlust often manifests itself in the form of looking at pictures of rainbow buildings in Argentina or teaching myself useful Polish phrases or reading an entire website about Bulgarian cuisine while at work. My workplace environment only enables me by making it extremely easy for me to spend an entire shift reading about Bulgarian cuisine.

Finally, some real progress. Dave and I are going to Peru in November. I will have someplace useful to channel this energy. Now here is a photo montage of pictures from Google Images!

Ruins!

Alpacas!

Chocolate!

Ceviche!

Wild camelids!

Peru is one country that Dave and I both can agree on. I’ve wanted to visit Machu Picchu since I was a wee beastie. I saw Matt Lauer traveling there on the morning news while eating my Fruity Pebbles and I thought, “Yes. I shall go there.” Last year I met some kids from Lima and got a favorable impression of that city as well. Did you know it is the Gastronomy Capital of the Americas? I’m not sure who has the privilege of awarding such titles, but I intend to find out if it is well-deserved. Peru is a great exporter of cocoa beans, so I can’t help but imagine chocolate gushing from the alleys like floodwater. And if there is good chocolate then I could easily live off of that for ten days (or until I get a chocolate hangover).

But chocolate addictions aside, I may need to start eating fish again to be able to survive in Lima. My last few experiences with fish have involved unparalleled bellyaches. Peru is famous for ceviche, which I tried with Dave several years ago. Instead of cooking the fish, it is prepared with lemon juice and spices. The lemon juice is supposed to kill the bacteria and parasites. We went to a restaurant near our college and ordered some sort of pink-fish-ceviche. It was delicious, but we both felt very weird during the car ride home. My whole body felt loopy. I didn’t know it at the time, but the feelings of loopy-ness were just hallucinations brought on by food poisoning.

I told a friend from Lima about my ceviche experience. “You shouldn't be eating that outside of Peru,” she gently chided.

One night after I came home from work, Dave and I stitched together the skeleton of the whole adventure in one big marathon. Dave found some not-so-expensive round trip plain tickets; I arranged our accommodations. We tried to buy our tickets to Machu Picchu ahead of time. Apparently, it is not so difficult to buy the tickets in Cusco the night before or the morning of the trip.

Huayna Picchu, the misty and impressive mountain peak that one sees in all pictures of the ruins, is a little harder to tackle spontaneously. You need to buy the tickets in a package with Machu Picchu. Only 400 people are allowed to climb it a day and you have to go through Peru’s government website to book it ahead of time. Peru’s website is notoriously screwy, however, so we had no luck in procuring any tickets ahead of time. Officially, it only takes Visa cards. In reality it does not even take Visa cards.

We also missed out on buying our lunch ahead of time from the only buffet-style restaurant at the peak of this precious ancient treasure. I suppose we will just bring sandwiches.

I began to consider what sort of footwear one would wear for the climb. Normally I would wear my barefoot shoes for hiking, but I wondered if something more heavy-duty would be necessary. Google provided us with heaps of wisdom. Some people climbed it in sneakers, others in Teva sandals. One person recommended that we wear two pairs of socks. He said that a friend recommended that he wear two pairs of socks and, though he can no longer remember the excellent reason, he now wears two pairs of socks every day.

While we have the skeleton of the trip pieced together, there are still other important things that need to be addressed. I need to bring my level of Spanish to at least conversational-caveman level in the next two months. I can hardly remember anything from my Rosetta Stone lessons from last year, but I really hope to see some women eating rice in Peru so I can make intelligent remarks. And at least one alpaca, which I will ardently embrace.

The Millionaire's Bestiary

My short story "The Millionaire's Bestiary" appeared in Defenestration Magazine last week, so I drew this condor. Click the sensitive condor below to read the story. Go on. He's handsome, right? I am so proud of this crayon condor. It is the best condor I have ever drawn. Also read the other stories in this issue, because they are about Ronald Reagan and groovy love-powered vehicles.

Night in the Parking Lot

I didn't intend to spend most of the night in the parking lot of my place of employment, but that is exactly what happened. I got out of work at midnight and trudged into the shadowy parking lot with all the vivacity of a somnambulist. I unlocked my car. I put my car keys into my purse. I opened one of the rear doors, threw all of my bags into the plushy back seat, and closed the door. As soon as I opened the door to the driver's seat I realized my grave error: My car keys were in the back. I closed the door.

Then the car locked automatically. It takes all of ten seconds for Nina the Car to shut down like a tank. Because of this, no one will ever steal her, not even me. Her security system is so sensitive it can be set off by a firefly. It's like owning a really vicious Rottweiler. Every time someone takes a step too close, she starts snarling her head off, even when you're the one holding the end of her chain.

I shook my fists at the sky. I haven't had the car for two months and I've already had the check engine light turn on, a tire deflate, and the battery run dead. I seem to be going through the whole checklist of things that can go wrong with a car.

Not knowing what else to do, I went back into the building. I saw a security guard in his office and humbly asked what I should do. He directed me to the engineering department. The engineer and I walked out to the car, where he attempted to pull the doors open with his bare hands. He seemed strangely surprised that his fingers couldn't pry open a car door. Then he advised me to call the local police.

The engineer and I waited for the police outside under a streetlight in the otherwise lifeless employee parking lot. A coworker pulled up in a truck.

"Did you lock your keys in your car?"

I nodded.

"What you need to do is get a screwdriver and then wrap it in a piece of cloth and dig it into the top of your car door. Then you pry open a space to fit in a coat hanger."

I suspected that this coworker might be an expert car thief.

"You've been down this road before," I said.

As he drove away, I tried to imagine myself prying open a car door with a screwdriver. I was not the Herculean strong-man for the job, but the man swerving away in the truck might have been. The engineer was offering to fetch me a screwdriver when the police arrived. He scribbled down my licence plate number and information and gave me something to sign.

"I don't know if I'll be able to open the car," the officer said, producing a black duffle bag full of thick, rubber-coated wires. "We used to carry slim jims. Now the department says we can't do that anymore. The slim jim will open up most cars, but sometimes it will break the lock system. Then the people who own the cars can't sue because they signed a waiver."

Then I realized that the thing I had hastily signed was a waiver.

"But I can open up a car with a slim jim in ten seconds flat," he boasted. "I've been doing it for fifteen years. It's these new guys who don't have the proper training who break cars."

He proceeded to mutter about department funding as he wedged one of his tools into the corner of the car door. He was still unable to fit one of the wires into the door, so he inserted a thing that sort of looked like a whoopee cushion and pumped air into it as though he was taking the car's blood pressure. The air wedged the door open a little bit more and the wire fit into the space with ease. At the end of the wire was a little nub of rubber that was supposed to catch on the lock of the door and unlock it.

For the next ten minutes, I watched the officer fish wires of varying lengths into my car to catch the lock. This tense display of skill was like watching someone play the crane game in an arcade and dropping the teddy bear over and over again. The rubber nub would nick the lock, slip, and thud against the window like a bird. The officer took out the wire, bent it at another angle, and tried again. Finally, the lock bobbed up and the car alarm went off. I flung open the door and dug my keys out of my purse, resolving to make a copy of my car key and wear it around my neck for the rest of my life.

"Yeah, if I had the slim jim it would have taken me ten seconds, not ten minutes," the officer muttered. "But the department thinks this is better. What do I know?"

I thanked the officer and he drove away with his duffle bag of magical wires. I also thanked the engineer, who had been supervising the unlocking process. I waved goodbye and he walked away, waving. I called Dave to let him know why I was coming home late.

"Why didn't you just call me? I could have just brought you your spare key," he said.

When I hung up the phone, the engineer was still there, waving. So I waved again. I pulled around the parking lot. He was still there, slightly little closer to the building now, waving.

Hello, Car Insurance!

I got the license, I got the car, but I needed to get car insurance before I could drive off into the sunset. I was forced to descend into a dark underworld of labyrinthine bureaucracies, to endure the relentless gnawing of customer service agents paid on commission.

I. Please leave a message.

In the beginning, I called a local insurance agent recommended to me by a Real Adult. The first time I called, I got the secretary. The secretary, sounding bored and crabby, told me the agent was in a meeting with an important client and that she would have to take down my information. The meeting must have lasted the whole day because I never got a call back. Later, I tried to call again and got her voicemail.

The next day I called again, got the same yawning secretary and left the same futile message. After the weekend passed, I knew that I needed to create contingency plan in case this woman turned out not to exist. I collected quotes from other insurance companies and called back armed with information, this time finally hearing the voice of the agent I was trying to contact all along. She took down my information and said she would call me back later that day with a quote.

She never called me back that afternoon. At work that evening, I saw I had a voicemail. It was from the agent, saying that the car identification number the secretary took down had too many digits, but she had a quote ready for me. I called the next day and got the voicemail. When I finally got in touch with her, the quote she gave me was twice as high as the highest quote I had gotten so far. I wrote her a nice email thanking her for her time, saying that I had taken another offer.

“It’s okay, we’ll get you onto our policy in six months. Give me a call then,” she wrote back.

II. BEST FRIEND.

The sites that calculate car insurance quotes are designed to be user friendly, but they ask a lot of confusing and seemingly unnecessary questions.

What is your social security number?

When was the date of your last period?

List three things you've never told anyone.

Besides that, I didn't know if I had anti-lock brakes. I didn't know if my car was a CE or a LE or a VE or a PE. The first site I went to on my quest for insurance quotes left me wondering, “Am I doing any of this right?” I picked up my cell phone and talked to an “Insurance Expert.”

Katie gladly answered all of my questions and then asked me for my credit card number so we could go through with the purchase. This was all moving too fast for me. I didn't know what to say. Did she really think I was going to buy insurance on impulse?

“Uh, I really want to discuss this with my boyfriend first. It’s a big decision and I’d really like to call you back about it,” I said with some stuttering.

“Sure! Hey! Why don’t I call your boyfriend and we can talk him into this together? Don’t worry! I do this all the time with couples who have questions about our policies. Then I can answer any questions the two of you have. I’m sure that we can convince him that this is the best option for you.”

“No. That’s okay. I’d rather call back.”

“Okay, here’s what I’m going to do for you…”

I could not get her off the phone. I couldn't bring myself to say that I wanted to compare insurance companies without her breathing down my neck from a calling center in Omaha. Eventually she ended up asking me a lot of questions about my life, trying to develop an amiable relationship with me. Are you a student? You were a creative writing major! That is so cool! Are you going to write a book? I’m totally going to buy your book when it comes out. What kind of work are you doing now?

“I’m a telephone operator. I basically do the same job as you, but in a hotel rather than an insurance company.”

That’s a comparison no Insurance Expert wants to hear.

In the end, I got her to say goodbye. I told her that I had to follow up with an insurance company my parents suggested before making a decision. I was worried she would want to start a party line with me, her, and anyone I would ever consult for advice, but fortunately that didn't come up.

III. You seem like a smart girl.

In the end, I settled on the insurance company that gave me the best rate. Naturally. What else was I supposed to do? How else does one choose between a series of comparably sketchy options? I called the winning insurance company and set up a policy with yet another Insurance Expert named James. I felt like James was sitting at his switchboard phone snickering at some fantastic joke that I wasn't part of, playfully elbowing the ribs of his best friend who crouched beside his desk, trying not to burst out laughing. James was a bad actor and he was giving the performance of a lifetime.

“Wow! Look at this rate! You must have the best rate in the whole state of New York! I want to live where you live and get an excellent rate like this. I mean, you’re a new driver, you’re only twenty-three years old, and you’re getting this great rate! And the rate that I’m going to give you is only thirty dollars more than the rate you got online! Wow! You must be so happy with this rate.”

I found myself laughing out loud at him. I felt like I was walking into a scam, but I guess that’s how one always feels when purchasing insurance.

“Listen Brittany, you seem like a smart girl. I mean, you’re buying your insurance from us. So just bear with me while I read you these terms and conditions…”

Finally. I got my insurance, I registered my vehicle, and now Nina the Car is in my clumsy hands forever. Then the check engine light turned on, but that is another story for another day.

Hello, Car!

Meet Nina, my Toyota Corolla. After years of practicing on cars forged for the likes of giants (i.e., a Ford F150), it is relieving to settle down with a car that is proportional to my frame. She was made when I was ten years old and has a duct taped mirror, but she will probably go on living forever. This is exactly the quality I like best in a car: immortality.

But I didn't always have a car, or even a license for that matter. Heavens, no! Nina was a hard-won conquest, the result of six years of carrying and renewing a learner’s permit, three repetitions of the five-hour licensing course, weeks of professional lessons, one successful road test, and several months of lurking on Craigslist.

The first ill-fated road test was eight months ago. In a fraught moment of circumstantial dyslexia within the first five seconds of driving, I transposed left and right and got into the left lane, which was not the right lane. Then I panicked and swerved from the wrong lane to the right lane but did not use my directional. Needless to say, the game was over and I was left in the dust with a lengthy list of errors. I did not even get to the parallel parking performance I had practiced for weeks. It was a catastrophic blow.

Crushed under the proverbial anvil of shame, I immediately contacted a professional. I needed a professional. For the next several weeks I was under the guidance of a kind, old black man with a salt-and-pepper afro and a flaky leather jacket. Propped upon a silken pillow embellished with the image of a peacock, I steered an antiquated transportation vessel to the tune of my ever-serene instructor’s encouragement as his toe hovered above the second break.

With the excellent teaching of my sensei, my driving act was cleaned up and I steered with the grace of a high seas pirate. I passed the test and finally got upgraded from permit to license.

As I endured the continued stresses of public transportation, it was clear to me that I needed to find a car. To avoid fees and ghastly insurance premiums, I was set on purchasing a used vehicle from an independent party. Unfortunately, selling cars brings out the worst in humanity. The Craigslist cars were over-priced and ancient. People were hawking cars from the early 90s for thousands over their value with the most atrocious grammar, usually accompanied by such phrases as “the check engine light is on.”

Every day I sent Dave a “Car of the Day” email with one or two cars that seemed passable. The response emails would say, “170,000 miles is too much” or “5-speed means it’s manual, Brittany.” And every time I opened an ad, I would think, “Wow, it has five speeds! Just like my bicycle! Surely I only need one speed.”

One thousand Craigslist ads later, Dave and I went to see a Subaru. A grandfatherly older man was selling it because he had already replaced it with a shiny new model. Dave and his knowledgeable friend poured over the details of the whatsits under the hood as I attempted to adjust the seat to fit a child-sized woman. They only found one flaw – oil leaking from something under the hood. Thus, an important car part would have to be replaced within the next month, but they didn't think it the cost of the repair would offset the tremendous value of the car itself.

Only after offering to buy the car did we find out from Dave’s mechanic friend that it was a $1500 repair, several times more than the price they expected and more than half the cost of the car. I was ready to throw in the towel and go to a dealership. I had heard tales of dishonest used car salesmen, but could they be any more disreputable than the sort of swindlers who sell cars on Craigslist?

In spite of all this, I made another call and I spoke with another seller. I was put off initially because I was trying to ask him questions and he appeared to be having a conversation with someone else. Speaking with him was frustrating. Besides the fact that he was not listening to me, I detected a strong Spanish accent that was difficult for me to decipher.

Dave and I went to see the car. On the way there, I had another exasperating conversation with the seller, who offered to show me the car at a different address but didn't understand me when I declined.

“It’s just a misunderstanding,” I assured Dave. “I’m having trouble with his Spanish accent.”

We arrived on the crowded one-way street where our rendezvous was to take place. Dave’s dad was there to help us judge the car and haggle, if necessary. When I called the man to let him know we were outside, I couldn't understand him at all. I passed the phone to Dave in frustration. After a couple of minutes of difficult conversation, Dave finally asked, “Do you speak Arabic?” He asked the question in Arabic. Then he passed the phone to his dad, who speaks fluent Arabic.

“Spanish accent, Brittany? Really?” Dave asked.

“He’s Arab?” I asked, dumbstruck.

“Probably Egyptian,” Dave said.

Not only was he Arab, he was a sort of family friend. He drove up in the Corolla, garish with Christian artifacts and strung with rosaries. There was a large bag of bagels in the back seat.

“Do the bagels come with the car?” I wondered aloud. We all know where my priorities lie.

There was a fringy throw pillow with a butt-shaped indenture in the driver’s seat.

“My wife, she is very small,” the man said.

“So am I!” I cried.

Dave took the car for a test drive up and down the one-way streets and back to where we began. The Egyptian man sat in the back seat and together they bewildered me with mostly-Arabic conversation about their families. I noticed the duct-taped mirror to my right but decided as long as it wasn’t a $1500 fix I would happily take it. Dave’s dad proceeded to try to talk the Egyptian man down in Arabic. The man took out his phone.

“I have a call from an 815 number. What area code is that? And 917 – that’s somewhere in Queens, right? So many people are calling to buy this car,” the man said with downcast eyes.

We talked him down a few hundred dollars and perhaps still paid a bit more than it was worth. I didn’t mind. Throw in the bag of bagels and you've got yourself a deal, I thought to myself.

Now Nina is sitting in the driveway, un-drivable due to her lack of plates and my lack of car insurance. But this is another story for another day.

Let's Read Short Stories

It’s National Short Story Month. It’s also National Poetry Month, although it seems rather unfair that the two writing forms that have to compete for a single month. One of my goals is to read 26 short story collections and anthologies by the end of 2013. I’m reading a lot of women writers particularly, because they don’t get enough love. Not even from me, a woman. So far I’m on the tenth book. I’m a slow reader, easily distracted by online literary journals and articles about the fiber content of ground flax.

I told a friend at work, an avid reader of romance novels, that I was reading short story collections for a while and she was surprised.

“I didn't know authors wrote books of short stories,” she said.

Quite understandable. Until rather recently, they were considered unmarketable. I suppose the last time she saw a book of short stories, it was a fifth grade English textbook – a time in life that no one likes to look back on. Or maybe it was a collection of fairy tales or Greek myths. I didn't know I liked short stories until I read Poe and Kafka in high school, but I always loved fairy tales and myths of all sorts.

Some very good reasons to read short stories: You can read a short story on a fifteen minute bus ride. You can read a few short stories on a forty minute train ride. You can read a short story on your cell phone now. You can squeeze one in at the end of your lunch break. And if your job happens to be waiting for a phone to ring, you can read stories in between calls and not feel as jolted out of the story as you would reading Mark Z. Danielewski’s 27 volume opus about cats.

Here are some short story collections and anthologies that fill me with immense readerly pleasure. This list features entirely women, because they don’t get enough love. If you have a penchant for the surreal, absurd, uncanny, and grotesque, you would probably appreciate these. If not, click here to be led away from this nonsense forever, as it will annoy you and furrow your brow. And if you would like to discuss the beneficial lignans in ground flax, feel free to contact me on the “Contact” page.

1. Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

Kelly Link might be my favorite living short story writer at the moment. The cover says, “A Best Book of the Decade.” I thought to myself, “That is, indeed, a haughty claim.” This book lives up to the hype on its cover. Kelly and her husband, a sci-fi writer, had to create their own press just to publish her first collection. At the time, short stories were considered to be unmarketable and her stories also don’t conform to one genre. They are a mix of experimental literary fiction, horror, fantasy, sci-fi, myth, fairy tale, and surrealism. Ghosts, zombies, and fairies are presented in unique ways. They present you with uncanny pajamas or dog fur handbags. A ghost wife gets divorced from her living husband in Disney World; the Devil gets Seven Minutes of Heaven with a cheerleader. Kelly Link does magical things with sentences. Whenever you think you know where the story is going, you really don’t.

Definitely read: “Magic for Beginners,” “Lull,” and “The Faerie Handbag.”

2. Museum of the Weird by Amelia Gray

I read a lot of these stories multiple times and I never get sick of them. These stories are mostly very short, have unusual forms, and make me laugh loudly but also make me deeply depressed. It’s an emotional roller-coaster to say the least. The collection lives up to its name with characters feasting on their own hair and toes, an armadillo hitting on a penguin in a bar, and a guy who marries a bag of frozen tilapia. Click here to get threatened by the author.

Definitely read: “Babies,” “The Cottage Cheese Diet,” “Trip Advisory: The Boyhood Home of Former President Ronald Reagan,” and “Code of Operation: Snake Farm.”

3. Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting

Alissa Nutting has an awesome brain and I would pay thousands of dollars for it in an Ebay bid. This is a very funny book. The humor sometimes reminds me of Futurama, maybe because there is an intergalactic deliverywoman in it. You may wonder what unclean jobs it features. There’s a porn star who is paid to have sex with a game show contestant on the moon, a human ant colony, and a romantic funeral home employee who smokes blunts stuffed with the hair of the dead. I'm kind of in love with the "Sweedishy" model Garla (just like everyone else is) and the experimental rock singer who wears a tight leather jumpsuit with a butt-flap so he can easily relieve himself anywhere. So many characters that I love. So much awesome.

Definitely read: “Dinner,” “Model’s Assistant,” and “Bandleader’s Girlfriend.”

4. Fantastic Women, an anthology of stories from Tin House

Here is an anthology of 18 stories by women writers that are uncanny, absurd, and surreal, all bound together behind underwhelming cover art that doesn't really fit. Kelly Link is here; Alissa Nutting is here. There are quite a few authors that I had never read before that I love now. The women in these stories undergo metamorphoses, travel between pocket universes, and socialize with lonely circus dwarfs. Sometimes they are tied up and suspended from the ceiling of their charming suburban homes. There are  even werewolves and somehow I don’t want to punch them.

Definitely read: “Dinner,” “Abroad,” “The Wilds,” and “The Entire Predicament.”

5. St. Lucy’s Home forGirls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

Last year I got an email from a former professor suggesting that I read this collection. She knows me too well. The narrators of these stories are precocious children on an imaginary island near Florida. They lure baby turtles out of the sea, learn to behave like humans, and follow the Oregon Trail with a Minotaur. Their voices are wonderful; you want to give them a hug even when they make atrocious mistakes.

Definitely read: “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” “Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers,” and “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.”