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The Weeklies and the RainThe free weeklies-usually stacked excessively at café entrances- were absolutely stealth to the orderly public. Responsibility for what had happened was evenly divided between hurried rain and poor management.
Not one week earlier on another Thursday, Siam had been in the same place absorbing and then cradling the three papers of his taste. Free weeklies: one to do with music, another to do with theatre and the last to do with all entertainment, though it tended to focus on dining. On that Thursday, the token café was partitioned from a drier world that didn’t encourage accidents.
Same weather (white clouds, thin air) made the walk from one set of doors to the next (be they restaurants, cars, houses, offices, schools ect.) quite pleasant. Maybe not so much pleasant as mindless. This all one week ago, Siam not having too much of his routine disturbed.
The routine worked to prep him for the weekend, a time he always anticipated. The weeklies (often repetitively) told him what was going on so that the Friday mornings at the distribution center weren’t so threatening. They made for good browsing, so at first coffee break every Thursday, Siam had taken to grabbing the trio and personally shipping them back to his desk.
The desk hollow, yet thick aluminum. Over top in its own bright beige glory was placed a vibration-absorbing mat thing that cast back the persistent blue of the monitor. Siam had taken great notice of this, likening the withering reflection to the isocilitic path traveled by a setting sun’s light. Specifically through the trees and along the lake in the 12 Septembers he had spent absorbing the image. The point is that the glare bothered him, so he took breaks within breaks. He would take the afternoon lunch and coffee breaks and spend them in the office just appreciating the matte finish of these weeklies. Once he got over their lightness, he perused them for Friday dinner, Saturday movie/concert and Sunday lunch.
That was all a distant narrative memory to him now though. This was next Thursday and it wasn’t so much a blank stare he put on but more one of empty disorientation. In front of the Café S’il Vous Plait at 104A Avenue, the weeklies were all gone. Even the queer, Christian and other “lifestyle” publications were missing. And he had accidentally hung his umbrella over his cuffed pant legs, and the water stains looked avoidable. For some reason he thought of them as water stains.
Fucking rain (again) he thought in bubbles to himself. He would think this even harder. He did think this even harder, just right after he noticed the fritty woman darting along the avenue behind the windows of the café. She was beautiful, maybe, and she was anxious possibly; Sian couldn’t have observed a thing besides what he could see (being inside, it was the only sense relevant to the situation). He saw a woman dressed like a poor clansman. The white cap was wrong because it was gray, gray like newsprint. And then the dark red banner triggered a recognition scene. It was “Reel Life”, the smallish movie paper that was a fundamental part of each Thursday. Taken out of its realm of theoretical goodness, the paper weekly served as a nice, practical and temporary umbrella.
He went to the counter of the S’il Vous Plait and asked the quasi-Fijian counter girl what became of all the weeklies. With her hands under hot water working away at the bean grind they had collected in the four hours since opening (for the business crowd), she explained flawlessly the events that had led to the presented question.
“WHAT happened is that the two big ones, you know “The Sounder” and “Calendar” are both distributed by the same truck. They usually arrive just after opening, so when they weren’t here by 10, my manager called the distributor. Apparently the truck in charge of our route went up onto a median and into a tree after hitting a puddle. The driver is fine but the car is, you know, FUH, I mean, screwed. They don’t have any other trucks available until at least noon. So we didn’t get those.”
“What about the ‘Reel Life’?” he asked.
“That came, but we only get forty of those. When the other two didn’t come, and the rain came instead, customers just grabbed for it. I think they mainly used them as umbrellas.”
<end conversation>
Shitty shitty luck wiped itself all about the nothing situation. Siam grabbed a cinnamon-tinged hot chocolate to go and made the two-minute way back to the office. Covered by an umbrella, for god sakes!
And the phone rang and he was tired of reading his cup and needed another way to secretly express his disinterest in the conversation. He had already forgotten his usual expression. The water stains had dried up and lost their names and his hands were no longer clammy (not that they ever were); the morning break wasn’t even a memory.
The end of the peel...
... an intimate Billy Joel (run)
