*The List (a short story)

The List

Charlotte ate green peppers all day long.

She had been sitting at her little circular kitchen table, in her old chair (the only one accompanying the table), surrounded by piles of her bills, sipping coffee from her mug. But no, she wasn’t tending to her bills with one of her pencils or pens, she was bent over her piece of paper, her eyebrows furrowed in deep concentration. It had only two words on the top line, both spread far apart to represent two different categories. Two simple words, yet they represented something so incredibly big and important.

Boy                                        Girl

Charlotte had been sitting there for a half hour, names dancing by in front of her eyes, a parade of letters. But none had seemed right, so her pen remained poised in the air, waiting for its moment to shine. But it never came in contact with the college ruled sheet of white adorned with blue and pink lines.

She groaned. Blue and pink. Boy and girl.

Throwing down her pen, she paced in the kitchen, distracting herself by reciting in her head; My fridge, my counter, my sink, my dirty dishes, my curtains, my stove, my cooking spices, my overflowing trash, my coffee spoon. Not Mom’s stove, Mom’s fridge, Mom’s sink, Mom’s curtains, no, not hers. Mine. Not Dad’s coffee spoon, Dad’s dirty dishes, Dad’s overflowing trash, Dad’s cooking spices, no, not his. Mine. It was all Charlotte’s. It was strange, scary, and exciting all at once.

*Named By Fate (a short story)

Named by Fate

“Alice.”

“Alice!”

“ALICE!”

A hand grabbed my shoulder and I jumped violently in surprise. Jessica leapt back from me, not expecting my dramatic response. After a moment she rolled her eyes and tossed her perfect blond hair indignantly, regaining her pristine composure.

“Honestly, Alice, are you ever tuned into Earth?” Jessica sighed, handing me the updated game and practice schedule.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, but she had already moved onto the next person.

I stuffed the schedule into my bag.

As I pulled out my CD player, I wondered if people who had different names were destined to be different. I mean, all the smart kids had names like Edith and Edward. Old fashioned names. They could solve math problems that usually required a calculator easily in their heads.  Then there were the Hopes and Trinity’s, all such nice girls who talked to everyone and stopped to help a kid pick up his books that he’d dumped all over the hallway. And Quinton would be the only kid in school whose name started with a ‘Q’. He would be the class clown, and would probably be a rich stand-up comedian with a show on Comedy Central before he was thirty-five.

            But what about the girl named Mercury who asked to be called by her middle name so she could feel normal? What was my special talent? The ability to be anti-social? I glanced around the bus. As usual, I was the only girl curled up against the window all by her self, while the other twenty-one Varsity and JV girls filled the bus with the awful racket of mindless chatter. On top of that, I was the only one with a CD player, which had been on the endangered species list of technology for at least five years now. Also, there were probably only two or three other girls on the bus who willingly listened to the Beatles. There were the fashionable blonds, the funny brunettes, and the good-time red-heads. Me? Natural black hair. How dreary.

So these are my talents: I’m anti-social (by choice), crappy hair, appreciation of technological dinosaurs, and an eccentric music taste. Great.