… And so there was no other conclusion to come to. Ryan had no reason not to impale his hand upon the spindle for credit card receipts. The gods practically cried out for his meager splatter upon the thin, shiny little phallus. It was becoming increasingly hard to deny the expediency of the evidence. In fact, he only bothered reexamining the evidence because he was afraid his unwavering assurance in it’s solidity might suggest a kind of madness in him.
Ryan didn’t feel mad. It did occur to him that a few of his patrons might be so inclined. Ryan’s mood grew darker with each customer who sought out a pressed gold chain or diamond and sapphire broach for which to lower--by equating--their natural worth.
The old lady with the fat, sparsely haired neck, with her delicate hands and firm manner, spoke with the air of a television debutante. When prompted by Her with a shaky, smooth finger to assist in the clasping of a thick, gold herringbone around her thick, fat neck, Ryan had to fight back the urge to bury a seven inch ruby broach pin she’d been oggling into the layers of blubber around her jugular.
A woman so pleased and confident in the intrinsic value of shiny things, ‘And she’s buying the stairway to heaven…’
It was to swallow the bile churned up by the vulgarly painted, ploitering pink lips of his haggish, auto-theistic co-worker, as she spoke flippantly and indirectly of the disregard she held for her very real and very endangered soul.
There was no reason for Ryan not to slam his hand down on the spindle at all, and as his customers, and Pluto maniacal associate left for the night, and his manager retired to the break room to stuff her face with a ball of thick bacon grease, sandwiched by two pieces of seared toast, he was presented with an opportunity to do so.
Ryan had suffered surely enough at the hands of fortune--Frequent Copremesis, Homilophobia in an Evangelical family-- And at the hands of fortune--Burning loins for a tender badling, fully unaware of Ryan’s fiery gaze from his kiosk in the center of the mall--And those being only the most recent offenses.
The case for impalement was pristine.
This was an opportunity to take nature by force, and force Fortuna’s hand to jostle her wheel in his favor.
Surely there would be a fine little scar on the palm, to match the tiny full moon that would appear on the back of his hand. He wondered if the point of penetration would be more pronounced than the place of exit, and if the circular scars would align.
Impaling his hand would give him license to leave his wearisome work early, which was always welcome. It would give him something to speak to his darling dandy about, and surely the extreme implications of the wound would leave his man reeling in the wonderful novelty of it all.
He could blame his wound on a turning carpet edge that had gained his manager’s notice a few months ago. He could also pin it on his ailing work shoes; whose flapping soles had caused him innumerable trips as they further degenerated in the preceding weeks.
Ryan was sure he’d be surrounded in the emergency room (do such injuries merit the ER?) by a slew of concerned and service oriented nurses.
But what if he crippled his hand? This hadn’t occurred to Ryan before and the implications made him shudder.
He envisioned his thumb and forefinger frozen permanently in the ‘OK’ position. This image summoned a dusty chuckle from the center of Ryan’s being. Such a wound would be trivial, and could foster no less of a valuable lesson than to teach him the inconstant nature of things, and that there can be serious repercussions for such rash and bizarre behavior. What his deformity would serve as would be a little message from beyond, ‘all is not guaranteed my most valued son…’
So all was settled. Ryan scanned the store and smiled at it’s vacancy. He looked at the bloated, vomit colored carpet and listened to the vacuous slurping and chomping of his manager, in attempt to gauge the progress she had made into her meal. She usually went about fifteen minutes over her allotted time anyhow, farting around with her makeup and picking at her yellowing toenails.
Ryan looked through the smudged glass of his store window and his eyes went limp when they fell upon his lax Romeo, sucking absentmindedly at a smoothie from the health food store. In the dim of the golden lamplight, Ryan brushed some dandruff off of his black dress shirt and fixed his gaze on the half full spindle.
Marcy, manager of the jewelry store wherein Ryan was employed was slouched on a step stool in the small, claustrophobically packed break room, gazing in horror at a long white hair she had pulled from her philly sub, mulling over her options. The thought that there was no one at the sub shop with long white hair while she was placing her order inspired a number of inexplicable gags. She had the extreme misfortune of grinding the hair with her food into the crevice of one of her teeth, and torturously pulling the whole thing past her slimy, trembling lips with utter terror. As she was feeling the phantom worm trail of the ghastly hair on her lips and trying to remember her lawyer’s phone number, she was plunged back into reality by the startling sound of what she assumed was a little girl who had slipped in the mall while running and scraped her knee. The shriek was characteristically overdramatic, as a young girl’s screams are prone to be. She pictured a missing front tooth, a balloon tied to around the baby’s tiny wrist. She saw a caring father and mother kneeling to console their wounded child.
The memory of her own girlhood brought a warm smile to her flabby, grease smeared face.
Marcy shifted her weight to the left and elevated her rear in order to provide a whisper’s length of passage for a whinny stream of flatulence, and decided there was no point in contacting her lawyer anyway.
Why bother bringing the Jews into it?
About the author:
Spencer Troxell lives with his wife and son in Cincinnati Ohio, where he is working towards a doctorate in Psychology at the university of Cincinnati. He is 23.
© 2009 Word Riot
