April 11th, 2013

Dropbox treasure

I’m trying to find an old story fragment and I don’t remember what I called the file–or even any of the words I might’ve used–so I’m basically having to go through every file in my Dropbox whose contents I don’t recall by looking at the name. It’s annoying, but I’m finding lots of weird stuff I don’t remember writing, which is kinda cool. It took me a minute to recall what the bit below is…at first I had no idea. It’s actually a cut chunk of a story called “Massacre Day” that was in my first collection, *Once*. I think this piece got cut pretty early–it was too random–and that means I probably haven’t looked at it since 2007. But I like it, still, and since it’ll probably never have another home, I’ll post it here, below. The file name, for reasons that do in fact make sense but are incredibly obscure, was “couch.” It’s going to be a long search.

***

The new hot thing was shop-lifting from garage sales. It was of course way easier, since there weren’t security tags or scanners or guards or anything. Also because people selling stuff at garage sales didn’t care much what happened to the stuff—if you’re selling a bunch of video tapes with mold on them for ten cents each, you just want them gone, and if some kid wants to put’em under his shirt instead of giving you the dime, you’ll probably just look out into traffic and let’em disappear.

So basically it was a dumb thing to do because there was no challenge or sport to it, and at first also it was dumb because you never got anything good. The tapes we smashed for the tape inside and then strung it around on trees for a while, which was boring and as old-fashioned as the tapes themselves. Then we tried tying Kaleigh up with it, because she never minds what you do to her as long as you pay attention to her.

The stuff turned out to be really strong, you wouldn’t think it to see it all flashy-wispy up in a tree, plus my dad said those tapes were always crap, the ribbon always snapping or twisting inside where you couldn’t reach it, even with a pencil. But I guess when you have the whole of “Return of the Jedi” to use and Kaleigh not being much more than bones in a hoodie, you could get her fairly settled.