Ankur Razdan
Ankur Razdan is a writer based in the Washington, DC area. A regular fiction contributor at Sterling Clack Clack, he has also appeared in The Westchester Review, The Tiny Journal, The Chestnut Review, and many more. Follow him on Twitter and visit ankurrazdan.com for his professional editing services.
Her Dismal Future
In the desk drawers of his home office, of course. Tucked alongside work gloves and a rusty spade inside an old stained flower pot in a corner of the shed. Wedged between the wall and his heavy-framed Master’s. In the pockets of his jackets hanging in the closet of the master bedroom. In the pewter stein brought back from a trip to Munich. In the pantry, a tiny three-part pyramid stacked behind the cans of cream of mushroom soup that nobody will ever eat and nobody remembers buying. Under a certain hefty but liftable rock on the border between the front yard and the cul-de-sac. Inside the bronze jewelry box by the hallway mirror. In the hollow handlebar tubing with the blown rubber caps of his son’s childhood bicycle, waiting in the wings for a sibling with an interest in locomotion. In jewel cases filed away untouched in the cabinetry of the silent stereo system. A whole pack, crumpled and half-full, in the glove compartment of his beemer. All over the garage, where his wife never likes to linger for fear that given half a chance the dirt would never leave her body.
And elsewhere.
Change accumulates at a rapid pace, exerting pressure on the pocket as it does so. Once it reaches a certain level, this build-up invariably finds or forces a suitable outlet. The release is highly divaricated, allowing a diffusion of funds through such avenues as:
—Sour candies, frozen candies, chocolate candies, and chewing gum candies from the local Water ‘n’ Ice. Remarkably, this establishment is operated by the single human being with the most retroflex accent on record, while it is owned by a world record-holder in rhoticity. This apparent coincidence will be the basis for further study.
—Similar candies, not to be consumed by herself but rather disbursed to her friends, acquaintances, and ‘frenemies.’ Not as common an expenditure.
—Accessories for her favored brand of toy dolls—little plastic handbags, high heels, wigs, tiaras, etc. Purchase and enjoyment of these items are highly correlated with a sense of discretion.
—An ugly sweatband with the patch of a popular children’s cartoon character embroidered into the cloth.
—A water bottle once, when she was really thirsty and the mean woman behind the counter at the Valero wouldn’t give her a water cup for free.
In material terms, this level of consumption is miniscule—barely topping over a period of three months about one Deep Amazonian hunter-gatherer’s yearly resource usage. But for the subject, it amounts to a revolution in allocation and expenditure.
This windfall is entirely thanks to her new occupation. From her mother[1] she earns three ‘nickel’ coins[2] for every used cigarette butt she brings in, and two ‘quarter’ coins[3] for every unsmoked cigarette she finds in latebras.
Prior to the recent ban by the mayor on menthol and other flavored cigarettes, most seized contraband took the form of Marlboro-brand ‘Smooths.’[4] Since then, American Spirit-brand ‘Mellow Tastes’ have predominated. What she hands in is presumed destroyed.
The objects of her search are entirely too easy to find, as previously noted.[5] Requiring no pre-planning and taking up only a meager portion of her non-school waking hours, this inchoate economic activity is hardly a distraction from priorities like homework or recreation. The only glimmer of what may be called childlike[6] class-consciousness might be her meditation, riding home on the school bus one day, that the more Matt smokes, the more tiny shoes her secret dolls get to wear—and then, as the bus went over a speedbump and an extra layer of cortical matter was inaugurated in a point of punctuated equilibrium like a roving continent slipping a whole inch all at once, she gained the ability to flip things on their head, and was all of a sudden confronted by the realization that if he stopped smoking altogether, her dolls would get fewer new shoes. We see the role, however feeble and useless, that intellectualism plays in the political economy.
Presently she files no taxes on this income.
[1] The birthing parent with whom she is domiciled.
[2] That is, 0.15 USD total.
[3] 0.50 USD total.
[4] Her naturalized parent liked to joke, never in the presence of any African-Americans, that he had smoked so many menthol cigarettes that his “lungs [were] all black,” while his spouse squirmed.
[5] The used butts accumulate solely in craggy places of the backyard.
[6] Or childish.
Matt Russert glanced up and down the hallway, just to be sure. Everybody was where they were supposed to be, which was to say, not hanging around. Maria with her horticultural group, keeping barrel cacti from suicide. Camilla at her friend’s house, doing....His attention had already drifted. Matt himself right here, feeling the gravity of nicotine, the pleasurable pressing of more than one G.
Life is about practical arrangements, he mused as he sidled up to the alcove under the mirror. Everything has to coexist. It has to. The cops need the criminals, the sinners the saints. And presumably vicie versie. He met himself, his golf-tanned face, his eyes blue and watered-down, his hair sandy like the barrier island to his brain. Maria needs to rest assured that she is the savior and protector of my health, daily. And I need just one cigarette, minimum, which isn’t much compared to the air pollution and stuff which nobody can avoid anyways. Of the several knick-knacks on the ledge, he ignored most of them: a picture of him and his wife, a picture of him and his wife and his stepdaughter, a picture of his adult son (the only photographic evidence of the boy in the entire house), and a painted-over-purple bottle of rosé throwing fake-flower flak from its neck like an infestation. And any more than that one a day is about wanting, not needing. He fumbled with the joke-latches on the beaten-bronze jewelry box, more of a jewelry coffin, that held nothing in its velvety interior except for some superannuated copies of the girls’ birth certificates, a capsule in a ziploc bag that nobody really knew the origin of but nobody wanted to throw away, and, rounding down to the nearest single digit, zero cigarettes.
“Hm,” Matt intoned, tapping his fingers together. There should have been a pair of them. He and his reflection slipped away from each other like a couple just broken up.
He looked in several of his other hiding places and found an astonishing number (again, zero) of those special, slender paper tubes stuffed with tobacco. This wasn’t the first time he’d checked for a hidden cigarette and discovered that he must have already smoked it, but it was the first time ever that his second, third, fourth, and so on selections had all disappointed him.
“I guess I’ll have to go to the store,” he said to himself. But what he was really thinking was that he was not, actually, getting as old and forgetful as he’d thought.
There was a familiar clatter in the foyer, which he duly ignored. I can’t be driving to the store every day. Where did Maria find the time to hunt down every last one?
And then there came from the hall another familiar sound, a very interested “Ooooooooooh!”
Matt paused by the kitchen island and put his hand to his chin. Another thought had occurred to him as he scooped up his sunglasses, baseball hat, and keys. Am I in trouble here?
On the way to the garage he ran into Camilla, tittering by the mirror. He saw that he had never closed up the jewelry box.
“Hi, Camilla,” he mumbled.
“Going out? To get something???” she giggled, the extra question marks twinkling around her head like jubilant dancing goblins. Her backpack had fallen like a cliff diver off her shoulders into a crumple on the recently renovated tile floor.
Matt turned around right there. His Maria-centric thoughts fluttered away like those species of butterfly whose wings resemble stern, glaring faces.
“What’re you talking about?”
Camilla pulled out a pen and took a long, obscene drag from it, the kind that would make her cough skunk in less than ten years’ time, but for now belonged to a world of pixie stix and silliness. In her eyes was a deep, chemical appreciation of a different kind: the humiliation of your foe upon the battlefield.
Matt put his hands on his hips in that way that never seemed to work as well with this one as with the last one.
“Did you steal my cigarettes? All those cigarettes? Little lady, you cannot be smoking those things. They’ll make you sick, they’re unhealthy, they’ll kill you. They’ll make your breath stink.”
“I don’t smoke em, I eat em!” she said with an utterly alien, freaky little laugh that made Matt’s tubes ache where the doctor last year had snipped them.
“What?”
“Mom gives me fiddy cents for every one I find. See?” She pulled out a pair of coins from her pocket and stuck them on the end of two outstretched fingertips. The little girl’s brand of humor was the kind that you could see a dementia-ridden old lady calling ‘feisty.’ “So you better get better at hiding them if you want to make it fun!”
“Was this your mother’s idea?”
Camilla didn’t say anything, but kicked her shoes off.
“I wasn’t going to smoke those cigarettes, I had just forgotten about them,” Matt said.
“Smoke em if you got em!” she shouted as her darling little toes scraped the stairs all the way up to her room, the door of which slammed in a very proto-teenage way.
Matt put his car keys down on the alcove ledge. He looked down at Camilla’s backpack, still doing a stand-in for a slouch right there in the middle of the floor. He was feeling, maybe, five G’s.
“You know it’s bad for you.”
“I know, hon.”
“So why do you keep doing it?”
“Well, it’s one thing to know it’s bad for you...it’s another to....”
“Well, that’s not a great answer.”
“What do you mean? Course it is. I’m only human.”
“But I want you to quit.”
“I will quit. I am quitting. Hon. It’s just, it’s human nature, you gotta quit a little bit at a time. I’ve already stopped lighting up whenever I feel like it. Eventually it won’t even be stress-relief. Sneaking a puff every now and then is actually helping me along.”
“You think? You’re making progress?”
“Yes I am…. So can you call Camilla off? Stop with the little prizes, you know?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“There’s no need to have her poking around my business.”
“No, she’s not doing that. I’m poking around your business. So she’s gonna keep it up.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s part of the process of quitting, Matt. Like you said.”
“You’re right. You’re right. Like an absolute addict, I’m talking. Camilla is part of that process, too. I’m going to keep hiding the cigarettes for a while—and she’s gotta keep catching me.”
“Oh, you are the best stepdad a girl could ask for. Camilla’s so lucky to have you.”
“Better than the other guy.”
“That’s right. But you really are the best father I’ve personally ever seen. And to think you were worried about it before we got married.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Sometimes my thinking can be just ridiculous. Can’t it?”
“This is the strangest PTA meeting I’ve ever been to,” said his daughter’s father, jovially.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you at one,” said his daughter’s teacher, seriously.
He sipped an iced green tea and cast suspicious glances all around the cafe. In all his years as an elementary school teacher, he had studiously avoided even the most splintery hint of impropriety. Never laid a hand on the young girls for longer than appropriate, never flirted with a mom picking up her kid after school, never used the computer at his desk as a personal device. So he did not enjoy sitting here now, across a too-small table from an apparently totally normal middle-aged man and his apparently totally normal mocha latte. He didn’t mean to be rude, but it wasn’t the kind of situation he was used to—the same words he used every day seemed to have entirely different, awkward meanings when he spoke them now.
But the man was a parent, said they had to meet about his daughter, that it was urgent. Camilla. Good kid, always had her hand up—the kind of child you needed to pay a little salutary neglect to if you wanted to give more attention to the ones who really needed it.
But now the man just sipped his coffee with a stoicism that the teacher, who would prefer not to be named in this text, thank you, could not compete with.
“So how can I help you? Is there some kind of unhealthy home situation with Camilla? Or do you have concerns about school? She never really gets in trouble, I’ve never noticed any bullying—”
“Oh, it’s all okay, Mr. Hart. Camilla’s doing just fine.”
The teacher cringed instinctively at the breach of anonymity.
“You said it was urgent. About Camilla. You’re worried.”
“It is urgent. It is about Camilla. I am worried. You know, she’s been coddled all her life.”
The teacher squinted a bit.
“Okay.”
“She always gets the gold star. Always gets her pictures hung up on the fridge.”
“I sure hope so.”
“And I imagine it’s the same at school. But the thing is, I don’t think that’s really good for her. In the long-run. She needs a taste of failure.”
“Um. Does she?”
“You’re a teacher, you tell me. But in my whole life, that’s been my experience.”
“I’m sure someday she’ll do something she shouldn’t and then she’ll learn her lesson. The girl’s eleven. What exactly are you saying?”
“I’m saying, in the interest of her development, she should get a taste of real life sooner instead of later.”
The teacher shrugged and folded his arms at the same time.
“I don’t think I agree.”
This man, supposedly a parent, shifted his buttocks in his high-rise stool like he was about to let one loose. But instead he pulled a checkbook out of his back pocket. He asked the teacher for a pen. The teacher shook his head.
“An educator like yourself?”
Eventually a pen was borrowed from a barista, and the man was waving it idly over an open check.
“What is it you’d like, for one failed test? A failed quarter? The semester? A thousand?”
“I don’t think—”
“Surely you could use more books for your classroom? Underfunded, aren’t you?”
“Not really. School gets your property tax. Have you ever been to, um, ever been on the premises?”
“Two thousand? Maybe you don’t have to spend it on the kids, then.”
“Mr. Russert—”
“Don’t tell me your price is too high for me,” said the man with a grin, tapping the side of his head with the pen. “How bout three thousand? For the whole semester.” Then he gave a gruff laugh. “Do you know how many quarters that is?”
“Two...” the teacher ventured, meekly but automatically. “Semester’s two quarters.”
It was a mistake. He tried to hide his eyes, but the two of them were now, technically, negotiating.
She has failed. Yes, she has failed.
A bright light shines on the crying face of the little girl with her curls tying into knots of frustration and fear.
What could she have done differently, wailed her mother. How could she have avoided this.
Nothing, nothing. I mean, everything, everything. She could have tried harder.
I try!
She could have listened.
I listen! I got an A on my last test!
She got an A on her last test.
There are more tests than just that one.
I get an A on every test! Or a B!
She gets—
She doesn’t do her homework.
I do my homework!
I make her do her homework.
She should do her homework of her own accord.
She does her homework! Doesn’t she? Don’t you?
I do my homework!
Do you ever see her do it?
Oh my God, her mother wailed. She goes up to her room. I thought she was doing her homework!
His eyes are dim behind the light of a glowing future, approaching with such a quickly magnifying certainty that what started out as a sickly prance has become a charging animal with too many horns.
The mother tears at her clothes amid the shame and the horror of her little baby’s years ahead degrading like weakening appendages flopping to the ground and dropping their pens or knives or hammers, which roll away under the bed forever lost.
The girl, however, cannot see her future or its consequences. She is just sitting in the room where she has done what was asked of her. Her face is red and smooth as a boil and her hair flares out in all directions, wriggling and writhing like tentacles lashing out in their own minds’ pain. She did the work. She circled the box and ticked the oval. She’d been a good girl, bright and brilliant if she studied, and not too slow when she didn’t. She’d taken care of the things a good, bright, brilliant girl takes care of.
Now she is too brilliant, the light grown so intense that even she can perceive it, where it forms itself for her into a pinprick shining off the top of her teacher’s head, and reflecting in her mother’s eyes, and then pointing around the room, at the pens and paper in the common-use trays and the books on the shelves and the stacks of scientific calculators at the Science Station. When it comes to point at her, the heat boils her so deep within the pain of isolation and betrayal that she begins, finally, to cry. Many tears fall, before giving way to the whine of a throat scraping its insides together. Until her mother, embarrassed enough, asks her to please shut up.