Faery What The Fu

It was barely four in the afternoon but I was already so bored I'd started making calls two hours ago to all my part time helpers in the hopes that I could wheedle one of them into running the shop for me. I'd even offered to pay for a baby sitter twice but every one was busy.

I'm used to boring week days. My shop/duplex is situated in a small Wisconsin town with a population of 627. I make the sales that keep my little book/craft/neighborhood coffee shop in the red on the weekends. I usually do more business just on Saturdays then I do Monday to Friday. I could have just closed up. It's my place after all, my rules. But I almost always get a few people stopping by those last few hours before I close. (I'm open until eight every day but Friday and Saturday.) Those two days I stay open until ten. We have this renowned little bed and breakfast on the edge of town that the "big city" folks flock to. And the one restaurant the town boasts is like half a block up from my shop. Unless I'm really sick I don't close up early. My customers are mostly my neighbors and my friends. And if one of them wants a book to read while she does her stay-at-home momma job, or a loaf of chocolate chip banana bread as a surprise breakfast treat for a hubby who's been working a month of 12 hour shifts, then she's damn well going to be able to get it.

I might only make twenty bucks off those two or three sales, but it doesn't cost me any more to have the lights on in the store then it does to have them on in my bedroom in my half of the duplex. I obviously have INTERNET service in the store as well as at home. And I love the young couple who rent the bottom half of the duplex. I just don't so much love their music. They don't play it loud, but I have very good hearing. (Back when I lived in St. Paul-I'd hear the sirens and the fire engines even before the neighborhood dogs did.)

And besides, a lot of the people who sell their crafts and their hobby passions through my store work full time jobs in the bigger cities twenty, thirty, forty miles away and most of them stop by to either pick up their checks or drop off things after six. Yeah, it's easy enough to ring my doorbell. It's only ten feet away from the shop's door, but then I gotta go back over and dig everything out and waste their time.

My sign says I'm open from 10 am to 8 pm, and pretty much mostly I am. There's always something to do. Every other day I come up with a new idea about how to display books, or I decide I want to move the book shelves around. I have a big old table pushed up against the back wall and sometimes the store hosts birthday parties where kids make scrap books or candles or paint flower pots. Sometimes I have book club night, when every one in town is talking about a particular top ten marshmallow book of the week. And twice a week I host a writer's group. I can't always be a part of it, especially the Sunday afternoon one, but I can still listen and yell back compliments or critiques.

And I do my own "playing at being artsy crafty" at that table during the shop's quiet times. Like I said, it's my store. People in town are used to seeing a bit of controlled chaos spread out on that table. If an outsider walks in and is offended by the untidy-I think you can guess where he can go for all I care. I don't play with my candle making and my beads and the dozen other things I like to do during tourist days. I maybe don't depend on this place for my daily bread and butter but I do like that it's becoming a draw for out of towners. It helps out the people I'm starting to care about here in town.

I don't have to do this.

Hell I don't have to do anything.

I had a pretty small family. Just my mom and my brother and his wife, and the cutest little five year old nephew. God I loved that kid. He called me kitty katt, because my nick name is katt. He was this tiny little tornado that used to fling himself at my legs and knock me back on my ass so he could swarm all over me to cuddle and hug and give me saliva sloppy kisses all over my face.

I loved my mom, and I loved my brother. We won't talk about the snotty little princess bitch who was my sister-in-law. I got along with her because both my mom and my brother asked me to ignore the mean things I saw and heard her do to them. They asked me to play nice, for their sakes, so I did. Guess there was some good in that superficial mean twit because she and my brother sure made a wonderful kid.

They were all I had. All I cared about. Those three people were the only ones who'd never hurt me.

I didn't go with when they took my mom to the airport. I was going to. But I got the flu, and I was so horribly sick I was basically living in the bathroom. I didn't want to give my illness to my mom; she was in her late sixties and had always been pretty delicate. And my little tornado boy, he'd been born premature and he was almost two years old before he started to get strong enough that we stopped waiting to lose him. So I wished my momma a wonderful trip and told my brother I'd call him in a few days about Sunday's supper, then hung up the phone and dashed back into the bathroom.

An hour later, on the highway, two miles from the airport, a soccer mom with a perfect driving record lost control of her SUV when a tire literally exploded. She swerved into the oncoming lane of traffic and struck a blue Camaro head on. The mushroom shaped flame of the explosion reminded me of pictures I'd seen of an atom bomb exploding when I watched it on the news that night. I mourned for those ten dead.

I may hold my heart hidden away in a cage but to see something like that still saddened me.

I didn't find out until the next morning that my family had been incinerated in those flames. My family were four of the ones who died in that accident.

I thought about taking my own life. I'd never wanted to do anything with so much passion before. But I couldn't. They would have hated that.

And then all the wills were read and the red tape gone through and suddenly, all this misery and death and life cut short left me wealthier then most people even dream about. I wanted to get all that money in paper bills and make a bonfire. And then throw myself on that bonfire.

Instead I ended up here.

We came here once, when I was a kid, and my dad was still alive. Just passing through on the way to some where farther up the road. But I remembered, and I called a real estate agent, and I bought this place. It gave me a home. I had people already living in the other half of the duplex. I liked the idea of distant heartbeats. And their was the retail part. It would give me something to think about other then my dead family.

It's been over a year now and I think it was a good choice.

I still don't know how I've managed to turn this little place into such a tourist draw, but it's good for the town. Every little mom and pop establishment is suddenly doing business in the red, probably for the first time ever, for most if not all of them. And there's money going out, to the ones that always just made their "little pretties" for church bazaars and the once a year craft show. So I guess, I'll stay here. I owe these people now. They welcomed me here. But they also seemed to understand almost from the start that I didn't have the heart to let any one in deep.

I don't know if I'll ever find a real home. I think the hurt cut too deep. But at least I found a place where I can control my desire to run until it kills me. Sometimes you just have to take the best you can manage. At least, when you know you owe it to those you've lost to keep trying.

So mostly, a year later, I'm still sad and aching with the agony of memory. Time doesn't heal all wounds. Often it just layers them over with tender, fragile scar tissue. But eventually, you do Begin to "feel" again.

And right now what I was feeling was complete and total boredom! Boredom so vicious I would have almost preferred depression, which tells you it was bad.

Looking at the time on my laptop and seeing it was only 4:02-six minutes from the last time I'd looked, I almost started banging my head on the counter. I had never been so bored in my life. I wasn't sure time was actually even moving in the whole sixty seconds equals one minute way. I had to walk out from behind the counter and stare up at the clock on the wall, murmuring under my breath...one one thousand, two one... Shit, it was moving correctly. I'd have almost welcomed some weird time warp thing. Might have killed the boredom at least.

I was sick and tired of reading stories on the INTERNET. I didn't want to chat. I didn't want to write. I thought maybe having a temper tantrum and going all Irish bitch might be amusing but even if someone did come in, it wasn't likely to be any one I'd want to pick a fight with.

I was two seconds away from saying fuck it and sneaking in a bottle of vodka. (Maybe getting a little drunk would help me get interested in doing something!) And then the cute but irritating bell over my door jingled delicately.

Yippy! Company!

I almost vaulted OVER the counter, but then froze.

Here? There's one of them here? In this little no horse town?

Who and what, I wondered, feeling my heart slam into over drive. Only the one door, and they...HE...between me and street.

I couldn't see them yet, they were standing just inside the door, and an eight foot tall bookcase was hiding them from my view. Wasn't necessarily a bad thing, that pause.

This is probably just my techno incompetence, but Lit isn't allowing me to paste the entire story here all at once. I'm really close to taking it personal. I'm going without sleep to try to get the whole bit posted for consideration so please don't be mad at me if it all doesn't come up at the same time. I'm putting the whole bit up at once. (And by the way, it's 4:30 am in my world. Writing it gonna kill me, lol.)