Felicity Fenton ~ Plans

Tuesday meet­ings are stan­dard. Sure, bring your lap­top. Will some­one please take the min­utes? Interoffice mem­o­ran­dum. To pre­serve employ­ment, there will be no sug­ar, cream, lunch meat, or pay­checks from here on out. White boards. Black boards. Anti-fun­gal cream for pent up toes. Quarterly sum­maries. Yearly reports. Snapping gum. Finger joints popping.

Before we get start­ed, lets begin with the week­end. How was the last one? Did you sing? Did you shim­my? How do you say Saturday” in Khmer? What does Sunday look like from the moon? What about next week­end? Any plans? Dinners with cousins. Fathers in town. You know, zoo flamingoes.

Its all deserved. Its nice to see that every­one agrees they have earned exact­ly what they get on Saturdays and Sundays. All the days. Yours! Mine! Paper plates. Viral chick­en sand­wich­es. The cozy mouth of the couch. Stonehenge manicures.

Ill prob­a­bly work­out. Maybe run a mile longer. Do you have that app? The one that yells at you to get up, fuck­er? I cant help but do what they say. I nod and go go go. Supposedly it keeps you from rolling to the bath­room. So much rolling these days. My hip flex­ers ache. No dough­nuts for me. Only grass but­ter balls sprin­kled in nutri­tion­al yeast.

Can some­one out­line a plan? What are we going to do with all this pent-up ener­gy? Have any of you built a boat before, a yacht, a cruise lin­er? What is that smell? Tickets to Singapore are at an all-time low. Anyone inter­est­ed in weav­ing a bas­ket out of cow intestines? Lets make a plan. Lets make all the plans.

Meeting require­ments include nod­ding and smil­ing while jab­bing the sharp point of a num­ber two pen­cil into your knee under the table. Please close your eyes for a minute, sniff the con­trolled air for any sign of fresh­ness. Dont be dis­ap­point­ed when its not there.

Feel the tug at your ankles. It pulls you down a bub­blegum hole. Bubbles pop stick pop, soft­en­ing your fall. Looking up you see Venus is a bit brighter than usu­al. The chins of your co-work­ers dou­ble and triple as they watch from above, snap­ping pic­tures of your splayed arms on their phones. You pass by plas­tic soda bot­tles, horse bones, sil­i­con, dia­monds until you reach the bot­tom find­ing a week­day dance inside a ring of old­time sun.

~

Felicity Fenton’s sto­ries and essays have been fea­tured in Fanzine, Split Lip Press, Wigleaf, The Iowa Review, Pidgeonholes, The Denver Quarterly, The Masters Review, Passages North, X‑R-A‑Y (forth­com­ing), and oth­ers. Her book, User Not Found was pub­lished by Future Tense Books in December, 2018. She lives in Portland, Oregon.