Hats
I got fired from my job at CVS for stealing Prilosec OTC to alleviate the horrendous side-effects of my chronic GERD, so I started buying novelty baseball hats from China and selling them on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building. My girlfriend Sarah did not approve of this crude and boorish behavior; in response, she absconded from the apartment in the middle of the night twenty-three days ago, and has not spoken a word to me in the interim.
Two days later Sarah clicks up to the front of the apartment building and stares down at me as I sit on my blanket of hats. Looking up at her, I force a bent-paperclip smile onto my face and ask her if she sees anything she likes. Scoffing to herself and bending down, she picks up a black and brown mesh-dome trucker hat adorned with the title and mascot of my favorite breakfast cereal, Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Sarah looks at me with an expression of extreme disgust and loathing. In an attempt to lighten the mood, I try to force out a good-natured laugh. But my anguish-tightened throat expels an animalistic grunt of deep sorrow and loneliness. Ignoring this embarrassing noise, Sarah hefts the nearly weightless hat in her hand, as if this test will help her assess the item’s true market value.
How much? she says, gesturing at the hat with her chin and watching me closely.
I study the hat clamped between her fingers. Ever since I began my hat-based entrepreneurial endeavor, my prices have fluctuated depending on many factors: my current stock on hand, my daily sales figures, the number of passersby who have grumbled at me to get the fuck out of the way and to stop blocking the sidewalk, and, most importantly, if I currently possessed enough money to afford my usual dinner of a tuna-melt with curly fries at the twenty-four-hour diner at the end of the block.
But I don’t say any of this to Sarah. I cannot survive another humiliation at her hands. So I clear my throat very quietly.
Uhhh … five dollars? I say, in a tiny, croaking voice.
She turns the hat over and examines the interior, the bill, and the cheap plastic sizing strip sewn into the back of the mesh dome. Then she folds the hat in half, tucks it into her messenger bag, and hands me a five-dollar bill.
Stay here, she says. I really need to talk to you. I just have to get some of my stuff out of the apartment.
I nod like an obedient child and watch her hurry up the front staircase. I see her disappear inside the building and sweep my hats into the center of my blanket. I heave the lumpy bundle over my shoulder and sprint away in a wild frenzy.
*
Nostalgia
I pull back the gold curtain draped in front of my bathroom wall. I stare into a twenty-two inch television recessed into the white plaster. A silver-blue eye peers out from the northwest corner of the shimmering screen. A dramatic reenactment of my drive to work on my twenty-ninth birthday plays in a loop on the television. In an instant I recognize the actor portraying me in the film. He is a performer of vast emotional range and preternaturally interesting physical features. He possesses a wolfish, sinewy physique with sharp blades of bone pressing against the tight sheath of his pallid skin. Though I have seen and adored many of his films, I cannot remember his complex, multisyllabic name. But in this moment these facts do not matter. The dramatic reenactment of this formless, long-forgotten nugget of my wasted life is the most thrilling piece of media I have experienced in the past nineteen years. So I stand in the nude in my bathroom and stare at the screen for the next sixteen minutes. Near the end of the film, the actor drives a perfect replica of my 2011 Honda Civic into a parking space and presses pause on his scratched and dented iPod. My scratched and dented iPod. He slides his headphones out of his ears and folds the long cord into a bouncy black ribbon. He stares into my silver-blue eyes in the pull-down mirror and whispers a paragraph of silent words into the dingy glass.
~
Steve Gergley is the author of The Great Atlantic Highway & Other Stories (Malarkey Books ’24), There Are Some Floors Missing (Bullshit Lit ’24), and Skyscraper (West Vine Press ’23). He tweets @GergleySteve. His work can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/. In addition to his own writing, he is also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.