It's Friday, and why not join us for a little light weekend reading? Every Friday from now until the end of the year - at least - we'll be posting either an extract or a full story from the NO MONSTERS ALLOWED anthology. There is some absolutely wonderful stuff coming up over the next ten or so weeks, and hopefully plenty to give you an appetite for 'human horror'...
We kick off this week with one of the very first stories I accepted for the anthology, FIVE AN HOUR, by Devan Goldstein. The thing that I immediately loved about this story was its macabre humour, and the sense that this is the kind of thing that could almost happen to anyone. Anyway, enjoy, and don't forget to drop by next Friday for more NO MONSTERS ALLOWED goodness!
Cheers
Alex
Five
an Hour
by Devan Goldstein
My first day on the butterscotch line, they tell me I can eat five chews an hour.
Frank
says, “That’s more than on the taffy line.” Frank works across
from me. He and I box the butterscotches, fifty a box.
“If
they’re so worried about money,” I ask, “why do they let us eat
the candy at all?”
Frank
throws ten or fifteen pieces into a box. Then he asks me if I know
Kevin Mercer.
“No.”
“Kevin
worked here for three months. Left a year ago, I guess, and opened up
the hot dog stand outside. Know why he quit?”
“No.”
“Never
ate the candy. Without the candy, this job sucks.”
I
wonder how much worse this job could be than the one he has now. “I
guess he eats the hot dogs,” I say.
My
second week on the job, I start to make rules to pace myself. I’ve
been throwing two or three butterscotches into my mouth at the top of
each hour, and the long stretches after my rations run out have been
murder. As the candy goes by on the line, it talks to every part of
you: your hands, your nose, your soul.
The
first rule I make is, one piece at a time. Last Friday, I told Frank
I’ve got a big mouth, and he said, “If a whale worked the line,
he’d get five an hour just like you. You think he’d bitch about
his big mouth?”
I
didn’t know if whales bitched, I told him, but did he have to be so
rude?
The
second rule is, stick to some kind of schedule. At first, I think I
should have one butterscotch every twelve minutes. But then I think
of Swagger, and how slow the strippers there unwrap themselves, the
good ones anyway, and make you wait for it. So maybe I’ll have one
piece at the one-minute mark, then wait for at the half-hour, then
one every ten minutes for the rest of the hour.
I
ask Frank which system he thinks will work better.
“I
just eat them when I eat them,” Frank says. “But everybody’s
different.”
“You
must have seen guys try different ways, though. Who’s worked here
the longest?”
Frank
looks at me like I just dumped his box of butterscotches onto the
floor, and then says, “I have.”
By
the end of my third week, I have tried five different schedules, and
even messed around with eating two pieces at a time again. But the
problem isn’t the schedule. It’s the candies. Too many of them go
by. It just makes you want endless chewy butterscotch.
On
a break, I tell these things to Marcus, the floor manager. Then I ask
him: What if somebody sent the butterscotch rations down the caramel
line, instead, and the taffy down the butterscotch line, and the
caramel down the taffy line? That way, we’d all get excited when
the candies we could eat came by, but we wouldn’t care about the
ones we were cutting or wrapping or boxing. We could store up
candies, too, like a bank account.
“A
bank account,” Marcus says. Then he tells me to go get a hot dog.
“I
hate hot dogs,” I say.
“Then
just eat the bun,” he says, and I do, wishing he’d listen to my
idea like I listened to his.
Over
the next few days, I bring in different things to chew on in between
pieces of candy. I like the springiness of balloons, but Frank
complains about how loud they squeak between my teeth. A piece of my
old brown belt makes less noise, but the leather makes my tongue
sting by lunchtime. Silly Putty disintegrates in ten minutes, and I
pick it out from the spaces around my teeth for the rest of the day.
I probably swallow half of it down with my butterscotch rations.
And
anyway, nothing replaces the candy, nothing makes me want it less,
not even for the ten minutes between late-in-the-hour butterscotches.
Frank
and I hardly talk anymore, but one day I ask him, “You ever try
quitting the candy?”
He
says, “This job sucks without the candy. Only reason to quit the
candy is to quit the job.”
I
know he’s right. You can’t quit the candy.
Soon,
I start to think about the candy in a different way. I imagine naked
fat women swimming through grain silos full of butterscotches. I
think of my grandfather’s anal medicine, and I wonder if stuffing
butterscotches up my ass would keep me from wanting them so bad, or
if they have to hit your taste buds to work.
Then,
I have an idea: I could easily fill two boxes at a time, one box with
my left hand, and one with my right, switching every so often to make
up for the difference in speed between my two hands. If I can fill
two boxes, I should get double rations.
The
next morning, I wait in the parking lot to tell Frank my idea.
When
he opens his car door, I say, “I could fill two boxes at a time,
and get double rations.”
Frank
looks at me the way Marcus did when he told me to eat a hot dog bun.
Then he starts to walk away.
“Where
are you going?” I ask.
“Inside,”
he says. “so I can do my job and then go back home.”
I
walk after him, and put my hand on his shoulder. “Frank, wait.”
As
he brushes my hand away, I notice how bony his shoulder feels, like I
could crumble it in my hand. And if I did, he couldn’t work the
butterscotch line anymore. Marcus would have no choice but to ask me
to fill two boxes at a time.
Then
I grab the collar of his jacket and pull it hard. Frank falls onto
the pavement. He looks up at me, and where his eyes usually are I see
two unwrapped butterscotches. As I reach for the one on the right, I
think, if he has one butterscotch in each eye, his head must be full
of them.
Devan
Goldstein’s
writing has appeared in The
Collagist, The Rumpus, A List Apart,
and elsewhere. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife
and son, and works as a web usability and strategy consultant
Copyright © Devan Goldstein 2012
If you fancy grabbing yourself a copy of this, and indeed 19 more stories of human horror, then you can grab the anthology at http://www.lulu.com/shop/alex-davis/no-monsters-allowed/paperback/product-21240457.html
Cheers!
Alex
No comments:
Post a Comment