How to Pack a Suitcase

A lot of packing a suitcase depends on where you're going.

If you're traveling with your family on spring break, leave room for souvenirs. You'll end up raiding the hotel gift shop on the last night desperate for trinkets for your friends back home, and you won't know how much space you'll need. If you're going on a trip with your school, don't bother with the drugs or condoms. Let's be honest - you don't have any friends to do drugs with, and unless you plan on wrapping a hot dog with those condoms for an unsuspecting student to find, you're not gonna need those either.

Find out your boyfriend cheated on you? It's tempting to throw his clothes out the window sans suitcase, but don't take the easy way out. Jam his personal effects into that nice rolling Rick Steves bag he bought for his business trip, toss in your cat's most recent batch of kitty litter, and wait for your cheating-whore-of-a-man to return from work. As soon as you spot him outside, bombs away. Aim for his windshield.

Breakups happen, and it's okay to get upset. When your girlfriend of four years tells you she's just not sure which direction the relationship is going in and that she doesn't really see a future with you and you'll just be better off without her and take all the time you need moving out, she means you better be out of there when she gets back from jazzercizing. Turn on some sad music and spend your last few hours packing away all of your memories: the shirt you bought at the first concert you went to together, the picture of you two on Steel Force, your grandmother's ring that you were planning on giving her tomorrow night. Just remember, big guy - it's okay to cry.

Going on a music trip with your marching band? Don't bother packing at all! Instead, spend your time avoiding the inevitable mountain of homework due when you get back making fun of the PSSA's you took two weeks ago and hoping people remember what you're talking about.

Smile

I mean people say that they like someone else's smile all the time, they mean it too, smiles are nice, but the thing about him and the thing about her is that her smile had this way of lighting up everything, it had this way of making him smile too, and it was pretty obvious that her smile was connected to happiness (as most smiles are), so he tried to make her happy because it made him happy, he tried to make her laugh, even when she was crying he would make bad jokes, hoping for the kind of choking laughs that come out in between the sadness, and when she was upset at him it was hard because she almost never smiled when she was upset at him and so he could never get mad back, all he could do was get sad that she was not smiling, so he said things like what more is there to say and people make mistakes which don't really mean anything and what he was trying to say was I'm sorry, I can't change the past, but what I can do now is tell you that this is the present and right now all I want in the world is for you to smile because really that was all he did want and he knew if she could just read his mind everything would be fine but instead all he could do was tell her that the only thing he wanted in the world was for her to smile, and he could hope that she would believe him, and he could hope that she would smile.

Rainy Today

The Key Card

You always wondered about death.

I mean people wonder about death, sure - about whether there's a heaven or a hell or maybe just a void - but you're not so concerned about the after dying part as the before dying part, when your life flashes before your eyes.

You jam the key card into the slot, praying for the familiar clicking sound that means the door is unlocking.

Here's your issue:

Say you're crossing the street and the truck accelerates through the red light, but you don't just get hit right away. You see it coming. You have time to move out of the way.

Does your life flash before your eyes?

The door beeps, meaning the key didn't work. You take it out and try again.

If your life does flash before your eyes, you die. You watch all your mistakes, you watch your first kiss, the day you met your best friend, your eight birthday - a lifetime compressed into the instant before death - and it distracts you long enough for the truck to turn you into sidewalk splatter. Or maybe it doesn't flash before your eyes and you hit your teeth on the curb diving but you still lived, didn't you?

Another beeping.

You wonder if there's an advisory board for this sort of thing in heaven, where they stop time at every potentially fatal incident, where they decide whether to press a big orange button that says "MEMORIES", where they watch their clients freeze to remember all the times they got goose bumps when a pretty girl touched their neck.

The snow blower is an older model, like the one your dad had for those winters back in Connecticut - he did always say it drove itself - and you're not really sure how they got it into the hotel hallway, but as it bears down on you now, without an operator, its thrashers churning wildly, you jam the key in one last time.

The door clicks.

There's still time.

Bookmarks

I liked a girl who used all sorts of things as bookmarks.

She rode my bus, and it started on a snowy early-dismissal Tuesday when I saw her reading in the mirror above the driver's head – her dark brown hair (almost black) pulled back into a bun, her knees pushed up against the seat in front of her, and her book – Brideshead Revisited – marked with an empty restaurant match booklet. A few days later she was reading Thirteen Reasons Why and keeping her page with a faded fisheye photograph of a farm; after that it was The Hotel New Hampshire and a plastic spoon.

I wrote her a love note – a long one on graph paper with little charts in the corner (fig. 3: "how happy I am vs. how close I am to you") – and gave it to her one day when we were sitting together on the way home. She read it and then looked out the window. I didn't push the matter further.

Right before her stop she reached into her bag, took out The Poetry of Oscar Wilde, and removed her bookmark, which was, in this case, a receipt for a vegetarian burrito from Chipotle. She slipped my note in its place and then kissed my cheek as she stood up to get off the bus.

Sometimes I see people with bookmarks for bookmarks and I laugh.

****

This is, by the way, my 500th post. Also thanks to Meredith for being such a great hand model.

Another Note

I've been thinking about readers week, and it occurs to me that the idea of my judging your stories is pretty stupid. I'm no better writer than any of you, and my idea that I should be the one to pick which of your pieces gets posted is pretty conceited of me. I think in the future it'll just be my stuff up here.

Normal posts will resume as soon as I get some sort of idea.

**EDIT**
I've recently been in contact with a few readers (read: family members) who would be interested in posting something. If you want to have something posted, email me a picture and a story (or other written piece) and I'll just post everything I get.

Notes

1. In an effort to feature my readers and also because I'm very lazy I'll be having a "reader's week" in the future - seven photographs coupled with seven written pieces. As soon as I get seven of each that I like I'll have the week, which will start on a Sunday and end on a Saturday. If any of you have already sent in photographs that I did not post but that you would like considered. Chances are I liked them but I didn't want to post multiple photos by one person in a short span of time. Otherwise, I encourage you to submit as much of either category as you like. Use my gmail address, and include "mostly harmless" in the subject line.

2. That snowball made a nice sound when it hit your window.

The Most Ordinary Day

The most ordinary day had two records.

In Warren, Maine, 19-year-old Lori Brown dozed off briefly at 4:38 AM while finishing a dissertation on Ulysses, and, for one tiny moment, everyone in the small New England city was asleep. Thus the record was broken for the most populated urban area to ever have all of its citizens unconscious simultaneously - a title previously held by a slightly smaller town in Ukraine.

On average, days have a couple hundred records - most plastic spoons purchased, for instance, fewest socks lost, fastest construction of an endtable from Ikea in the 60 and up age group - so it was understandably a little unusual when the most ordinary day had only two records.

In a little flat in the Bronx, Brandon Mayers made the best glass of chocolate milk in the world. He drank it while he enjoyed half a corned-beef-on-rye and the latest issue of Time for Kids.

Odd things happened, of course - there was a prison riot in Japan and someone somewhere threw a frisbee inside a crowded movie theater - but the fact is unusualness is pretty usual and what would be really unusual is if nothing unusual happened and as far as unusual goes the most ordinary day was pretty usual. Some people argue that the most ordinary day had three records; they say it also broke the record for least records, but that's neither here nor there. What matters is the most ordinary day itself, and how extraordinary it was in its normalcy.

Brief Instances of Invisibility

He's wearing socks that have an R on the right foot and an L on the left, explaining that they cost him twenty dollars down at the sporting goods store, where the manager's cap is as worn as the rafters where he spends his Sunday nights, dressed all in black, black pants, black shirt, and he tells you that the shirt and the pants don't matter, that you could buy them at kmart or pick them out of a dumpster or even just color all over your arms and legs with a black sharpie but what matters are the two things that he makes his own, that keep him from turning completely invisible - the socks and the tape.

The socks he picks up at the sporting goods store for twenty bucks, they're expensive, he knows, but he tells you about how while you're pulling them on they feel so uncomfortable, so tight, until you hit that sweet spot and suddenly you're not wearing socks at all, you just have on another layer of silky skin, and how he loves that feeling - so warm, so soft, so perfect.

The tape is black, he buys that at the sporting goods store too, along with the expensive socks. It's for boxing, and he has his girlfriend decorate it with a silver sharpie right before the show, they hang out after church, and then in the evening he changes into his gear and drives them down to the theater, she cracks his fingers for him, she kisses his cheek, she leaves to meet up with her friends in the city and he takes the caged elevator up to the rafters, he watches the mic check while he slips on the rock climbing shoes he wrapped up in grip tape, he lives the regularity, he made this routine his own because up in the dark it's easy to lose yourself so he spends twenty bucks on socks and gets his girlfriend to write him notes on the tape that keeps his palms safe while he digs them into sharp edges and scalding lights so that he can always be himself, so that he won't disappear, he tells you about the time he slipped up on a greasy beam in the middle of Anthony Sher's I.D., and he tells you about the nail that cut up his arm but saved his life, he tells you about the blood that ran down his wrist and elbow and dripped to the stage, where the actors fell easily into roles that were not their own while above them he struggled to hold on.

Scenes 9

One:
We just kept laughing, do you remember that? We laughed for about three minutes straight, first it was about the noise that woman made as she fell off the grape stomping platform, but it dissolved into nothing, I was laughing because you were laughing and you were laughing because I was laughing and your face looked so red and tears were rolling down our cheeks and we struggled to breathe. That was my favorite, laughing like that.

Two:
There is this moment during her song when he plays bass drum and you play wood blocks and I play xylophone and I know we've had our differences but in this really weird way I just feel very connected at that moment, like it's easy, like this is how it should be.

Three:
I marked the stairs and then you marked the stairs.

The Dream

In her dream, she's handing in a math quiz.

She looks out the window as she settles back in her seat. Outside, it's storming. Lightning strikes the oak in the courtyard, fusing together a squirrel and a bird. They tumble to the ground and struggle to get separated. The bird twitches its feet.

The teacher calls her to the front of the room with a frown on his face and her paper in his hand - her quiz, marred with red pen. Didn't you read the directions? he asks her, they explicitly say to perform the integration at standard temperature and pressure.

She wakes up drenched in sweat.

School the next day is shaky. She pours over the math quiz instructions and finds not a single hint of chemistry. She laughs it off. Finishing with her quiz just a few moments to spare, she looks over her work. Something is wrong. Instead of positives and negatives, she wrote sharps and flats.

Things get worse from there.

She's learning about Ksp values in third period. She can't stop thinking about sulfuric acid on the staff paper - a diminished chord, she decides. She tries to find the volume of Brahm's Quartet No. 5 if it's rotated about the y-axis. Instead of taking notes on Dos Palabras she finds herself analyzing the syntax of her Spanish-to-English Dictionary. She writes a DBQ on the French Revolution as it relates to Heron's Law. Lines start blurring everywhere. She accidentally makes out with her brother and calls her boyfriend "mom". She slurps her soup with a fork. She sharpens a pen.

That night, lying under her bed, she knows it can't go on. She sneaks downstairs and writes out a suicide note in Spanish with an eraser, and then, sitting at the kitchen table, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, she presses the gun to her forehead and pulls the trigger, gently drenching herself with a water pistol.

N's Last - Part Three

"You need to read this."

"What?"

"You need to read this."

Bill blinked. He moved his hand from the receiver. "Hello? Hey, yeah. I'm going to have to call you back."

He hung up and took the manuscript from Theo, who began pacing the room, finally settling at the window. Arms crossed, legs shoulder-width, he stared out at the street and chewed on his lip.

"I don't see what the problem is. It's definitely genuine," Bill said.

"Did you actually read it?" Theo moved across the room, grabbing the story. "Look: ‘the bunny hopped as if in slow motion, his owner did not chase him, for there was no need in this land; things moved differently here, and-'"

Bill interrupted. "I read it."

"We can't publish this."

"It's by N."

"It's terrible."

Bill was angry now. "Are you kidding me? The man wrote the best fiction in the world. He sold millions of copies of every single book. Critics raved. The man is the best."

"He was the best," Theo corrected him. "Not anymore. Look at this – it's awful. If we print this we ruin the quarterly. We ruin N. No one's heard from him in thirty years. The guy went crazy."

Bill stood up, his voice measured, his fists clenched, his face inches from his fellow editor's. "If we publish this, we make a million bucks on one issue."

"Is money all you ever think about, you conniving bastard?"

"You don't have a family," Bill said between gritted teeth, "your paycheck doesn't matter. Mine does."

Theo yelled. "I don't care about your goddamn paycheck, Bill, we can't publish this."

Bill's punch was quick. It hit Theo in the nose. Something cracked. Theo fell.

There was a beat. Bill steadied his breathing.

"We have to publish it."

He grabbed the phone and left, slamming the door behind him. Theo could hear him dialing in the next room. Grabbing N's story, he picked himself up and walked over to the door.

Bill heard the click, and his heart sunk. He dropped the phone. "Theo," he yelled, yanking the locked handle furiously, "open the door."

Theo took out his lighter.

Friday

On Friday nights, he drives.

He drives starting twenty minutes before rush hour in suburbia - four-thirty, most nights - but on Friday he leaves a little early because rush hour comes a little sooner. He leaves twenty minutes before rush hour because the intersection is twenty minutes from his house.

It's a little before four-thirty, right now, and he's there, doing his first round. He's sitting pushed back from the steering wheel, right arm straight out, shades on. He comes from their right, from Mill Plain Street, signaling left onto Sturges. Across is a regular with a red volvo, and she knows the deal with this intersection even if she doesn't know the twenty-year-old waving her on has waved her on thirteen times before. With a curt nod in his direction she makes her her turn. He cuts left right on her tail, slowing up bumper-even to the car behind her. The guy coming the other way on Mill Plain slides through after him.

He makes two more lefts and then starts over - Mill Plain to Sturges, letting someone go, taking his turn, and then slowing up so the car coming the other way can move. He does this every day at rush hour because there should really be a light at this intersection. He gets annoyed about little stuff like that. His high school girlfriend said it was cute.

His sister calls him and asks for a ride to her friend's house. He says no and feels bad, but he's busy and they need him here. If there's anyone who could make him leave his post it would probably be his sister, but even then it isn't likely to happen. On Fridays the intersection is a little more jammed than usual, and he knows it better than anyone. He herds his flock carefully.

His sister is a freshman at the same high school he went to. She's the kind of girl that seems to have it all: good friends, a junior boyfriend, a spot on the varsity field hockey team, fantastic grades. She's smart - that's for damn sure - and she's really the only one he trusts. She understands him.

He slots up in the queue for a third time, glancing around, eyes sharp, ending up helping a nervous looking teenager get past the intersection. As he pulls around a fourth time, he thinks about his old high school friends and wonders when they'll get a break from college. Probably in April.

By the seventeenth turn around, the intersection has thinned out. He makes one more left, letting a middle-aged man in a Chevy go in front of him. No one is coming the other way, so he decides to call it a night. The intersection will be okay without him.

He stops at the Burger King down the street and gets the number three with no fries - he's trying to shape up a little bit. He eats his dinner in the dark parking lot, contemplating what he'll do for the rest of the evening. Ultimately, he decides on a movie.

He tries to throw his garbage into the can from the curb, but he misses. With a resigned sigh, he picks up the trash and drops it in the can. On the way back to the car, he absent-mindedly wonders what his ex-girlfriend is doing right now. Maybe playing the clarinet. That had been an old inside joke between them.

He drives away.

The Accident

N's Last - Part Two

He began leafing through the manuscript wildly. "Bill, this is from N."

Bill gave a fake laugh.

"No, I'm not-," Theo insisted, "this is an honest-to-god manuscript written by N."

Without looking up, Bill said, "Oh, yeah, 'cause it's not good enough that the best writer of our generation who went recluse and hasn't been seen for twenty years sends us a submissions. He has to actually write it out by hand and send us the original."

Theo grinned and held up the stack of paper, N's distinct autograph dominating the bottom half of the front page. "Also, he signed it."

Bill was halfway across the room in the blink of an eye. "That's genuine, isn't it?" he demanded, ripping the story from Theo's hands and tearing through it. "This is his handwriting, too."

"This could be big," Theo said, leaning forward in his chair, his forehead on his palm.

Bill laughed in disbelief. "Are you joking? This is huge. This is what Fiction has been waiting for. We publish this story and we make a million dollars in one issue, easy. Not to mention the ten thousand extra subscriptions." - he was getting giddy - "I'm calling our publisher."

Dropping the package, Bill practically skipped to the next room.

Theo picked it up and began reading. He heard Bill's voice from the other room. "Pam? Yeah, hey. Listen, how much would it cost to print a few extra copies of the magazine this month?"

"Bill," Theo called out, still reading the story. He was picking at his lip.

Bill said, "yeah?"