In honor of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), we return to some abysmal, unedited fiction, a throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach to exploring the art of storytelling. Enjoy! Or ask for a refund. Which will get you nothing. Because it’s free.
Without further ado, we turn to an original short story, “A Wanted Child”…
“Wasn’t that great?” bellowed Ted, beaming at her. Olivia shrugged and sighed, the music still ringing in her ears.
Olivia was only there out of an uncharacteristic spasm of sentimentality. Her mother had loved Rod. The road trips of her childhood were always accompanied by his breathy ballads about one-night stands and doomed relationships with older women. When Olivia saw a billboard for the concert, she decided she couldn’t miss it, and she didn’t want to go alone so she invited the one person who she knew wouldn’t say no. After the fact, it seemed silly.
Olivia’s weariness intensified as she felt Ted’s hand brush her lower back. He had tried to grab her hand all night, pressing it into his clammy fist, his eyes desperately searching for hers.
The concert had been an ear-splitting, maudlin event. There were hours of the greatest hits played to a crowd of middle-aged, over make-upped manatee women wearing pink. Olivia felt sadness when it ended; Ted feigned a smile when he caught Olivia’s eye as the swelling crowd digested them toward the main exit. Olivia was stunned out her stupor by a resounding thwack to Ted’s shoulder that reverberated through her body.
Suddenly a voice boomed over the crowd, “Teddy, muh boy!”
She turned to see a set of gleaming white teeth and, above them, a pair of iridescent blue eyes and a mop of golden gray curls. “Ted, my man! How the hell are you?” boomed the row of gleaming teeth.
“Ah, haha, Mr. Carson!” Tim simpered, his voice all but lost in the din of the crowd. “Good to see you, sir. I’m doin’ well. And yourself?”
“Buddy, I’m doing great. I just treated my secretary and her husband to this god-awful concert and I’m about to hit the bar. If I drink enough of the hard stuff, I might not remember the shit we had to listen to. Y’all wanna join me?” he asked with a rakish wink.
“Ahh, well,” Ted fumbled, his best-laid plans of seducing Olivia yet again on the verge of being foiled. “Ahh, we, we have other plans. If ya know what I mean,” Ted declared unconvincingly with an attempted mimic of the wink that came across as something closer to a nervous twitch.
“Actually,” Olivia cut in curtly, “I’m going to bed.”
“Woowee! Well y’all have fun,” Mr. Carson said, clearly relishing the deflation of Ted’s pseudo machismo. As the crowd pressed in on all sides, beginning to force them in different directions, Mr. Carson latched his eyes onto Olivia as though sizing up a cow in front of the meat factory. “What, may I ask is the name of that pretty little thing…?”
“Oh, um, this is Olivia,” Ted whined over the noise of several hundred happy manatees. He couldn’t help trying to brag about his pretend girlfriend.
But Mr. Carson was gone.
Divorced and living alone, nothing in her life up to now had prepared Olivia for what happened next. The weeks brought a flood of roses delivered to her door, calls, a proposal for work at her communications boutique: all from one Troy Gregory Carson. It turned out he was a successful real estate mogul with a reputation for fun. How old is he? Olivia wondered with amusement.
Cynical about all human relationships, Olivia ignored the advances at first, pushing the work proposal to her colleagues and paying little attention to everything else. But Troy was relentless. Finally, a handwritten invitation to lunch at his high-rise office convinced her to pay attention. It was so old-fashioned and unusual she couldn’t pass it up. She wondered what her mother would have said to see her now, dressing in nylons and lipstick for a sophisticated business lunch with an older man.
Marian, Olivia’s mother, took life on her own terms, as she always said, in a time when women were expected to behave as they were told. Approaching 40 as a divorced career woman without children, Marian took matters into her own hands. It had cost her contact with her deeply religious family who didn’t approve of her choice to have a fatherless child. Of course, Olivia wasn’t biologically without a father, but Marian opted to carefully select genetic material from a fertility clinic near her hometown in California. Though the road was difficult, she claimed she never regretted it. “I just knew you were waiting for me,” Marian would coo over Olivia, stroking her hair, “How could bringing such a beautiful life into the world be wrong?”
It had been just Marian and Olivia, a universe of their own, separated from family and with few close friends. In the final years when cancer ravaged Marian’s body, turning her warm, round cheeks to ashen, sunken hollows, Marian’s family had tried to make contact. Marian refused to see them, perhaps as much out of her own vanity as any lingering bitterness over the rift. She was gratified to learn through the one sister she talked to that the next generation had seen many IVF babies enter the family. Though married, several of Marian’s nieces and nephews couldn’t conceive. Suddenly, the family started to reevaluate their moral horror and likely felt a twinge of guilt at how they had treated Marian, a woman ahead of her time.
Despite all her progressive feelings, Marian had an old-fashioned streak and couldn’t resist romance like a handwritten invitation. Forever getting strung along in the next big romance full of grand gestures and no substance, Marian’s relationships never lasted long but they were memorable. Maybe she would have been excited by all this, Olivia thought as she glanced at herself in the mirror one last time.
Unlike Ted, who constantly required the assurance of meaningless jabbering, Troy let her eat in complete silence, merely staring fixedly at her whenever he wasn’t staring at other women in the restaurant.
After the meal, Troy steered Olivia onto the elevator and took her to his company’s office. Waiting for them was Troy’s long-suffering secretary, a bland woman with a toad-like grimace.
“Mizzes Paradise, this here is Olivia, communications specialist and super model extraordinaire,” Troy said. He seemed to be addressing the room more than the uninterested woman behind the desk.
“Good Lord, Mr. Carson,” Mrs. Paradise responded, barely glancing at Olivia, “Please, tell me this is another bastard child of yours and not an attempted romance.”
“Mizzes Paradise! How old do you think I am?” exclaimed Troy in mock seriousness and offense. “Mizzes Paradise, I happened to meet this fine woman here at that damned Rob Stewart concert we went to the other night and I think she is the prettiest peach and oh so smart. She’ll do right well as a little wifey, and that ain’t none of your concern, Mizzes Paradise.” Hamming up his southern drawl, Carson became an insufferable oaf.
“Mmmhmmm,” replied Mrs. Paradise disinterestedly. She hoisted her meaty thighs out of her swivel chair and inquired flatly of Olivia, “Do you like cream or sugar in your coffee?”
“Both.”
“And extra sugar,” Troy chuckled with his trademark wink. Olivia was struck by how obnoxious this man was. Had she really not seen it when he harassed her for weeks, misogynistically offered her a job and ogled her at an overpriced lunch? He struck her as a high school jock who never figured out he had hit 50. Or 60 judging by the amount of gray creeping into his golden curls.
But she found she didn’t want to leave. Troy was so loud and predictable she couldn’t look away. He drew her out of herself without ever requiring her to talk or even listen. The past years had been full of disappointment: first her husband divorcing her without warning, her mother dying of cancer, her career upended.
She had sunk into a quiet desperation, a sea of personal pain from which there seemed no escape. Her mother’s friend was the only one to intervene, insisting she make an appointment with a psychiatrist.
Olivia remembered the night the drugs took hold. It was not the beginning of happiness but a quiet end to the all-consuming sadness that had gripped her. She did not feel anything that could be described as joy, but the tears did not come and did not want to come. She lay in her bed, eyes heavy with sleep, and the sobs that had wracked her did not arrive, the unrelenting stream of tears ran dry. Olivia slipped into a dreamless sleep, and for the first time she knew she would survive this.
Troy’s intense and sudden interest in her distracted her from the memory of agony. The bottle of pills got pushed to the back of the counter. Olivia realized one morning she hadn’t taken them in more than a week.
Continued in Part 2
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