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Undesirable Acts of Lounging
Shelly worked at a bed factory in Tuxedo, New York, but didn’t own one. She had a flat, worn mattress that was flopped on her bedroom floor: something left over from a life she was way past well too used to leading. Got to the point where she was treading rye pretty thin over the crushed quartz of her life’s prime dilemma: never finalizing anything in her quest to leave the future be and let the present take care of the past. Parsimony, that great leveler of circumstances (hers and beyond), had captured and/or devoured what was hardest hit of her indefatigable freewheeling spirit, and now the good news was only heartache and resistance to the futile repetition of her routine. Eventually she asked no one in particular (as she was alone), “Why does my whole life feel like it’s just a play within a play, and a dull one at that?” Of course there were reasons she’d rather not have that question answered, reasons she also didn’t want to contemplate, and so, in the bleakest of traumatic aspirations, she decided to play dead until her current paramour showed up.
Coincidentally, or maybe not so, as serendipitous encounters go, Shelly was knocked back to reality and the life that she was currently in the habit of living, by a rapid blast of knocks on her apartment’s degraded excuse for a front door.
“No lawn to speak of.”
