Just So You Know

An introduction to a series of short stories I've been working on for a little while, each about one character from the group of friends described below. The first story is Esmeralda's, is nearly finished, and if I fail at getting it published in a lit mag somewhere, it will probably end up here too!

            Just so you know - this is Helly: a baron of boredom, a tedium tycoon, a Dixieland Dunbar. And efficient, too: He sculpts empty hours into empty days, milks mass media of every drop of its frivolity. He is five foot eight, 140 pounds, and has nice hair. People are not crazy about his face, generally, though in the right light and seen in profile it looks something like an aeriel view of Spain. Spain is a very beautiful country.

            Helly is also a genius. SAT scores: math 800; reading 800; writing 360. The graders did not enjoy his essay page doodles: the severed head of Jesus, halo and all, over crossbones - a femur and an ulna, because why not? 25 minutes is too few for art, but kitsch is cheap, temporally.

            Helly is short for Hellen because his parents thought he was a girl. It is hard to say why; the doctors, who often know these sorts of things, told them otherwise. A mystery. He keeps the name, because he did not keep the parents. People did not forgive them for attacking his genitals with knives.

            Anyway he is mostly intact, and thank god, too, because he intends to reproduce one day. He has an idea: He will draw all over the baby's head in permanent marker, so that it looks as though the baby has jet black hair. People will think, "What an incredible baby!" Some will find out about the marker and be terribly let down.

            Helly has a younger stepbrother named Evan. Sometimes Helly says "Get it?" after they are introduced. Evan thinks this is great, just grand. To be fair he thinks this about a lot of things. "Well ain't that just grand," he says, for example, about especially clean public restrooms, and roadkill pickup crews, and lesbian pornography. Evan has a pair of rose-colored glasses that he wears to be ironic. Evan thinks irony is just grand.

            Evan goes to school every morning at 6:15, because he likes to talk to the cafeteria ladies before homeroom. His friend Ovid drives them in his dad's green pick-up. Ovid is generally unimportant, except to say that this story ends with him preparing for a date, and that he has a cat named Metamorphoses who hears the voice of God.

            On Fridays before holidays the lunch ladies sell Evan peyote, one Benjamin per kilo—that’s ten cents a gram, that's $45.36 a pound, that's $1.98892 × 10^32 a solar mass, assures Esmeralda, whom Evan shares the peyote with during study halls. Esmeralda becomes transfixed by the fluidity of numbers when she trances. "I created a star of half-moon," she breathes, and Evan says, "Well ain't that just grand."

            Esmeralda is the worst gossip in the world, which is to say she's very bad at it, which is to say that she knows many secret things and says nothing. She knows many secret things because her mother is a guidance counselor and likes wine. On Wednesday nights she invites over a gaggle of teachers and the school librarian to make jokes about closeted kids and pray for delinquent souls. Sometimes they make wagers on student behavior. When Penelope Maccorkindale killed herself Esmeralda's mom made $700.

            Maccorkindale, no disrespect, is a pretty funny name.

            Benjamin Maccorkindale was Penelope's twin brother, and maybe he still is, if you can be related to a corpse. Benjamin doubts it. For instance: He is not a believer in ancestry. He has gathered dry leaves around the trunk of his family tree, and he's rubbing two sticks together; oh yes.

            His father is a garbage collector, and on the day he found his daughter's body he took Benjamin and two old lawn chairs to the truck lot and watched the crushers' mammoth teeth turn garbage into neat bricks like children's blocks, and built an altar in his head, and lit a cigarette.

            Oh yes.

            Benjamin's got big dreams. He will be the world's youngest CEO, and here's how: plain common sense. Business sense. He carries his economics books in an olive-colored briefcase. Or else he'll take cinema by storm - acting is empathy and translation and and and evacuation of the self. He keeps scripts and a digital video camera in a trendy messenger bag slung over one shoulder. Here it is: He'll reboot the manned space program, design shuttles with elegance and grandeur, die on Mars. His computer is loaded with simulators and lives in a geeked-out backpack with worn straps.

            On his computer he has a picture of Evan's brother Helly that he looks at sometimes.

            Just so you know.