A Series Of Small Sadnesses by Tony Rauch I feel strange at times. Sometimes I might be lost, other times it's as though I'm a hog wallowing in the mud on a cold gray day. I may be in a small car driving to the airport for some reason. Or I'm stuck in a teapot in a giant's house for some reason. Maybe I'm hiding from the giant. I don't know. Then I'm late for work because I had to wrestle some bad guys for some reason. Then I'm stuck up on your roof for some reason. So when you get home please look for me and try to find a ladder. For the love of god, try to find a ladder. I'm running in the darkness. I'm keeping busy, which is really just a way for me to hide from everything else. I'm trying to figure out what I should do next. But I do know that a nickel is a dime to some people and a dime is a nickel to some people, and that I am a lot of different things to a lot of people. But I don't know if that is a good thing or not. Then the pretend basketball game starts without me and I'm disappointed. I'm not really all that mad at anyone or anything, I'm just, you know, a little disappointed. My niece comes over. I have to watch her for a while. Eventually she is hungry and wants to make a sandwich. I explain that it's too early and that she can't make one herself anyway, that she'll have to wait. She assures me she can make one herself, but I don't believe her, so to prove it she does in fact go about making herself a sandwich. But she also makes every other thing in the kitchen. She gets everything from the refrigerator and cupboards and whips it all up until there is a stack of pancakes on the table surrounded by piles of sandwiches, mounds of eggs, stacks of baked potatoes, and so on. I wander in to find her sitting there, just as quiet as can be, eating her sandwich, and just staring ahead the way kids do sometimes when they're chewing. "See, I told you I could do it," she sings, still staring ahead in that child-like way. We don't know what to do with all the extra food, so we invite the neighbors over for a great feast. We stack all the plates up on an end table and they come in the front and go out the back to congregate in the back yard, picnic style. Eventually they eat all the food and two of the divorced couples get back together, one guy finds a new job (he was out of work) through meeting another neighbor, someone finds a tutor, and another person buys someone's car. I'm sure more little things happened back there, those were just the ones that we heard about. My girlfriend (well, not really my girlfriend, but just a girl I'm seeing that may become my girlfriend at some point, I don't know yet), Iris, is on her way over. She is huge and hairy. She looks like a great mound of hair. Eight feet tall. Five feet wide and lumbering. Tottering slowly. And she smells horribly. She'll be here soon, but you'll smell her way before she gets here. Your stomach will curl up and you'll want to vomit. That's how bad it is. It would take a truck load of shampoo to get her cleaned up. I think if we cut her hair down she'll actually be quite small. Maybe she'll be able to move more quickly, get more stuff done, get more out of her day, and thus maybe get more out of life. Maybe it's all that hair. Maybe that's what's causing all her problems. Sometimes I wander out back, out into the alley and just kind of hang out back there. I don't really do anything, like wander around or take a poop or anything, I just kind of hang out, feel the breeze, get away from it all. I don't really think about anything. I just kind of stand there and shuffle around a bit. It's nice. I buy an old town. A very small one. Just a couple of buildings. The entire place is run down and falling apart. I kick everyone out, tell 'em to scram because I want the place to myself. I mean, it's my town and all. I like it here, the wind blowing through, the tumble weeds and dust. The loneliness. The longing. I like the loneliness. Every time there's a big wind, some more of the old grey boards are pealed away from the tilting buildings and they blow away, down the dusty street and out of town, out to who knows where. Or perhaps these are all just some random things that I happened to make up. Probably because I didn't really have anything better to do. Maybe because I miss you and wish you'd call me sometime and ask how it's going like you used to. But you probably have better things to do now, not like before, back when you knew me better. Or maybe that's made up too. Or maybe not. Maybe that's the truth. And maybe that's how I really feel about things at the moment. Or maybe that was also something I just made up to try to entertain you with.