Authors, apparently, must also be Bloggers.  As part of my mission to re-vamp lrburt.com, I’m incorporating several regular features, including Fiction Fridays, which are dedicated to posts about writing or excerpts of my fiction projects.

Since my readers are probably more interested in what I write than in how I write it, I’ll kick off Fiction Fridays with a short story I wrote a few years ago.  Actually, it’s not terribly short, so I’ll break it into two parts to post this week and next.  It’s a humor piece, and a love story, and it stars a roll of toilet paper.  Something for everyone.

Her Dying Wish

by LR Burt

If you asked her what she wanted to do before she died, she would tell you things unsurprising and unremarkable: to travel to Europe, to write a novel, to go skydiving, maybe, if she was feeling adventurous.

If she told you this, you would believe her; after all, everybody, yourself included, wants to travel to Europe, write a novel, and skydive before they die.

Like everyone who claims these dying wishes, she never put spare change in a jar to save for that European vacation; she never sat down to write the first line of the novel that came to her as a lightning bolt of inspiration; she definitely never felt adventurous enough to sign up for a skydiving course.

No, what she dreamed of, in her secret heart, was to knock glass jars off supermarket shelves; to say swear words in places and in front of people she shouldn’t; to write a scathing letter to a person of great importance.

In short, what she wanted to do before she died was to become a menace to society.

Of course, if you asked her, she would never tell you that, because as far as she knew, she really and truly believed she was exactly like everybody else–and nobody else wanted to become a menace to society before they died. At least, no one told her otherwise. If anyone had, she might have recognized her real dreams sooner, without resistance or thinking she was going mad, and by pleasanter means than the threat of her imminent death.

Although, if she had recognized her real dreams under less urgent circumstances, she would not have realized that she’d never really lived at all, or felt so acutely what it meant to come to life.

“This mole concerns me.  I’d like to remove it and send it for a biopsy.”

Fifteen words from a dermatologist were all her imagination required to self-diagnose melanoma.  This was not a typical reaction.  Most people would pay their $25 co-pay, then spend the rest of the day phoning family and friends to help them deny the possibility of anything being seriously wrong with them.  She, having no one, called her boss to say she wouldn’t be coming in for a half day as planned.  Because, as she didn’t say, she knew she would be too busy googling ‘melanoma’ to get any work done.

On her way home, she hit the drive-thru for a burger, which she never touched; when she flopped down on her couch with her laptop to eat it, she couldn’t stop herself clicking to view the image results of her search, which made her imagine every mole on her body swelling up to hamburger patty proportions.  Needless to say, this was not what she could expect for the progression of the disease if she had it.  (And you must remember, there was no hard evidence that she did.)  But the imagination is not known for medical realism–and to be fair, pictures of cancerous moles would make almost anyone lose their appetite.

Rather than navigating away from the images, or, better yet, closing her browser session completely and escaping into the world of daytime television, she continued to look.  In what to her mind was a rational way, she accepted that appetite loss would be a condition to which she would soon grow accustomed when she began aggressive chemotherapy.  Not that she had very long to get used to not eating, with a 9-15% survival rate.

At which point she began to wonder:  did she really want pass the few days remaining to her in a hospital bed?  She could live with the fact that her predestined date with her Maker was coming soon and very soon.

The operative word being live.

As her own voice replayed in her head stating all the things she’d always said she wanted to do before she died, her cursor once more found its way into the browser search box.  Her fingers, as though commanded by an irresistible inner urging, clicked over the keyboard, rattling out the query:  ‘European dream vacation.’

Despite having no real, heartfelt desire to tour Europe before her death, her appetite returned with the pictures of gourmet French restaurants and Venetian cafes; she now believed more strongly than ever that these were her dying wishes.  When her stomach’s gurgles increased to un-ignorable growls, she got up from her sofa, strode purposefully across her apartment, slid on the flip flops she’d abandoned at the door, and stepped out into the clear evening.  She would just pop into the supermarket for French onion soup fixings, a loaf of sourdough, maybe biscotti for dessert, definitely a bottle of cabernet.  She’d watch the Travel Channel from the kitchen while the soup simmered.  After the meal she’d book her vacation, then settle down to write the first chapter or two of her novel.

(Also, she was out of toilet paper and couldn’t wait much longer.)

As of a minute ago she’d never had one single idea for a novel.  Now, entire, beautifully worded paragraphs were sure to spring from her mind, fully formed like the goddess Athena from Zeus’ head.  Her novel would be about a woman with less than six months to live who decided to do all the things she’d always said she wanted to do before she died.  Like go skydiving.

Or it would have been, had she been predestined to make it to the produce section.  Alas, she never did…

…or the liquor aisle…

…or the one with the broth….

…or the bakery…

…and therefore she was predestined not to have her European inspired meal or plan the vacation she did not really, in her heart of hearts, want to take.

En route to the produce section, she was distracted by the aisle which she had, since childhood, always thought of as the Thou Shalt Not Touch Aisle.  This, of course, was the one where jars of pickles, mayonnaise, salad dressing, mustard, ketchup, barbecue sauce, marinades, and jams, jellies, and preserves stood on shelves, a veritable rainbow encased in glass and gleaming under halogen lights.

A serpent whispered in her ear:  Hast thy mother really said thou shalt not touch the merchandise on this aisle?

Her mother definitely had; her nightmares were haunted by a white-faced and tight-lipped wagging-fingered warning which even in adulthood kept her dead center of the aisle, hands glued to her cart, too intimidated to actually shop.

Only today, the cart veered slightly to the left of center.  She barely had time to assume that the wheels must be out of alignment (they weren’t) before a disturbing image loomed in her mind, of herself wearing an evil leer as she–purposely–rammed her cart into the pickles.  She envisioned several jars plummeting to the tiled floor below, hitting with a crash; as she imagined jagged shards scattering, she could almost smell the wave of yellow-green, acerbic juice that would flood the aisle if she were really to do such a thing.  In actuality, her fingers locked in a death grip as she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, savoring the brine and vinegar tang that swirled upward from the imaginary wreckage and into her slightly flared nostrils.

Like a shark teased by the scent of blood wafting in the water, her eyes snapped open, narrowed but gleaming with madness as she bent over her cart, elbows akimbo, and rammed it into a shelf.

CRASH!

A half-dozen or so pickle jars hit the floor and shattered her dream-state.

Horrified, she saw that she really had carried out the random act of destruction.

Down the aisle, a lean, black-haired man wearing a dark business suit stared at her.  She interpreted his slight smile as a smirk and thought he could only be laughing at the clumsy dork.  Or maybe the crazy maniac.  The intensity of his gaze made a hot flush prickle its way up from the neck of her t-shirt and bloom on her face as she silently told herself of course she was just a clumsy dork, absolutely it had been an accident, she had most definitely not hit the pickle shelf with her cart on purpose.

And then the man spoke:  “Hello.”

Three steps brought him to a more conversational distance from her.  One hand tugged at his tie, which hung loose in the open collar of his dress shirt, as he extended the other to her.  She didn’t shake it, because she was too busy thinking he looked nervous, which he was, and trying to work out why; women wearing grubby t-shirts they got free for donating blood didn’t make handsome men in expensive suits (she thought it might even be Armani) nervous.  Nor would she have believed him if he told her it was because he felt like he was meeting Princess Di or Mother Teresa or some great woman who was living out her life’s destiny regardless of what other people thought about her chosen path.

But nerves and her failure to shake his hand didn’t stop him from saying, “I’m John.  John Roberts.  Would you…want to have a drink?  With me?”

Her heart leapt.  Wouldn’t she! It had been years since she’d had a date, and she’d never had one with a man who wore Armani–

Just as abruptly, her heart fell did a petrifying freefall exactly like the one she imagined she would experience if she ever got adventurous enough to go skydiving.

Years.  She didn’t have years.

“Thanks,” she said, clutching the handle of her shopping cart tighter, trying (unsuccessfully) to ignore the inner twinge at the sight of his hand falling to his side and his cheeks going pink with mortification.  “I can’t.  I’ve got melanoma.  It’s terminal.”

Sure that he would rat her out in revenge for her rejection (he was actually thinking that it was always these angels who were taken too soon–too good for earth, they were), she didn’t wait for his reaction.  Instead, she wheeled her cart around and sped toward the end of the aisle, cringing at the dill spears squashing beneath the wheels and her flip flops, oozing a trail of juice behind her in the dust on the linoleum.

You’ve just committed a hit and run!  You’re a disloyal customer.  A bad citizen.  And you turned down a date with Probably Mr. Right.  You’re a complete and utter social deviant.

Not to mention a total idiot!

But her inner voice contained no authority, and did not command her to stop.  Instead, her pace quickened, carrying her more speedily away from the scene of the crime.  Her haste, however, was not motivated by shame or guilt for destroying private property, or even from regret that she’d turned down John Roberts.

“CLEAN-UP ON AISLE SEVEN!” she shrieked.  Or tried to shriek.  It came out more a squeak, strangled by a peal of laughter that pushed itself out of her lungs.

Her blood bubbled, her heart raced…It felt suspiciously like a thrill.  Which was exactly what it was, though she rejected the notion because normal people weren’t thrilled by deviance or stupid relationship moves.  She settled on exhilaration and blamed it on her impulsiveness, combined with the shock of learning of her own imminent death and being asked out by an incredibly handsome, apparently rich, man.

This was not the same life she had been not-living a few short hours ago.

She didn’t feel like herself at all.

If she had fled the supermarket then, she was not so far given over to her emerging desires that she could not have gone back to life as it had been prior to that point in time.  Sensing this, she panicked a little at the brink of change.  Still speeding toward the supermarket exit, she reasoned that mere months from her death was not the best time to suffer an identity crisis; she’d better go home and have a normal boring evening before she did something she regretted.

As it was, God (probably not the Judeo-Christian God, as He is not, historically, given to promoting delinquent behavior), the Universe, or Destiny, call it whatever you like, intervened.  A sudden burning within reminded her that while she could go home without French onion soup, French bread, biscotti, or cabernet, she could not go home without toilet paper.

So she pulled a u-turn.  She very narrowly avoided a collision with an apron-clad teenaged boy scurrying with a mop and yellow caution sign toward the Thou Shalt Not Touch Aisle.  The sight made her laugh again.  She raced toward the paper products aisle, astonished by the maniacal quality of her laugh, and yet unable able to stop laughing, not because she thought the situation was very funny so much as the act of laughing simply felt very, physically, good.

She’d never noticed before the precise way a laugh rippled up from her belly, making her chest feel big and full.  It was if the air she was breathing was made of pure joy, which tickled and tingled its way through her throat and out her lips.  And she’d never paid attention to the way the sound rang in her ears and made them feel pricked, alert, like a delighted dog’s or cat’s; or how, when her head was lolling back, her long ponytail whispered against the cotton of her t-shirt; or that her face, tilted up, up like a sunflower, felt so warm in rapture.

They were, of course, the sounds and sensations of a dream coming true.  But as we have established, she didn’t know she’d dreamed of this, so it never occurred to her that she was experiencing the endorphin rush that signified the culmination of a life-long desire.

(It also never occurred to her that John might have followed her or watched her from around the corner of a Heavenly Cloud toilet paper display stacked in the center of the aisle.)

One thought in her mind, of which she was not now fully conscious, but which, over the next few days, would become her singular, driving passion, was that if her melanoma struck her dead right now, as she ran her cart into that very display of Heavenly Cloud, toppling the tower of squashy building blocks, she would die a happy woman.  Or as close to happy as she could be, with dreams yet unrealized.

She was, by far, happier than she had ever been in her life to date.

#

It was the toilet paper that fundamentally altered her future.  A few squares of Heavenly Cloud set her life on an irrevocable course spiraling toward what she eventually would deem bliss.

Bliss was not, however, an adjective she would attach to the new roll of toilet paper.  She had not noticed, in her haste to get her Heavenly Cloud and get out of the supermarket, that the words “NEW AND IMPROVED FORMULA!” were emblazoned across the package.  Her personal experience found the former descriptor to be accurate, but as for improved… The formula violated everything she stood for as a toilet paper consumer–especially one who swore that God Himself stocked the bathrooms of His mansions with this brand.

She used Heavenly Cloud religiously, and if she saw you in the supermarket with any other brand in your cart, she would give you the $6.97 to buy a package of Heavenly Cloud.

Thus her current outrage.  She, who had been so faithful, had been betrayed–as no one in history had been since Judas sold Jesus for thirty pieces of silver.  All those people she’d converted!

Jerking the offending roll off the spring-mount wall holder, she tore off sheet after sheet, tossing them into the toilet.  She flushed it repeatedly until all that remained in her hand was an empty cardboard tube, and in her chest, a heart throbbing with satisfaction and adrenaline which prompted her to sprint to the living room and take up her laptop from where she’d abandoned it on the sofa when she decided to go to the supermarket.

Her fingers rattled across the keys in what she intended to be the beginning of a very scathing letter of complaint to the manufacturer of Heavenly Cloud toilet paper…

…only what came out was more like a horror story about a woman who’d found herself captive in a Soviet hostel where this formula of Heavenly Cloud was used as an instrument of torture.  Unable to stop herself from pounding violence and vitriol into her keyboard, she began to laugh, just as she had done while running amok in the supermarket.  She thought of that poor boy who’d had to clean up all those squashed pickles; what would Heavenly Cloud’s complaint department think if she told them cleaning up kitchen accidents was all their toilet paper was good for?

But her laughter and typing ceased when her conscience suddenly screamed, “WHAT IN HEAVEN’S NAME ARE YOU DOING?”

Fingers still curved in the home key position over the laptop, she sat for a second, chest heaving to catch her breath.  What was she doing?

Heavenly Cloud had never let her down before.  The flushed roll had been just one of twelve.  Perhaps only the one felt like a paper product rather than a textile.  Surely she could give Heavenly Cloud the benefit of the doubt?

With shaking hands, she selected the entire text of her document and punched delete–though not without a tightness in her throat and chest that made her next movements seem sluggish acts of will.

She shut down her computer, set it on the side table, switched off the lamp, and retreated to her bedroom.  Falling into bed, she pulled the covers up to her chin.  She was very tired; drained, in fact–as you tend to feel when a stopper is suddenly placed in your over-brimming happiness.

If only she knew that by writing that letter, the feeling would return and increase–and bring her something entirely unexpected, and even more secretly desired than deviant behavior.