Skinning Them

A bird had gotten in from the outdoor department and some young collegian had chosen today to seek out the manager with a speech on animal cruelty. And Jackson didn’t know how to say, yes, ma’am, birds are in here every day, ma’am, it’s a danger to the employees to try and retrieve them, ma’am. Instead he caught Callaghan by his apron on his way out, on his way to the beach, and asked him to get a net and see if he could snare the bird before the young woman had a stroke. And Callaghan didn’t know how to say no, sir, I’m have plans, sir, this job and this bird aren’t my life…sir.

The collegian would chase the bird around and tell it not to panic. So Jackson was obligated to follow. He fled by Mosh, nearly leaving a trail of fire from the heels of his shoes, and stopped himself briefly to glance back at her and point. “Watch the registers, ya?” he called, and turned away again before receiving an answer.

“O, yes,” she replied to herself, standing sentry between the Gatorades and Diet Cokes as she had been for a half hour at least. It was not a zealous statement on her part. Zeal often evaded the workplace, and she thought, in my life I file this under temporary. But you still waste time on temporary things.

She really thought about quitting—not for any reason in particular. It was just the idea of quitting, the idea of walking out of there and into a different life. The reality was, she saw, that it would be more like walking out of a paycheck and walking into the gutter. She had never cared much for birds, but there were two flying around indoors, finches maybe, and only one of them had a sympathizer. The other sat above Mosh and preened; she had been watching it for most of her shift.

“That’s twelve gigs of RAM and a terabyte of hard drive, you can’t chew through that in a lifetime,” said Carrey that evening, as she and Mosh sat with their knees bent and toes touching, spanning a park bench. They did this because the two of them, if they sat normally, were too skinny to occupy more than half the bench and someone else inevitably would sit on the other half. Neither of them preferred sitting next to the anonymous and Carrey was loud and made it easy to eavesdrop on her every word. “If we go in together we can pay it off in full straight away.”

Boba came up through the straw too fast—Mosh either forgot she had gotten a bubble tea or wondered why she had gotten it because as a whole she didn’t like boba, she rather liked the idea of it, and the tapioca pearls jammed in her throat and slid down like little slugs. She stuck her tongue out and recovered. “That’s half a grand apiece, ya?”

“Something like that,” Carrey said.

“I don’t have half a grand.” If anything, she bought boba tea for the large straw and when her gag reflex finally began to reject the tiny slugs she just enjoyed watching the tapioca pearls float around.

“You do too have half a grand,” Carrey said, putting her coffee on the ground beside her. “Every week you say, ‘I’ve reached…” and last week you were upwards of thirteen stacks saved. You do too.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Mosh said. “Last week I had thirteen thousand, this week I’m broke.”

“Because you made it rain and bought a new car, I guess,” Carrey snorted.

“O, yes,” Mosh replied. There was always a colorless cold about this statement. To Carrey it was a colorless cold in general; Mosh was plain, auburn-haired, pale, and not very excitable, but she was a point of interest, for better or worse. She had the tendency to speak about being violent and malicious in the flattest of tones, so flat that you could only laugh—and in your frail little gut you would shudder smallishly and not realize it until later. She was never serious, but her humor wore a very serious face. And if you opened her up enough she got weird, as if she had an alien’s green insides. People tended to avoid Mosh.

Carrey was not People. Carrey had big horse teeth and a stretched-out face blotted with the little dents of acne scars here and there. She redeemed herself in her blackest black eyes and, to others, in her skill with makeup. If you’ve heard of the white t-shirt and jeans type of person, then Carrey was the black t-shirt and jeans type. Particularly often she wore a black shirt with the word “suck” on in in bold Arial Black, like SUCK. But she had another shirt that said, in frail small font, something like "I remembered to wear my bra today." Carrey was one such miraculous person with opinions, as Mosh often thought of her. Because if you didn’t express your opinions, Mosh concluded that you didn’t have any. And that was also true of herself.

People flocked to Carrey. She was an A cup and had the stick body of an underwear model after Photoshop. She was boney and pokey to hug. So it was a point of interest to Mosh that nearly everyone in the apartment building knew her, nearly everyone in the range of coffee shops new her, and nearly every guy in range of her sphere of influence had touched her in one way or another and thought about her long thereafter. Her bone legs made Mosh’s look fat, but Mosh was not fat.

Some guy, whose only memorable features in the palette of memory were his hair, sprayed and gelled into a bird’s nest formation, and his red-and-white Waldo-esque hoodie, sat down on the bench across the way. Mosh saw him pull the glimmer of a lighter from his pants pocket.

“I want to be Youtube famous,” Carrey whined. “I’m too poor. Help me, Mish-Mosh. Come on, miss Mads. My Maddie. Madison Anne Mosh. O, please.”

“You’re not poor,” Mosh said. “When I told you I had thirteen stacks a-stewing you told me, ‘I have fifteen-something, suck a dick.’”

“It’s not in my budget to deal out one thou if you’re going to use it to play puzzle games,” Carrey grumbled. “You’ll help me out, ya? We’ll be Youtube famous together. The internet likes people like you, and they really like people like me.”

“I’ll help you with fixed interest,” Mosh said. “On the condition that you keep your porn off of the rig.”

“With a twenty-five inch screen that’s hardly fair,” Carrey complained. “Come on. Come on, come on, come on. I want to buy it. I’ve waited long enough for it.”

Carrey had only had the idea since last Tuesday. Mosh, on the other hand, with frigid coolness, had been fooling, which Carrey knew. She had had the idea to buy a PC ever since she couldn’t have one—her whole life, practically—not for Youtube fame, which was impractical, but because if she could drown away one of her past lives (one day in Mosh time) she might be content to live more lives in the future. That wasn’t to say that Mosh ever thought of discontinuing herself—not by any means. But she did wish for contentedness from time to time, and when she went whole lives without it, she always thought something along the lines of, “Better luck next time.”

The guy across the way had lit his cigarette and Carrey hadn’t quite noticed until she lifted her great nose and wrinkled it, reviled. So she raised her megaphone mouth toward the sky and said, “This day was so nice, Mosh!” And this drew the attention of about everyone in their corner of the park. The active smoker was looking, and when Carrey met his eyes he withdrew as though a dart had been thrown his way. “Until Waldo took up his cancer-stick!” For Carrey was passionate about this. “I’ll read your obituary in ten years, ya?”

The remark sort of landed on and slid off of the guy. He blinked, probably finding her hard to believe. Most people didn’t react to direct criticism from some anonymous. They blinked and stared and looked around them. Probably they thought about it later, and figured, “I’ve been insulted!” And felt the gut-rising pang of anger you’re too late to refute.

The girls left, Carrey swinging her hips at a trot-walk, Mosh trailing somewhat behind with rolled shoulders and a prescription of minor scoliosis still hanging on her from middle school. She thought—does anyone think I have scoliosis when they look? Every girl in that class period in the locker room knew she had it because they cleared the ruler within the minute, and she (and some girl, Dana or some other) emerged late, having been ruler’d several times, with a recommendation for seeing a doctor about it. Do people notice? But most people rolled their shoulders.

Carrey on the other hand had straight posture, maybe too straight. She had once gone to private school, where her teacher called them out by name if they slouched. The point? She didn’t know. If she put her hair up and wasn’t too proud to wear her glasses, she looked like a librarian. She looked like a stiff in collared shirts. Necklines ran low in her closet.

So the bubble tea met the trash, and Carrey constantly took birdish sips from her hazelnut roast. And in their apartment they felt the calm of air conditioning drowning out the TV, and Carrey scrolled through her social media and bought the damn computer at eleven at night, half and half between them. Mosh gave way to the sinkhole of her head, and while Carrey thought small, surface level thoughts while scrolling media, as she preferred to do to achieve a blank sleeping state of mind before bed, Mosh would turn to water and seep through the floorboards in her head, would contemplate the absurd, would think for a moment about Grieg not being back yet as her slight return to the surface, and then fall and experience some zero-gravity there in some dark Tartarus between neurons. All the while she stared forward with dull, sighing fish eyes.

I have a name, she thought in this Tartarus. I have a name that people call me. It’s my name, but is it on me or am I in it? Is my name a jar or jelly (if I am toast)? I own it, so I wear my name. I have a name—the very thought rose a flurry in her stomach. We have names, isn’t that odd?

She spent only brief time in Tartarus. And she resurfaced again, and thought—I have to get up early tomorrow. I have to go to work in the misty morning, which means I have to wake up before the sun does in seven hours. Why does anyone wake up so early? The best part of life is a good sleep.

She had just thought about appearing on Youtube, and felt some quiet, pithy excitement about what could be if they did in fact get popular. She felt some deep, primal desire to be a familiar face worldwide to someone anywhere. That was the allure, but it was shallow. No discredit to the pursuit of fame, but it was a shallow pursuit, she thought, when everyone was the next Youtuber. Mosh didn’t recognize hope as a contributing member of society.

“It should ship in two days or so, and it’ll take about a week to get here,” Carrey said suddenly. “Then we can set it up with our recording stuff and find games to play together. I want to be like Markiplier. Do you see where I’m coming from?”

“O, yes,” Mosh said. Carrey’s brows fell flat. “We have plenty of male role models to steer us right.”

Carrey’s face softened again, because she knew Mosh was passionate on this subject in a bland, indirect sort of way. “Not to worry. In a year flat, people like us will sit on their couch waiting for their rigs and say, ‘I want to be like them.’ Meaning us.”

“The Youtube experience is different between us,” Mosh said, meaning gender.

“But you watch Markiplier,” Carrey observed, “if no one else.”

Mosh could tolerate no one else. “Sure.”

“So for now, we’ll take after male role models,” Carrey said, “until we’re the girl gamers that people aspire to. We can inspire girls like us, and make them feel like they’re represented.”

So Mosh, a little put-off, shifted and thought about going to bed. “I’m not a girl gamer,” she said. “I’m a gamer.”

Grieg, at that time, jabbed his key into the door, unlocked what was already unlocked, and floated in. He closed the door so quietly and took so long in accomplishing this that they both were staring. He turned to his left for the kitchen, and wasn’t particularly affected by anyone else in the room. There he began the work of building a too-tall sandwich combining ingredients no one would think of in a snap—ham, salami, pepperjack cheese, ham’s second layer, Cheetos, olive oil mayo, a dab of horseradish, relish, and some leftover tuna from last night—propped it up with a toothpick, and crammed it into his jaw and ate it on the counter. It was absolutely everything he had wanted to eat in the past four hours, for he had been tweaking not near to a convenience store, and had changed out of his tweaking clothes in the car, and sprayed himself with Axe in the parking lot. Now, Mosh thought, he smelled like a thirteen year old tweaker. But Carrey liked the smell of Axe in any quantity.

“You dyed your hair, Mosh?” he asked, pausing in his midnight snack, his grey eyes squinting at them suddenly over the brim of the sandwich.

“O, yes,” Mosh said, “I dyed it the same color it was yesterday. Like it?”

He kept squinting, and nodded slowly. “I do but you dye it every day, I feel like I hardly know you.”

There were pain pills somewhere under his bed and in various spots in his car and miscellaneous baggies of other things. His hobby only occurred once or thrice a week, however much he could afford. Otherwise there were capsules, and he was always, from one thing or another, of the mind that Mosh was a rebellious free-flier, dying her hair dark brown one day and light brown the next, and sometimes blue. In a lot of ways he liked that aspect of her.

“How many garbage cans did you scatter on your way in, Kite?” Carrey asked. She would only call him Kite. He had objections when he wasn’t as high as one.

“How many what?” he asked, his mouth full and dusted with Cheeto orange and mayo.

Carrey shook her head, absorbed on her phone. “Work tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” Grieg said. “Probably.” He looked to Mosh. “Do I work tomorrow?”

“Probably,” said Mosh.

So Grieg thought, shrugged, and held his sandwich remnant in one hand, sucking the mayo driblets off of the other. He pocketed what he had bitten off in his cheek and, giving Mosh a onceover, said, “You look good in that color.”

“I did, yesterday, too,” she said. “You missed it.”

“God-fucking-damn,” he said. So he finished his sandwich and recalled, “I got invited to a thing at a guy’s place tomorrow at midnight. I’m going.”

I wouldn’t, Mosh thought. But she wouldn’t do a lot of things. Carrey, if she had been listening, might have thought, I wouldn’t, but she hardly listened to Grieg. She called him their sock monkey, from which they pull out money when the rent is due. It had been his apartment, and in a state of clear-mindedness one summer he posted an ad for female roommates specifically, two of them, to help with rent because he could scarcely tolerate guys—six pairs of two had come and gone in the last year, all kicked to the curb by his boot. He found himself better in female company. Neither Carrey nor Mosh knew why. Carrey had been first to move out of her parents’ into his apartment, unafraid, operating as Carrey did, of an oddly specific Craigslist ad. Once Mosh had gotten to meet him and know him, had assessed the state of his room and taken eight good mixed drinks from him there without suspicion, she became the second roommate.

For all her impressions of him and her discerning eye, she decided that he was wholly harmless, in fact terribly so. He was a toe-head with Irish bloodlines somewhere far back; his hair stuck up on its own in a little white fluff at the crest and receded some on either temple. He had one entire drawer full of band shirts from miscellaneous concerts, listened devotedly to Major Lazer and had a myriad of CDs organized in rows of all odd genres. He wore black jeans to every occasion, all eaten at the heel, and had the look of someone who had crossed thirty. But he was twenty-three as far as either of them knew, a college dropout and menial laborer at a super Walmart down the street. Of all of them, Mosh often thought his life the most miserable. But he was so constantly in a lighthearted mood that no one would ever know how he felt coming down from everything. Carrey thought him pointless, worthless, every insult under the sun. But there were still occasions when she and him would sit together on his bed and look but not touch.

They were all college dropouts. Carrey said all the great ones were. Mosh was of the feeling that she didn’t want to look back on the first twenty-one years of her life as a grey mush—the grey mush called “when I was in school,” while someone somewhere looked on those twenty-one years as they did any other point in their life, with freedom, seeing vitality everywhere, remembering more, remembering vividly, living. So she had gotten out at nineteen. But there she was thinking in Tartarus again.

Grieg eventually toddled away to bed as a child would, holding mum’s hand, rubbing his eye. Carrey was the last to retire, the one true night owl. Around one she rummaged for something to eat and settled on a glass of milk, and only afterward did she sit fish-eyed, jeans unzipped, and descended into a sort of Elysium. Why did she enjoy pleasure? she thought idly. What am I for?

She worked at a music store and listened to amateurs blow hard on clarinets and saxophones in the back, where they gave lessons. She sat at the desk and could play guitar very well, but none of her coworkers knew that. She had, on slow days, this heavy anti-religion about her for no good reason. And then she would think, as a trombone went “bwaaa-wuuuuh-waaaa,” that something bigger really did exist. Not God, for she never thought of God. Something bigger, because the whole world and everything in it, seemed oddly specific, and everything they made of themselves seemed worth remembering.

Carrey climbed into bed in tiny black panties and a crop top and, listening to Mosh snore across the hall, fell asleep under the blue veil of her nightlight.

Mosh had set her alarm and slept open-mouthed, her hair in knots.

Grieg lay half on half off his bed in a puddle of drool, and dreamt a little bit of Mosh in a wishful way, a product of his crash. He often dreamt of Mosh. He had gone to elementary with her, but she didn’t recall. They were harmless things, his dreams—she only existed there in theory, not even in image, and when he woke up if he could remember the dream, he would just know she was in it. And when he dreamt of Carrey they were interlocked, destructively passionate with each other, and fighting, as they would if he ever went clean of some substance for more than a few hours.