Anne-Marie Kinney - Radio Iris

“I’m sorry,” she’ll say. “I’m trying, I am.” And when the banging grows more urgent, she’ll search the walls frantically for a window that will never materialize.

She tries to picture the man next door in his office, doing whatever he is doing, but his features are hard to delineate. It’s as though she’s never quite looking at him. She’s so intimidated by his presence that she can’t bring her eyes to focus on him. She stares into the radio’s face again, and tries to imagine his, but all she can conjure is his earthy smell, and the way he seems to fill space, even through a wall, in such a way that she can feel it in her own space. His face could be anybody’s. Inertia keeps her sitting, keeps her staring at the radio in her hands. She turns it on, turns the dial a notch and snowy static fills the room. She switches it off again, and puts the radio down.

A thought occurs to her, then. She gets up and goes into the kitchen, quickly outlining a brief speech in her head, and reaches for the cordless phone on the wall.

She dials the office until her own voice greets her, Thank you for calling…

At her own voice’s prompting, she dials 3 for her boss’s voicemail and again she is greeted warmly, this time by the boss. Everyone is so polite when they’re not there. At the tone, she gears herself up to sound pitiful.

“Hi,” she says, “it’s me. I am so sorry to do this, but I have an awful sore throat and a fever of a hundred and one. I don’t think I’m going to be able to come in today. Hopefully, I’ll be better tomorrow. Sorry.”

She drops the phone on the counter and leans on her elbows. The new emptiness of the day looms ahead like a fog. She expects to feel guilty. She expects the guilt to envelop her, encase her limbs. But this isn’t guilt. This is something else. This is something she could see herself doing more often.

She heads back to her bedroom and dresses in a pair of cutoffs and a white tank top, the sunlight pushing the walls of her small apartment inward. She combs knots out of her hair and wonders what she is dressing for. What could she do? What could be waiting for her? She’s sweating; it’s too hot already. Her cell phone rings on the floor and she picks it up.

“Hey, what’s up?” Mallory sighs.

“I called in sick.”

“Good for you. I got fired.”

They agree to meet at Ray’s in an hour, and Iris finishes getting ready. She swishes mouthwash while tying her shoes, humming through the stinging green liquid. She picks her big canvas tote bag from the top shelf of her closet and switches her belongings from her purse. She’s sitting on the closet floor with her makeup and billfold, her keys and gum wrappers in piles around her, thinking how long it’s been since she’s organized anything, her bedroom a jumble of hastily stashed clothes, cheap, falling-apart shoes, and dust bunnies illuminated by sunbeams, when a loud rush of hissing snow comes blaring through the open door. She jumps up and rushes back to the living room, where the little radio leans against the arm of the couch, pervading the room with white noise. She snatches it up and jabs the off switch hard. Off— it’s off this time— was it off before? The room is silent again, and Iris carries the radio back to her bedroom. She sets it on the dresser next to her stereo. She turns her stereo on, and Elvis is singing about suspicious minds. She looks at the radio beside her stereo, side by side, the one only two years old, black and a little imposing, her daily companion, the other one a flat gray, toy-like, and seemingly quite old, with a slightly bent antenna. She picks up the little radio, flips open the back and removes the batteries, tucking them away together in her top drawer as the horns swell brightly, trumpeting the day outside her smudgy window. She listens to the rest of the song standing against the dresser, her head resting on her folded arms.

She arrives at Ray’s Coffee Shop before Mallory and finds a table upstairs, looking out over the bottom level. This way, she can see her when she comes in, and she can watch people unnoticed. She can stare right down at their heads in this wooden room, the walls, floor, ceiling, and tables all the same shade of wood, like the place was carved out of a single tree, then filled with soft red couches and stacks of newspaper. Most of the customers are alone, spines curved toward computer screens, books, or newspapers. She remembers that she has not read a real honest-to-god book in possibly months.

Mallory walks in to a clang of little bells and Iris waves down to her. She watches the top of her head as she orders her coffee.

A minute later, Mallory comes over and slumps into the chair opposite Iris. Her hair is in loose pigtails, a little greasy at the scalp, and she is wearing a heavy gray sweatshirt, though it is well over eighty degrees outside. She sets her cup down on the table, closer to Iris than to herself. She makes no move to drink from it.

“Here,” Mallory says. “I don’t want it.”

“Oh, thanks,” Iris says, gently pushing the cup to the side. “So.”

“Yeah, so.”

“Do you want to tell me what happened?” Iris asks.

Mallory rolls her eyes. “I just had to get out of the house. Sneering into the mirror isn’t doing anything for me and Nathan is sick of looking at me like this.”

“Nathan?”

“Nathan? My boyfriend? God, can you retain anything?”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Whatever. At least I’ll get unemployment for a while. So freeing, right? I feel so unencumbered I could puke.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think about what I would do with my time if I didn’t have a job. Haven’t you? You could take a class, or learn how to do something…”

“I don’t need to learn shit. I need to be able to pay my internet bill so I can keep judging celebrities’ outfits.”

“Yeah, of course.”

The two sit in silence for a moment. The music over the speakers stops suddenly and Iris only then notices that there was music to begin with. Everyone in the café appears jarred out of something, eyes searching the silent air. A moment later the music is back, on a different radio station now, but filling the same need. A collective sigh of relief, masked now, unshared.

Mallory starts laughing, a loud, rollicking laugh. She doesn’t seem to have noticed the shift.

“And the funniest part is,” Mallory says, her laughter cooling, “I was going to quit anyway.”

“What?”

“I’d been drafting my resignation letter in my head for months.”

“Why?”

“Because I couldn’t spend my life like that anymore, always under the gun, on deadline, we need this yesterday, like everything is life or death.”

“I can’t even imagine. So, then, it’s a good thing you got fired?”

“No, because now I’m humiliated. And I didn’t get to give her my awesome letter. I was going to call her Countess Bitchface.”

“I don’t know what I’d call my boss if I called him anything.”

Iris thinks of the look on her boss’s face as he examined the melons, holding them up to his ear as though attempting to crack a safe. She wonders where he is now, since he isn’t where he said he’d be. He could be absolutely anywhere. She slumps down a little into her seat in case he’s here.

“And now what?” Mallory continues. “It was always my plan to have some killer thing to leave for, to gloat about, and I waited too long.” Slowly, her hard fuck-all expression gives way to a blank stare.

“Well,” Iris says.

Mallory is looking at her fingernails.

“What would you do?” Mallory sighs, reaching for the coffee now, taking a long slug.

“What?”

“You said you’ve thought about what you’d do with all the extra time if you didn’t have to work. So? What have you come up with?”