Matt Cowper - The Clerk

Thomas thought back to his ruminations on his birthday. He’d believed himself superior to those middle-aged schmucks trying to shave off a few years by being adventurous and outdoorsy. He didn’t need to prove anything. And now he’d gone and overworked himself, because, it turned out, he did need to prove something, at least today. He was running on fumes, and he didn’t know if he had enough in him to fix dinner. He might skip it, since even throwing something in the microwave seemed, in his present state, as exhausting as preparing a ten-course meal for a two-hundred-person wedding reception.

But when he reached the top step and saw his sister sitting outside his door, he knew he’d have to pull energy from some deep, rarely-tapped source, because it was going to be a long night.

Emily was crouched against the wall, arms wrapped around knees. She tilted her head up at Thomas as he approached, and the look on her face was one of ecstatic defiance: it was the look of the battle-scarred protester, the troublemaking kid at school, the employee who’s about to tell their boss to go fuck himself.

“Hey,” she said. It was more a challenge than a greeting, like she thought of herself as a sentry posted outside his door, and would turn away anyone who didn’t have the correct credentials — including the tenant of the apartment. “Figured you’d show up eventually.”

“Where the hell have you been?” Thomas replied, trying to muster up some anger, but instead producing impotent whining. “We’ve all—”

“Don’t wanna hear it. I know everyone’s been looking for me. I’m sorry. I’m here now. I want to talk, not listen as you berate me.”

“You want to talk? You don’t want to listen?” Now he sounded angry — he thought. “Of all the goddamn selfish things—”

“Thomas, if you don’t stop reading me the riot act, I’ll leave. I’ll leave, and you may not see me for a long time.”

“Fine by me.”

Emily gaped. She was like all those supposedly decisive leaders who issue an ultimatum to some underling, who say take or leave it, and who are then surprised and offended when the person being put on the spot shrugs and decides to leave it.

“Well?” Thomas said. “Are you going to leave, like you just threatened to do?”

Emily sighed and stood up, wiping off the seat of her pants. Thomas watched her. Even on the roofed landing, with the day fading, she seemed healthy, if a bit crazy-eyed. Whatever she’d been doing the past week — and Thomas had imagined a slew of possibilities — it probably wasn’t self-destructive. Then again, it seemed few things could tarnish his sister’s beauty. He could remember growing up with her: Emily ate a pint of ice cream? Her body tossed metabolic gasoline on it and enthusiastically burnt it off. Emily stayed out late? She’d straggle home, sleep three hours, and wake up looking like she’d just returned from a getaway to some tropical island. Emily was down with the flu? You wouldn’t believe she was sick until you took her temperature.

Right now, she was dressed in a stylishly unstylish manner. Her jeans, as usual, were form-fitted to her long legs, and her hair lay tousled across her face and shoulders, as if she was windblown from the beach — which she very well could have been. Her black North Face jacket was tight at the right places, and her wearing it had driven many a lesser woman to fury over the years: here they were, showing off ten miles of cleavage and arms which they’d done their damnedest to sculpt in that muscular-but-still-feminine style, and this bitch looks better than them in a fucking jacket .

When Thomas compared how she looked to how he felt, he believed a great injustice had been visited upon his person in particular, and in general upon the Copelands and Dowlings who had worried about her. Someone who’d run away from her family should look like they’d been languishing in a dank, rat-infested prison cell, not like they’d been enjoying themselves at a spa.

“No, I’m not going to leave,” Emily said. “You called my bluff.”

Thomas frowned; a large part of him wished she hadn’t been bluffing.

“Well, guess you better come in,” he said.

He pulled his key ring out of his pocket, but the omnipotent force that had adjusted gravity had also transformed the metals of his keys, as well as the plastic of his countless rewards cards, into heavier, denser materials.

“You OK?” Emily asked, noticing her brother’s grumblings and his slow movements. “You look plum tuckered out, as mom used to say.”

“It’s been a long day and night. I was planning to skip dinner and collapse right into bed.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can fix you dinner, though. And we don’t have to talk for long.”

“No, I don’t want you to fix me dinner,” Thomas said firmly. One didn’t let family-abandoners and possible adulterers cook for them. “And you know this talk of ours is going to last till midnight, if not later…”

“No, it won’t, not if you don’t want it to. I’ve got plenty of time to talk. I’ll be around for a few days.”

Thomas didn’t reply. He just wanted to get inside and get himself horizontal, at least for a few seconds. He opened the door, flicked on the ceiling light in the living room, let his keys fall anywhere, and dropped onto the couch as if he’d been shot. Immediately he felt better. The cushions seemed to have some sort of healing force within them. He closed his eyes, and would’ve drifted off to the blissful dreamless sleep of the truly weary, but his sister was here, and she wanted to talk.

“Huh,” she said from somewhere in the apartment. It sounded like she was in the bedroom. “I haven’t been here in a while. Forgot what it looked like. It’s… nice.”

Thomas blinked his eyes open. “Nice? It’s just basic decor. Compared to your home…”

“That place in Raleigh is no longer my home.”

“Well, shit, Emily, what’s that even mean? I ask again: where the hell have you been? Answer the question this time.”

“I’m reenacting a story that’s as old as human history,” she said in delighted self-mockery. “I ran away with a boy.”

She was now in the living room, standing in front of a painting Thomas had picked up at a thrift store. It depicted a man and a hunting dog walking across a marsh on the edge of a large body of water. Their destination was a hunting blind, which they’d nearly reached. The day was overcast, the clouds and the water a slate gray, the cordgrass and scrub a dull green. The painting had an impressionistic quality, since the man, dog, and hunting blind were little more than jagged smudges. The painting had stirred Thomas when he first saw it, and he still sometimes felt that vigorous pang when he happened to glance at it. The picture wasn’t sunny or optimistic, but neither was its grayness and vagueness oppressive. It just was.

And Thomas didn’t like his sister looking at it. Such a morally bankrupt person didn’t deserve to be in the presence of any sort of art. Yes, he realized his thoughts were similar to what Peggy, that Bible-thumping pestilence, would say at work during one of her condemnation marathons, but he didn’t care.

“Nice painting,” she said, as if she’d read his thoughts and was trying to needle him. “I don’t remember this one.”

“Can you elaborate on how you ‘ran away with a boy’?” he said, ignoring her comment. “I feel like I’m pulling teeth here.”

“No small talk? Just dive right in, huh? Is this how you treat every lady who comes here? No foreplay, let’s get down to the serious stuff?”

Thomas sat up, though the increased gravity tried its hardest to keep him down.