Positive Alex

Alex felt positive. Positive that he had forgotten to lock the door to his house.

This was of particular importance due to his acrimonious breakup with his partner Rick. The stuff that held together was what now pulled them apart. Who owned what, the ugly business of dismantling the accumulation of stuff. It felt like some maudlin encapsulation of the slow dissolution of 5 years.

At this point, he just wanted to be rid of it. Perversely he didn't want Rick to have a bit of it. Rick said that he would show up one day with a UHaul and cart what he thought was his away. Damn if he gets the big-ass TV. Damn if he gets the stainless steel refrigerator. Damn Damn Damn.

Alex's cubicle had been stripped of any reference to Rick, but the gaping holes where something once was whispered a reminder. He considered the empty cubicle 3 down, on the right. It was across from a window, a precious commodity. The reality was that his manager didn't wield enough influence to secure it for him. Hmmmm....he could just move his stuff in there. After all, it had been empty for one whole week when Tamara was escorted from the building, all of her stuff in a cardboard box. He looked under his desk, and there was a cardboard box with Rickstuff inside.

The Razr buzzed in his pants pocket. He glanced at the screen, it was Rick. Alex let it go to voice mail.

At lunch Alex went home. He tried the front door. It was locked. Whew.......

He unlocked the door, and everything was there.

He felt disappointed. It wasn't fair. The entire morning had been spent deciding the next move to get even, but there was no getting even, because Rick had not upped the ante. Alex checked his voicemail. It was Rick's easy voice, telling him that he was at the airport. He had applied for a transfer at work, and there was an opening in Portland. He was on his way there now.

Alex was pissed. He was cheated. He wanted closure and Rick got the last word.

The cell buzzed. It was Rick again. Alex ignored it.

Ian in Flames

It began with a bloody toe. Ian was wearing flip flops, and stepped on a piece of metal, which poked through the foam rubber and neatly sliced his middle toe open.

It took him a while to get it to stop bleeding, and longer still to get a band aid to actually stick. He ended up wrapping the band aid with a small strip of duct tape to hold it in place. Later he would regret this decision, as the adhesive clung to his toe itself. It would require a lot of cursing and a pocket knife to remove.

He stood in front of Elaine's apartment, on the 5th floor. There was no way that she was going to let him in. Perhaps it would be best to begin considering her his "ex girlfriend", but he was not ready to make that semantic leap just yet. It was not done just yet.

Elaine was smart to ditch him, Ian thought. There were a lot of issues in his life. He used to think that some of these things were actually considered "personality", but losing his job made him reconsider. Work was an unfair scenario, trading part of his finite life to do someone else's tasks. This thought had informed his attitude towards his job. They owed him something more than a paycheck. They owned everyone big time. He had never read Marx but told people he was a marxist.

There was smoking. He was defiant of anti-smoking laws. He was constantly harassed when he chose to smoke. It started in restaurants. Now it was public areas. Soon they would have anti-smoking detectors in his dorm room, he thought glumly.

What Ian didn't know was that there wasn't a smoke detector at all in his dorm room, but there was a web camera. His roommate had installed it to monitor his room when he wasn't there. He had even put it on his web page, and without his knowledge, someone had posed his page to a blog that was read by millions. Ian was on his way to becoming a internet star, but not in a way that he would appreciate.

Elaine would eventually get a text message from a friend that pointed her to this blog. She would think to herself, as she watched, how pathetic Ian was, with his little toaster oven, microwave and dorm sized fridge, with little else other than a bottle of peppermint schnapps wedged in the freezer. This bottle would figure prominently in Ian's future, when he accidentally set the room on fire.