Unfinished Story

Wilma Frick leafed through the paper, knifing its transparent spine with pink-polished thumb and forefingers. Unfolding it over and tucking its rustled, unruly corners over each other, she felt numb and bland irked by the whispering lonely ghost of solitude that haunted the angled crooks and corners of her house, spooking behind the lattices, staring back in the mirror, creaking on the hallway floorboards under a single pair of languished steps, brushing the linoleum echoing the numbness of a void. She stopped at the sex-classified and looked at its ashen and ebon Ferris wheel of desire letting the wheel of words tickle her brain and massage her doubts like pastoral promises. There, nestled between the boxed headlines offering ten-inch members or a caged anorexic transgender, under the wan light of a moth-colored light-bulb, her eyes caught like brambles gripping a clothed ankle, and fixed on a 2 by 4 inch ad: “Man seeking woman between 25 and 40. “Wilma was 38 and had long since started to get desperate
She had not been on a date in four years and spent her days marinating in the distilled haze of talk shows and apple martinis, her mind scrubbed with soap operas and their bland one-cell tissue of scripted melodrama. Evenings she spent in self-doubt doused in doses of wheel of fortune digesting her Lean Cuisine entrees before perfunctorily switching over to run her nightly marathon of sitcoms. Her mother began to call her frantically on Saturday Mornings, and then Tuesdays as well before her shift at Grand View Mental Facility. And then of course nearly every day she would call to hoarsely rebuke her churlish ways and remind her that she did not want to die alone. Now she steeped in fear of expiring all by herself like some abandoned china-doll rocking off-kilter in her forlorn cracked-paint cradle, there she would lie in her own bed, as alone as a fetus in the womb whacked out of her mind on Percoset and diet pills convulsing between sticky, soiled sheets when the maker sent his reaper.
Wilma glanced back at the paper sensing a chill flare down her spine as outside the heat wave blistered on. Looking up, she lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply letting the smoke cloud her lungs. Wilma got up from her slouch on the seat and shuffled over to the kitchen where she fixed her fifth or sixth Bloody Mary, clasping up the glass and swirling the pureed red pulp inspecting it with a quizzical look on her chubby face before she put it down with girlish satisfaction. Then she yanked open the cabinet door on grinding hinges and put the capped Grey Goose into its murky, stacked- geometric interior. She grabbed her glass leaving looping rings of moisture on the Formica counter.
Walking over the fuzzy brown carpet that tongued with lint-sponged steps like an angora sweater cushioning her bare feet. She heard the crunch of glass and cried out in pain as thin jagged glass stabbed into her fleshy left foot. Cursing aloud, she bent her corpulent frame like a huge flesh doughnut being rolled up and began to examine her foot. In between her toes bristled bits of a broken filament fixture she was planning to install over her waterbed to get the feel of a tropical beach bar minus the palm fronds. Wilma reached over and plucked the glass out like she was plucking quills out of porcupine. She awkwardly tossed the blood-tinged fragments into a wicker wastebasket adding to a menagerie of apple cores, hairnets, balled tissue paper, and fruit flies. Scanning her cramped living room her eyes fell on the tented section of the newspaper she was reading gabled upwards and flapping like a curtain in a draft, swishing as her perennially gyrating fan pelted it with gusts of sour, sweat streaked air. She wanted to finish reading the ad she had started about a possible male caller, a princely, star-struck suitor blowing the queen of hearts in a wet, sloppy kiss, a fat hairy, perfect match to scoop her up from her soup-can cluttered kitchen on the fringe of North Hollywood, or at least lay her on her alpaca downed couch (That she had purchased at an Alpaca ranch in Palm Springs before her nineteenth nervous breakdown) and man handle her like someone breaking livestock, chafing her peach-fuzzed thighs against the downy lama fleece of her couch. But she was not ready to confront the outside world with even a praying, finger-crossed phone call. Roosted on her reclining settee she had strategically placed mere feet from her forty-inch TV to bear her through an unending campaign of sitcoms she flipped through a TV Guide with the attentiveness a poet memorizing a divan. On afternoons like this, battling the dry heat she hustled between the refrigerator and television like a general in perpetual retreat and re-assault, sitting down and waving the remote: a frenzied conductor for one instant navigating the TV tower surf and then in the next surrendering to her ubiquitous appetite scurrying her rippled frame to the icebox for another frozen entrée. She scampered around the house like a caged fox but never beyond the kitchen or front door; the smoky apartment was her sole turf as she suffered from crippling agoraphobia, she would timidly gaze out the window but always let her glance fall back on the TV with its mothering arms and reassuring chatter. The TV was like a placenta nurturing her ignorance, in rays and electro-magnetic emissions, nursing her in its fuzz-crackled stare.