Their Love

He loved her like others loved the rain although he wished she stopped literally showering him with water unexpectedly.

She loved playfully chasing after him in a field of spring flowers up until her allergies caught up with her or until he handed over the allergy medication.

He loved watching her eat despite her protestations that it was creepy and weird especially when he insisted on recording it for exactly those reasons.

She loved invading his space on the couch utilizing the most modern warfare techniques and strategies that she could reasonably afford given their tight budget.

He loved standing in long lines with her because of her unique way of making all lines paradoxically appear circular.

She loved that he never gave up until he actually turned molehills into mountains.

He loved the period of peaceful serenity each morning just after she woke up and just before she started screaming at him for putting lipstick and blush on the dog again.

She loved making him lunch for all of the wrong reasons.

He loved taking her on long romantic walks to his favourite spots while she argued that his definition of romantic needed a complete overhaul.

She loved helping nurse him back to health when he was sick, but she refused to have him sit on her lap while sucking from the bottle.

He loved spending weekend afternoons watching paint dry, while she absolutely adored painting him.

She loved packing up all of her belongings, leaving abruptly and waiting down by the train station that he built for her in the backyard as she needed a place to play make believe with all of her dollies.

He loved her way with words in all of its nonsensical, raving and quite worrisome detail.

She loved smashing his sand castles and then intimidatingly standing over him celebrating the fact that her castles were now clearly bigger.

He loved her smile and her laugh and, to a somewhat lesser degree, her unrelenting and quite brutally sarcastic satirical love letters.

She loved his carefree and whimsical approach to life except in those moments when he was operating heavy duty machinery.

He loved sitting next to her at the table both because it was her, but also because it was just a really fine table which displayed expert craftsmanship.

She loved when he first referred to her as his peach, though as time went on, it became more and more concerning especially considering the crazed smile on his face whenever he said it.

He loved walking a mile in her shoes equally because of the perspective it gained him as well as the comfort that custom-made insoles provided.

She loved his bear hugs which were now thankfully given using 50% less bear.

originally published in The Bitchin' Kitsch 

Time to Make it Snow

He sat on the grass by the lake under the shade of the grand old oak tree spying on her swimming from his private vantage point, just marveling at how wet her hair was able to get and just laughing at how dry it would be later.

She took the expression “if the shoe fits, wear it” literally exactly once a month just so the huge pile of shoes in her closet didn’t feel like a complete waste of money.

He climbed a ladder to the roof of his house, hoisted himself up, and looked back down at the ground with disdain and pity. It was moments like this when he felt so proud and alone.

She is often told that she looks like a woman half her age which makes her understandably happy as well as eager to meet this youthful woman whom she will either befriend, tear to shreds or both.

He drinks water with a thirst befitting a much thirstier person or a less thirsty person who is aiming to fit in among all of the other very thirsty and cool people he is always surrounded by, which he is.

She burst through the door, ran to the bookshelf and hurriedly re-organized her books by their chronological date of publication just in time for the arrival of her mother who only asked for one thing in return for years of thankless parenting; randomly assorted books and periodicals whenever she visited. “Take that mom!” she whispered devilishly under her breath as she heard her mom knocking at the door.

He opened his closet and placed all of his shirts in a pile and then, taking exactly four large steps backward, he leapt on top of the shirts with a glee that could only come from leaping onto a large pile of shirts or finally being completely wart free.

She was heading uptown on the bus surrounded by hippos, most likely hungry hungry ones, and she was just praying that they weren’t also going to the library, no matter how real or imaginary they or her trip to the library was.

He sat in his car and observed the busy street around him – a couple walking their dog, the mail carrier distributing letters and flyers, a young woman going for a run, some kids making a lemonade stand and an older man watering flowers in his underwear. “Damn,” he thought as he looked around in wonderment “this is one amazing tuna salad sandwich.”

She was sitting at her desk in the dark, her face illuminated by the moon in the window, as she faced a giant pile of premium white paper. She methodically picked up one sheet at a time and punched hole after hole after hole in them until all that was remaining was a massive mountain of white circles. With as much restraint as she could muster, she grabbed her glue stick, rose and walked slowly and menacingly towards the freshly painted black wall. “Time to make it snow” she whispered.

He spent his days wantonly and dramatically cracking nuts and then, stopping, feeling guilty and gluing them back together.

She sat at the piano and played slow, moving and emotional songs for hours until she just couldn’t take it any longer as she dropped her head and wept. Steadying herself, she stood, took a step back and then grabbed her trusty saw. No one, not even her beloved piano, could make her feel this way.

He looked at the large, juicy apple on the counter with misplaced jealousy followed by vicious sadistic chopping with his invisible knife before turning to face himself in the mirror with the smug satisfaction of a job well done before settling down to enjoy yet another really great apple still filled with misplaced jealousy.

She sat on the beach watching the waves crash at her feet enjoying this perfect moment of relaxation. A flock of seagulls announced their presence overhead. The waves continued. Her mind drifted. She wondered how different things would be if, instead of water, the waves were in fact made up of flocks of seagulls and she, for some reason, smelled strongly of fish. Or what if she was a seagull and the rest of the flock, all of a sudden, decided they no longer wished to fly with her for reasons they couldn’t completely articulate mostly because they were seagulls. Or if this beach and the waves and the seagulls were merely figments of her imagination or she of theirs. She sat on the beach watching the waves crash at her feet only feeling significantly less relaxed.

He, after many months of menu planning and hiring staff, opened up his first restaurant to rave reviews such as “why does this place reek of fish?”, “you do know that this isn’t your restaurant, it’s my boat, right?”, “stop wildly waving that freshly caught snapper in my face while imitating my voice” and “fine, if I order the bouillabaisse, will you leave me and my boat alone?”.

She often stands outside on her deck on warm summer evenings, glass of wine in hand, just wishing she was more one dimensional in all senses of the term.

He is often referred to as a human garbage can by his friends who are, in fact, garbage cans and aren’t, in his experience, the best judgers of character. And yet, it still hurts.

She held her newborn baby on her lap the way a mother dolphin would hold a baby dolphin if it had arms and hands and a lap. Why she was always making things unnecessarily challenging and awkward and involving dolphins, she’d never know.

He spent his afternoon enjoying the groves of cool jazz, sipping deliciously fruity cocktails, preparing delicate and dainty spinach and feta pastries as well as plotting the brutal and vengeful overthrow of his strata council.

She stopped what she was doing each day exactly at four and ran home. No matter where she was, who she was with and what she was doing, she would abruptly stop, only to resume those activities at exactly 4:25. What happened in that 25 minute period each day and why it left her literally covered in glitter and soot and smelling of talcum powder and orange zest she would take to her grave. It’s how she was raised.

Nola Kane: A Character Study

Nola sighed. Another utterly exhausting, yet heartwarmingly fun day was coming to an end. The clock read 6:02 pm and she had just, moments ago, waved goodbye to the last kid still somehow teeming with energy and her significantly less energetic mom. Nola sighed, not because she was tired, though she was. Looking outside at the darkness of the late fall evening filled her with a great appreciation for the working electricity inside as well as the vastness of the universe. She smiled a wry smile at her ability to be so deep after a long day.

As she surveyed the now-deserted room that only a short while ago was bordering-on-but-never-quite-reaching chaos, she felt something akin to satisfaction or fulfillment, but it was hard to tell as she was also quite hungry. Nola just loved these little ones who attended her daycare. When she first started years ago, her mother claimed that she had found her calling, while Nola, even though she thoroughly enjoyed her work, wasn't always quite sure.

Back in school, she had been one of those "most likely" types whom teachers fawned over and fellow students both admired and teased, usually behind her back except that one time when she had sensed their presence and turned around really quickly exclaiming "aha!" The world had been her oyster even though she never quite understood what that meant even after she took up oyster fishing and oyster shell collecting as hobbies. To this day the smell of oysters always makes her feels slightly nauseous.

Despite having so many options in her senior year which was almost debilitating, but not quite, unlike that time when she broke her foot which was actually quite debilitating, she surprised everyone by studying early childhood education and eventually opening up her own daycare. She's learned at an early age that it is much easier to surprise people if you purposely surround yourself with easy-to-surprise people.

Others wondered if she was selling herself short and she kept claiming that she wasn't for sale unless we were talking big money as even she had a price. Others also wondered about her choice of cardigans. While running a daycare appeared to be a perfect match for this fun-loving, yet sensitive, young woman in her mid-20s, in the back of her head she always felt like she should have rolled the dice and pursued her true love, and no, that wasn't referring to her love of games of chance involving dice or the stunning Gill Brooks who lived across the street, though those too.

From her early 20s she'd concealed her true love because she couldn't face the music or the laughter or even the sink without calling a plumber first. Privately she'd always wanted to solve crime or crimes, if one wasn't enough to satisfy the itch. Satisfying itches was one of those things that helped her unwind as well as cutting back on winding herself up which had a very limited upside anyways. She had spent her years in college fantasizing about becoming a childcare provider by day and the catcher of bad people at night and then the president-elect of a fantasy world made up of elves who was slowly bringing down the government from the inside while she slept. But something held her back and she was never quite sure what.

Nola shook her head from side to side, slowly at first, and then faster and faster until she grew tired of it and neck grew sore. She was disinfecting the toys that the kids had slobbered on and shared and then slobbered on some more and just wondering if she was truly as happy as she felt when a certain, key part of her, the desire to solve crimes, lay dormant and unused. Maybe she was too sensitive or maybe she was too fun-loving or maybe it was the precise combination of the two that had her trapped in this world of solely watching and washing children for a living.

Or, maybe, just maybe, her struggles were due to her fear of heights; her debilitating fear of heights. A fear that would be a source of pride, if fears ever could be, which they couldn't. She stopped in her tracks at the front door as she was about to lock up and head home and she looked up at the tall building across the street and shuddered involuntarily. Tops of buildings had always had that effect on her.

In an instant she was taken back to her childhood as she stood there in the doorway of her dimly lit daycare she had build brick by brick from the ground floor all those years ago. True, someone else had actually formed the bricks into a building, and true, there was only a ground floor, and true, she had just turned some of the lights off which explained why things seemed dimly lit, and why she was visiting her childhood as she stood there was a mystery to her. Another mystery. So many mysteries. They surrounded her and kept her up at night; well those, and her addiction to caffeine. All she wanted was to throw off the shackles of her fear of heights and solve them all. She also wanted to buy some ice cream.

She turned back to look at the daycare, knowing that in a few short hours, she'd be back here on Burdett Avenue in the morning. The little ones would arrive once again, and she'd play with them with a joy that naturally emanated from her as she was just such a fun-loving woman. And yet, there was so much more to her that she kept concealed, as if locked away in a small safe hidden underneath her pile of big wool sweaters in her closet. She started to cry and wasn't sure why. If only she wasn't so sensitive. Nola sighed. Time to go home.

My Bio

Tommy Paley, or T-Pain as he is often called for perplexing reasons, wrote these words that you are reading at this moment, though he did not invent said words or devise any of the rules for grammar and punctuation being demonstrated (quite poorly) here as he often claims. He wants you, the reader, to sit back and relax and enjoy a nice hot mug of cocoa unless you are like him and hot mugs of cocoa are a constant source of frustration and humiliation. And while you are relaxing, he wants you to not only continue reading these words, but also to make believe that this write up is on the inside back cover of his first published book of hilarious and introspective short stories to be enjoyed by humans and proto-humans alike.  

Tommy, for those who haven’t had the pleasure of being in super-close proximity to him for long, extended periods of time, is a proud, nearsighted, highly (and potentially dangerously) creative family man. So proud, that he once very briefly considered a series of tattoos that would have covered his entire back stating as much; so nearsighted, that he once thought he was sharing his white bedroom with a large collection of quite-lost and oddly two-dimensional polar bears and so creative, that he once wrote a story about how he met his wife using only vowels and exclamation marks. He never shuts up about being a family man to the point that his throat is often quite hoarse (the fact that his throat closely resembles that of an actual horse is purely coincidental). Tommy always wanted to have a family of his own; to hug and hold and call his own while also researching how easy it would be to utilize them for financial gain without feeling too morally decrepit. His family, who came into better focus once he was fitted for glasses, was disappointingly not nearly as blurry as he initially thought, but always supportive, to a fault, of his creativity (albeit while often sighing and rolling their eyes uncontrollably).

Mr. Paley, as his students and closest relatives have been conditioned/brainwashed/pleaded with to refer to him as, spends his days searching for truths, both real and abstract, after devouring a breakfast, both real and abstract, solely comprised of day-old stale bread. Stale bread, according to him, can be used to make a really great bookmark if you are not concerned with totally ruining the book you are reading and getting crumbs everywhere. Once he spent a Thursday evening attempting to literally get crumbs everywhere. Totally unrelated, but the very next morning he started a search for a new set of roommates who weren’t so “sensitive”. Truths, based on his extensive searching each day between 6:30am and 6:35am (which usually involves also attempting not to fall down the stairs while half-asleep), are as elusive as they are valued on the black market. Mr. Paley, went asked to comment, clarified that he has never actually seen the black market with his own eyes as it was “really really dark at the time” (which later got explained because he was wrapped very tightly in his blackout curtain).

T-Pain spends much of his small amount of free time marching to the beat of his own drummer which was always a dream of his when he was but a young, misdirected and freckled boy with absolutely zero ability to keep a beat. A few years ago, he got tired of spending so much time sitting, breathing heavily and staring at the wall that he attempted writing at the same time to give his brain and fingers a chance to work together on a project. His brain and fingers not only grew closer, but they also held a secret staff meeting and passed a motion to buy Tommy out. To call what he feels when writing “joy” would be both accurate and misleading. To call what he writes about “necessary” or “meaningful” or “non-gag inducing” would cause people to wonder if he is just writing his own reviews now. When not writing, he is not.

Mr. P can often be found counselling the leaders of tomorrow during working hours and shepherding wild animals in the evenings, although no proof has been provided and it is really just his word at this point. What sort of has-been deadbeat would go through all the time and effort and allergy medication needed just to invent a lie involving the herding and care of feral animals just to attempt to impress people reading this bio? What sort of deadbeat indeed! Hopefully, by reading this, you can see how funny Mr. P is or at least how desperately hard he is trying to be seen as funny, which should be funny in and of itself, only in a bit of a sad way. If you are smiling reading this, then he has succeeded. If his success, in turn, makes you a tad worried blink twice and then touch your nose with your two pinky fingers at the same time. Help is on its way.

Finally, and kudos to you for reading this far in the hope that there will be draw prizes upon completion which there definitely will not, in the near future Tommy hopes to complete his vegetarian cookbook to end all vegetarian cookbooks (that’s meant to sound as promising and threatening as it does) entitled “Seriously, Where the F@#& is the Meat?” which will not only contain amazing recipes and hilarious anecdotes involving food, but also instructions on how to appear richer than you really are without resorting to a life of crime done entirely using marionettes. Tommy also plans to continue to write his unique brand of creative non-fiction that, while not helping him achieve the fame and applause and free bags of pre-shredded cheese that other writers of his ilk may crave, give him yet one more reason to get out of bed and put on his socks in the morning. The other is to avoid cold feet.