Long pieces of fiction in which nothing really happens alternatively titled, why did I spend my time writing this or Can I get a refund on that MFA

Rebecca is sitting on the living room, her legs are crossed in a lotus position, opposite heel placed on the opposed thigh. The heel is pressing into the flesh of her upper thigh in a way that is leaving a mark vaguely reminiscent of a child’s fingers imprinted into Play-doh. The carpet’s color almost matches the eggshell of the couch. If her fiancé comes back home tonight, she is going to make him dinner. She vaguely considers doing this naked, but recoils at the idea of nudity in the kitchen. The couch is oriented in the traditional American manner, facing a nineteen inch Toshiba television. The blank television’s screen is reflecting the couch’s own eggshell back at itself. Her back is resting against the right arm of the couch, and her left shoulder is parallel to the full length window that overlooks an arterial street of Silver Spring, MD. She keeps picking out random men, and assigning her fiancés particular walk or gestures to them. She is considering suicide, but doing so abstractedly, allowing it to move through her mind in wave like fashion, ebb and flow. The people on the street below are moving tributarily from office buildings and into the parking garage.

She is secretly thrilled by the anonymity of looking out at a window. An oscillating fan is raising slight goose bumps on her arms despite the interior heat of the room, which is approximately 82 degrees. The room’s temperature and relative humidity make its condition something close to viscous. The thoughts themselves are abstract, and occasionally involve bizarre scenarios. The dramatic suicidal reflection is the sort of thing that her fiancé would recognize and accurately categorize as her need to be raised from the grey mass of humanity and be “special.” Most of the suicidal scenarios that she has created are too complex and yet indistinct to be described successfully. One of them involves a hot air balloon.

She had started searching for inner peace a week ago. She’d been reading a book in the library staff lounge about artists who had taken their own lives: pistols and ovens, things of that sort. She had finished her leftovers from the previous evening’s late meal, an overcooked tofu and brown rice medley. Her white plastic fork had been hanging precariously from the lip of her Tupperware. The vending machine had been making noises that resembled a small dog’s growl.

One of the men on the street had certainly been her fiancé until he had crossed the street and kissed some other woman. It appeared to her that at that exact moment, he became someone else. If she had to do it all over again, would she? She wasn’t sure if she meant life or the relationship, or the affair. She is focusing intently on drawing her ribs apart and then back together like an accordion. The breathing technique that is being practiced is in accordance with the techniques that her guru had showed her. Who, her guru, would be disappointed if he knew she was even considering suicide, all be it abstractedly. She guessed.

The shades are open and the light is heavy in the room. The sun’s angle leaves her ankles warm while shading her upper torso as she gazes at the third shelf of her book case. The bookcase, which runs the length of the foreshortened far wall, is roughly parallel to the couch’s orientation in the room. The foreshortened walls terminus is at an arched doorway that leads into the apartment’s single room. Her fiancé had threatened something about never coming back before storming out. She had visions of fiery car crashes that were influenced by old music videos from the early 2000’s. She imagined the camera, probably filmed in some sort of uniform blue, catching the pure agony of her face as she races towards the flaming wreckage. Her eyes are blinking rapidly enough that she could be mistaken for someone in the REM cycle of sleep. A blossom floats by, white, near weightless.

The apartment smells of vanilla incense mixed with kitty litter. A few people are walking on the street below, mostly in pairs. The kitty litter smell is fainter than it is in most houses, her mother having bought her a mechanical hand that removes the offending excrement and re-distributes the litter evenly. The hand, she supposes, truly having a shitty job. In general, the people appear to be walking in close enough proximity to be arm in arm, but that could just be her not looking directly at the street, but rather only catching things out of the corner of her eye. She shouldn’t really be observing the street at all, vis a vis her attempt at inner peace, if truth be told. She didn’t think about it often enough to cause any real concern. The near wall on the couch’s left hand side has an 8x14 inch reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

A colleague of hers had mentioned something about yoga in the break room where she was reading her obscure book. The colleague, a woman whose cheeks were a constant burnished red, had managed to transform her pear-shaped body into something approaching a rail road tie with the help of yoga. The machine’s low growling had been replaced by a purr. She presumed that the changes occurred due to some oscillations in the cooling needs. Initially, she wasn’t interested in listening to the conversation. Other people’s conversation’s in the break room being tacitly thought of as indiscriminate by at least 65 percent of the staff, herself included. The woman, Joan, had been wearing a pair of mid-level dress shoes that add an extra inch or so to her already thinning frame. Joan had been extolling the benefits of Bikram to the senior manager of library, who to his credit, had gamely listened with all the signs of attentive posture and relevant head nods, as he waited for his food to finish being appropriately warmed. The conversation seemed wooden and one-sided. Though, at some point Rebecca had become interested and placed her book down, creasing the spine in the process in a way that would have normally bothered her immensely. The senior manager’s shoulders had been rolled forward, his weight shifting subtly from one leg to another. The movement gave him the appearance of being simultaneously childish and yet full of healthy adult energy that some people value highly in senior management. The rumbling of the vending machine had occluded a bit of what Joan had relayed at this point. His glasses had been small and nearly weightless. His impatience, which I’m really only inferring here, had been displayed by an almost imperceptible inclination of his head, which allowed him to stare at a point just above Joan’s head while appearing to listen intently. This particular habit caused most of the employees to assume that he was at least mildly cross-eyed. The topic of which, his eyes, had gone tacitly unmentioned in the office, though each person had probably mulled it over a time or two in the heart of his or her very own cube.

The thing with the hot air balloon is not your simple run of the mill jump off. After she put down the book, creasing its spine, Rebecca pretended to be mulling something over while sucking on the edge of her plastic fork. She had in fact covertly been admiring her forty-seven year old colleague’s impressive butt, which had been outlined fairly well by a pair of tight fitting Calvin Klein dress pants that she had clearly picked up in celebration of her weight loss. Which, good for her, was the sort of agreed upon position of the office in general, though some people were jealous for fairly easy to guess reasons.

For the latter portion of the conversation, Rebecca had kneaded the middle and index fingers of both hands into her temples, feigning a headache. And found, that in closing her eyes she had been able to listen more intently.

“I wake up every morning feeling younger than the day before,” her colleague said. The microwave’s beep had been especially long and piercing, the sort of thing that would have driven a dog nuts. Her boss had beat a hasty retreat from the room, collected his coffee and a hard plastic bowl of sticky rice, and stepped past Joan with an apology that went something like, “No rest for the weary,” which he had said ironically, though no one, not even him, was sure whether the irony was intended or not. And in listening she had had this sort of mental click, like a key finally turning in an old dead bolt, with the same accompanying satisfaction, that she really needed to change something in her life and that perhaps this was it. The coffee had been black and harvested in Argentina.