Entry #25 Who's House?

Saw the plays, then.

My hotmail account has been "compromised," so I'm going to find out by whom and send them a line from one of the plays I saw last night, "What are you doing in my house?" 

I've spent a little too much time trying to think of how to fit this link in, so I'm just going to do so...here.  Trick comes in my trying to understand why I'm so struck by this.  Maybe it's just pretty much completely terrifying to me.

Here's an oldish excerpt that most of you have read...there's even a video somewhere I think of me reading it:

Zero Gravity - Colin Winnette

            Zero Gravity has once again been voted the number one dance club for young adults in the Midwest.  Naperville, Illinois, specifically.  Tonight there will be a look-a-like contest for some singer, some young female singer, hardly old enough to date, whose name when read aloud from my computer chair evokes a nod from my daughter meant to hurry me along.  She’s beside me with her hands behind her, fidgeting.   

            “Are you planning to dress up?”  I click the NEW TAB option on the web browser and do a search of the young celebrity’s name.  In none of the photos does she look comfortably dressed.  In not one does she appear caught off guard.  Even in those of her laughing, the snapshot is typically timed with the release of some handful descending; drops of water, glitter, petals, buttons, but her expression seems soundless, more the hollow shape of a mouth than the active frame of laughter occurring. 

            “No,” she says.  “I don’t know.  What does it matter if I do?”  She’s shifting, impatient, but then draws herself upright and still.  At the bottom of a second page of photos is one of the young celebrity holding an ice cream cone.  A small dog cradled in the crook of her arm, pressed against her side.  Her hair is pulled back beneath a hat.  Its brim rests atop the large duplicate lenses of sunglasses doubling the shape of shields, the crest of which is all she sees.  Her mouth is still.  Expressionless as an elbow.

            “Look at her here-…”

            “-some girls might,” my daughter says.  “But not me or my friends.  I’m not sure I would feel comfortable.  She really dresses up.”  Once my daughter is old enough to drive, she’ll no longer rely on this kind of backpedaling. 

            “Let’s get ice cream,” I say.  She makes a long sound, a nasal kind of yawn of the word Daaad. 

            I click a link, ABOUT US.  A video ad comes up for a bank.  A man holds an elevator door for a woman.  Later, the woman catches a coworker who has leaned too far back in his office chair.  Leaving work, the same coworker picks up a child’s toy, catches up with another man pushing a stroller, and returns the toy.  The man, sans stroller, pauses to let another man enter traffic, and that man-

            “Dad.”

            Kindness is contagious. Blank Bank of So and So.  I resist the urge to search “teenage sex party + code,” “celebrity surgeries gone wrong,” “girls + missing + father + aftermath.” 

            NEW TAB, I search “Kindness is contagious.”  Blank Bank of…there is no good way of telling her I’d prefer she didn’t go...(end of excerpt)

There's that, then.

And here's this, hot off the presses:

Monday - Sunday - Colin Winnette

See it in Necessary Fiction.