Liz Edwards

Jamie was cranky – really really really cranky. The woman behind her at the post office sang a note along with the post office’s music, a Sarah Bareilles song, just a note, not really singing along so much as making one inhuman-sounding out-of-place noise – and Jamie thought that she could bite her head off. Then she thought – well, that’s just something people say – but then Jamie thought about Ozzie Osbourne, and she thought, hey, I AM cranky enough to bite the head off a hamster. Probably. Literally. And she thought, Uh oh, but then the woman behind her made another throaty noncommittal song noise and Jamie snarled inside and all the worry was gone, that part of her, the part of her that had distance enough from the crankiness to comment on it, the crankiness took over and pushed all of that out.

The snarl ebbed – and Jamie thought, come on, be cool. Thought, okay, smile at post lady now –

The post lady took Jamie’s package and started stamping it – Jamie realized that now, ten seconds after the post lady had said something, she didn’t have any idea what the actual words were. Not that it really mattered – except that that part was kind of freaky too – along with the hamster stuff – that it was freaky that she talked, had a conversation, a benign unimportant one, sure, but the words just hadn’t stuck.

She thought – Kind of weird.

Jamie made a point of telling the post lady that she had nice earrings. The post lady smiled at her, warmly, and in a familiar way, because Jamie came to the post office a lot and she and the post lady often talked – usually Jamie was nice. She smiled back at the post lady and thought that the smile was probably convincing.

The Sarah Bareilles lady behind her made another noise and Jamie felt her face flare – nostrils, eyes, the parts of her lips that lay over her canines. I’ma cut a bitch!

“Have a good day!” the post lady said. Jamie snapped her wallet shut, pushed the receipt down in her purse and smiled at her, genuine-looking, she thought, again. She said it back, thinking, Whoa Jamie… She swung down the post office steps, wrestling her too-big wallet into her purse, shaking her head like she did when she was trying to shake off something awkward, something creepy that she’d just heard or seen, a creepy stare from a man or something funny and messed up like a little kid pinching a stranger’s behind, because she wished she could shake it off…

But no. There it was again, at the stoplight, just a block from the post office – Jamie leaned forward to the steering wheel, against her seatbelt, snarling for real this time because the man in front of her had just inched forward, and then again, and then again – lips over her teeth, pulled up, and the snarl coming out rough from the back of her throat, like, Just stop already okay!

Uh oh, Jamie thought again.

The drive home took her through a lot of trees, and as her car tipped downward at the head of the big wooded hill before her house, the one wedged between two steep hills, with waist-high grasses on either side of the road, and the alder trees touching in places high overhead, Jamie remembered got a mental image from one really horrible day back when she was living with her brother in Utah – she’d come home from work (what a mess that was! her boss and all that noise, the overwhelming problems of her best friend, the old lady receptionist who thought Jamie was a slut) and she’d gone, still in heels, straight to his “garden” – she’d sat on an upturned bucket, the silvery heat-curtain crinkling on her back, her knees splayed and the rest of her pitched forward, chin in her hands and head pushed back, up, her face practically touching the plants…it was just the color, she’d just sat with it; sometimes green was just good.

Jamie face relaxed a little – she was glad the drive home was so green.

“At least you’re out of Utah,” she whispered to herself. “Fucking, fucking Utah,” she whispered, making the turn. At the bottom of the hill Jamie started drumming the steering wheel along with the song playing on the radio. Swearing was Jamie’s therapeutic standby.