Saturday's Storyteller: "Seltzer water tastes like TV static. It's just the sheer feeling of electricity and disappointment."
by Belinda Roddie
Seltzer water tastes like TV static. It's just the sheer feeling of electricity and disappointment. But it was all I could drink when the water was shut off during a hot afternoon, so that ghost is going to haunt me like an continual shock from a shag rug.
On the TV itself, they were replaying the 2012 World Series. Go, Giants.
I thought about calling my mom and seeing if I could drive over to her place. I would kill for a cold glass of tap water right now. She didn't pick up the phone. I remember her telling me two days back that she'd be in the middle of the fucking desert, basking in the Palm Springs sun and trying desperately not to daydream about her ex-husband/my biological father. That made me cringe. But this seltzer water was making me cringe harder.
After I had finished Satan's can, I crumpled up the aluminum and tossed it into the nearby bin. Outside, it was too damn hot that the sidewalk looked like it was doing the worm to an unknown song in a technoclub. My neighbor, for some ungodly reason, was watering his half-dead lawn. He saw me looking out the window and waved. He was missing two fingers on his left hand. Blown off during 'Nam.
Seltzer water fits perfectly into this sad suburbia, I decided, as I drew the blinds. My whole life was just TV static.
This week's prompt was provided by Ayana Franck.
Seltzer water tastes like TV static. It's just the sheer feeling of electricity and disappointment. But it was all I could drink when the water was shut off during a hot afternoon, so that ghost is going to haunt me like an continual shock from a shag rug.
On the TV itself, they were replaying the 2012 World Series. Go, Giants.
I thought about calling my mom and seeing if I could drive over to her place. I would kill for a cold glass of tap water right now. She didn't pick up the phone. I remember her telling me two days back that she'd be in the middle of the fucking desert, basking in the Palm Springs sun and trying desperately not to daydream about her ex-husband/my biological father. That made me cringe. But this seltzer water was making me cringe harder.
After I had finished Satan's can, I crumpled up the aluminum and tossed it into the nearby bin. Outside, it was too damn hot that the sidewalk looked like it was doing the worm to an unknown song in a technoclub. My neighbor, for some ungodly reason, was watering his half-dead lawn. He saw me looking out the window and waved. He was missing two fingers on his left hand. Blown off during 'Nam.
Seltzer water fits perfectly into this sad suburbia, I decided, as I drew the blinds. My whole life was just TV static.
This week's prompt was provided by Ayana Franck.
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