UNSUCCESSFUL ENTERPRISES

North Korean Anxiety Dream part II

Out in the forest its wet underfoot and my husband is running with no shoes on through the trees.  I keep back, at a safe distance. I am anxious about what he will do if he sees me.  I can’t work out whether or not he is looking for me or trying to escape my friend’s large estate.  He reaches a clearing up ahead and turns quickly, before I have time to step behind a tree trunk.  He sees me and his face twists apart.  He begins to run back towards me.

North Korean Anxiety Dream part I

I have been invited to a party at the house of a friend who is very rich and famous.  He lives in an enourmous mansion, on a headland in the highlands of Scotland.  The only way to access the house is by helicopter.  When I arrive, the other guests are already there.  Everyone has decided to go down into the basement to use the Olympic sized swimming pool.  I say that I have forgotten my swimming costume, but no one seems to believe me.  I look down and I’m wearing the swimming costume, but over the top of my outside clothes.  I manage to wrestle the clothes out from underneath the swimming costume and am about to get into the pool, when someone says that there’s an intruder in the house.  The guests are quite drunk, but seem slightly alarmed.  They resolve to stay in the pool room, where there is only one entrance and we’d see if anyone came in.  I realise that they are not watching the door, and out of the corner of my eye I see someone slip through the door and around the edge of the pool. I recognise him as my estranged husband. 

I follow him at a discreet distance, the other guests are swimming and laughing in the pool and so haven’t noticed me creeping along the edge of the pool.  My husband hasn’t seen me either, but it keen to get to the fire exit on the other side of the pool room.  I watch him push the bar and look over his shoulder to check that he hasn’t been followed.  I hide behind a potted palm tree and he does not see me.  I watch him open the door and run quickly and quietly out into the forest.

University Challenge

You are invited by the agency to perform at the University Challenge Annual Reunion Party at the BBC television centre in London.  The job pays extremely badly, lower than minimum wage, but you haven’t been in the business long and you reckon on it being an easy gig.  You’re nervous. The agency said that there would be at least 50 guests - all of the qualifying teams from this year’s series, plus all of the production team, and Jeremy Paxman. 

You’ve been prepared for this moment, the first time you have to do it in public, and you’ve been over every possible scenario in your head, combed over all of the most hideous possibilities and dealt with them calmly and rationally in the hypothesis.  You had imagined that perhaps your first appointment would be in the likes of a working men’s club, or at a corporate function of some kind - drunk businessmen with their ties tied around their heads, sloshing beer on you.

You arrive at the venue at 5pm, in order to change and put on your make up.  You emerge from your dressing room at 6pm and take your position on the stage. You assume the position, waiting for the curtain to be hoisted up, waiting to see twinkling lights reflected off of a one hundred round lenses, but something thick and heavy hits you on the back of the head and you slither onto the floor, into the darkness.

YES

mortauxvaches:

yesterday i jumped onto the cafeteria lunch table and read howl and a crowd gathered and the administrators talked to one another on their radios and my ex tried to bury her head under the table and my voice cracked over and over and an angry boy younger than me tried to ask what i was doing and i gave him the finger from behind the pages.

(via theothertruths)

AGH

looking for a job any job preferably to fit my skills – really good negotiator/haggler almost Militarian sense of punctuality and slight OCD tendencies – relaxed and personable though (honest)

America part III

After 13 minutes in the air, I unpeeled my hands from the armrests and ordered a red drink: tomato juice. It tasted like cardboard, flat and fibrous.  There was a dull roar. As I became aware of the noise it I couldn’t work out if I knew when it had started.  It was the roar of air forced through engines and of bllod bring pushed and sluiced through capillaries. My head felt swollen and taut.  The other passengers seemed calm, docile.  I child four or five rows back whined mildly like a deflating balloon, the noise was weak, lacklustre.  Easily quashed by the child’s mother. My pores felt as though they had inverted, dried up and crusted over.  I could feel the insides of my eyelids. 

“Would you like to order your meal now?”  She smiles with teeth like bathroom tiles.  Her lips are drawn on wider.

I shake my head, no, and resume my grip on the arm rest.

“Would you like to order your meal madam?”

I open my mouth to repeat what I’ve just said to this idiot in a neckerchief.  But the words don’t come out. Instead, I hear someone else’s words.

“Yes please. Chicken. Please.”

I turn to my left, and for the first time, see the woman sitting next to me.  Embarrassed I smile, weakly and she catchs my eye as the stewardess simpers off scattering more of the same question over the other passengers.  There is something fmailiar about this woman.  I begin to panic, that I know her from somewhere and cannot place her, that she is someone from the past who I should remember.  She smiles at me quizzically but says nothing,  reinserting her headphones and turning her head slightly so that she can see out of the window.  Somehow, it is in this hand movement, this gesture that  I realise, with a sickening jolt that the reason that this woman looks familiar is that she looks exactly identical to me.

America part II

I came to on the plane.  At first I thought that maybe they’d carried me on and strapped me in.  But as my eyes adjusted to the dim light and the dry temperate air in the cabin, I realised that I must have walked. I remembered muttering to the blond family that no, I was fine, really.  I remembered the mother helping me to my feet.  I remembered her smiling sympathetically, and looking in that knowing, deliberate way at my midriff.  I remembered her telling me to look after myself.  It dawned on me that, with all the knitwear, I must have appeared bigger around the middle.  I remembered checking in alongside the blond family, the children whispering to the mother who shushed them and told them to remember their manners.  Americans are big on politeness.  Or so I’d heard.  Looking around I tried to work out how many of the passengers were American and how many were English.  I realised I was still wearing the scarf.  I unwound it and opened the pocket in the seat in front to stuff it in.  Inside the pocket was a magazine and a paper bag for you to be sick into. I pulled these things out and stuffed the scarf in. 

Turning the sick-bag over I see that someone has drawn on one side.  Someone with great skill, they’d managed to render a lifelike image of an aeroplane soaring majestically over the clouds, its wings engulfed in fire.