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ghost car of barna road

track 2 - slop 2/2

i wondered how i looked then - facing the shelves packed with discount junk, wearing nothing but thin slippers and my greasy pajamas. i had a scrap of paper torn out of a catalogue crumbled in my fist. it showed a small electric kettle in five color variants. one of them, the cyan one, was circled in bright red marker. underneath, as an added security, my mother wrote in her tiny, neat, schoolteacher’s handwriting: cyan.

they did not have the cyan one.

now, my options were limited. i considered them while sipping cold coffee obtained on the shelf behind me. i was either taking a pastel pink kettle home, hoping the cheerful colour will appease my mother to the loss of the cyan option; walk the two kilometres to the next supermarket hoping to snatch the cyan keetle;

or, my number one contender, returning back to our street, getting inside the rental and driving straight ahead until i hit the ocean.

"this is fucking ridiculous," i told myself.

she is fucking ridiculous. true. what but was i going to do about that now?

i groaned, pulling my phone out of my back pocket. it was half after eight. i was supposed to start working at nine and my hot cup of coffee, shower and peace of mind depended on a fucking cyan kettle that was not where it was supposed to be.

“i have no fucking time for this,” i breathed, snatching a box off the shelf and made my way to the empty cash register.

a smiling lady rang my purchase, asked me about my opinions on weather and, not deterred by my discouraging grunts and deadpan expression, mentioned the kettle i was getting was really amazing, she had it herself, and it looked so nice in her kitchen, she tried to have everything in her kitchen in pastel pink, it brightened up the room so much and made it so lovely, didn’t i think so?

“that will be thirty five euro, love.”

i wondered if i was too czech now. it’s been ten years of cloudy faces and getting snapped at in the shops. a lady at imigration made me cry in my scond week there. ten years later, whatever was happening here, was making my skin crawl. i was no longer used to happy faces and polite chatter. my first instinct was to use the kettle box as a shield and push my way out of the door, overthrowing old people and babies for bonus points. i felt like a stranger in my own home.

the unsettling through followed me down the road to my parent’s door. i tried to block it’s weight with my foot before slipping in, but it clung to my grey leggins. it followed me down the hall to the back sunroom/kitchen, right at my heel like an eager puppy. it was there when i put the box down on the table, there when my mom looked back with a smile, closer when her round wrinkled face fell noticing the delivered goods.

“oh, it’s the pink one,” she said, covering her sadness with cheerful politeness.

“they did not have the cyan one,” i said. “only pink and black. the pink is nice.”

she nodded, taking the box and placing it, very carefully, on the floor by the door. “sit down, i made you some eggs and bacon.”

i sat down in an empty place, facing the back door. my eyes kept returning to the box while my mother chattered.

one time in prague, not much longer after our move, my irish girlfriend got me this vintage jacket at a traveling thrift marketplace. it was the worse wine red colour, with tiny reflective flakes and shite-load of colourful beads strewn harphazardly across the back and it’s too short, not quite three-quater sleeves. she said the second she saw it it reminded her of my “free spirit”. by that she must’ve meant the long dark nights spend getting blackout drunk, shying away from phones which could at any time remind me about your existence.

my “free spirit” jacket became this thing hanging on our dresser door, obscuring a fair amount of the decorative mirror embedded in the frame. everything unsaid between us seemed to cling to it like lint. every argument we had was another bead sparkling in its sleeve. every bloody fucking thing that pissed us off about each other was this tiny reflective piece of plastic that, if the sunshine streamed in through the winddow at just the right angle, would hit you in the eye and scorch your pupil.

i would wake up and see the jacket and all the bad things about our relationship would be right there, reflected in that ugly, dusty piece of second skin.

after a while it became sentient.

it would walk into the room when we argued and point its too short arms at us, throwing out beads to jog our memories. that summer you kissed that other guy when we were dating; i can’t believe you told me you were quitting and lied to my face; the way you acted when my mother came for a visit; why do you never want us to travel home together, are you ashamed of me?; and finally you, you, you, you - but she kept calling you him, like she couldn’t quite remember your name. she called you him and the jacket kept throwing all the beads the colour of your eyes at me until they cut my skin.

finally we broke up and she packed everything she owned up into these huge suitcases she got online. she rolled them across the oak floor-boards that moaned in reply and when she stopped in the doorward for the last time she said: “you know, all you had to do was say was you didn’t like it.”

it took me a while to realise she was talking about the jacket, not us. she left it there, hanging off the closet door, so dusty it looked more grey then red by then.

i looked at the kettle in its snug box now, lying by the canary yellow wallpapered wall, enveloped by a soft pool of light. in wondered if this was the same thing. i wondered how long it will take until all the things i do wrong burst out through the colourful packaging and flood our kitchen floor.

“more tea?” asked my mother in her cheerful sing-songy voice.

“i don’t like tea.” i wanted to say.

“sure.”

from the box by the door, you could hear tiny plastic screws click-clacking in vicious enjoyment.