mandax

I wrote greeting cards for a living. I created silly, sing-song messages for people too lazy to write anything original. You know the kind – the ones who just scribble their names at the bottom of the card, pretending to be the author of the four-lined note in fancy font. If you asked me how I got into the business, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, because I can’t remember for the life of me. It sort of just happened. I didn’t mean for it to happen. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to be as phony as those cards were.

My current task was writing a message for a man turning sixty.








Alright, I had nothing against the elderly, but I was tired of writing the same, corny lines about how wisdom increases with age, or the same, corny jokes about lost dentures and balding men. Cards that celebrated reality should have been made. If a single greeting card was written as a reflection of society, it would read: Sorry about the divorce. Come over and we’ll drink scotch. Got any good porn? I would have loved to read a card like that. Those cards were so phony because people were so phony. It’s a damn shame. They were impersonal, too. Each card was written for an entire demographic.
I took the subway home when my shift ended at five o’clock. No one said anything on the subway, and neither did I. That was the order of things.

“How was your day, John” my wife Anne asked of me when I got home. Without waiting for a response, she continued, “It seems like you’re always home from work seconds after your shift ends. Do you sprint home or somethin’?”

“No,” I replied.

She opened the oven and took a chicken pot pie out of it. I didn’t really like chicken pot pie, but I never told her. It didn’t matter anyway. I had been eating it since I was five. So we ate it, watched some television, and went to bed. She was lying next to me, reading a book she had read a thousand times before. She must have really liked that book. Anne was my high school sweetheart, and here we were, married, without any kids. (We were planning on having two kids in the future.) Anne jumped up and rattled me out of nowhere, exclaiming, “Oh! Oh! I forgot to show you--”

She rolled off the bed and scurried over to the closet. She took out a large book and blew the dust off it, then plopped back into bed and pulled my arm to make me sit up. We both sat Indian-style, staring at the cover of our school yearbook from senior year.

“Look what I found while I was cleaning this morning!” She loved living in the past. She opened to the section with the prom pictures in it and pointed us out several times, then looked up our individual pictures.

“Look at you! You have the same haircut as you did back then. You should grow your hair out a little longer,” she suggested, running her hands through the little hair there was on my head. Toward the back of the book, a lot of handwritten notes in bright inks were scattered about the page. It was obvious it was her yearbook, because I didn’t recognize any of the people who signed. She pointed to what she claimed was my entry.

“All you did was sign your name. See? Look at that.”

It was true. All that was written was “John Mattley” in black ink. I stared at the page.

“No, I’m sure I wrote more on another page,” and I searched through all of the words. It was the most horrible word search I’ve ever tried completing because there was no way of winning. Not a single sentence in the rest of the yearbook was written by me.

“Let’s go to Hawaii,” I said to her.

“What?”

“Let’s go to Hawaii. On vacation. We haven’t had a vacation in a while.”

“John, we can’t afford to go to Hawaii,” she said hesitantly, closing the yearbook. She sensed something was wrong.

“I’ll write a dozen more of those damned cards a day. I’ll work overtime. We can go.”

“But when I used to bring up traveling, you said you’d rather stay at home and ‘enjoy the joys of reality’.”

It was right then that I thought of a graduation card I had once written.









I wished I was a grad again.

mandax

Is it that bad? Lol, I'll be honest ... this was the first draft. I haven't edited a single thing. This was my first attempt at getting my thoughts together ... but if it's horrible, I might as well not pursue it.

Johnna

It's not horrible. It's interesting...

"Each card was written for an entire demographic.
I took the subway home when my shift ended at five o’clock. "

I'd put something between those two lines, because his thoughts are on track and they don't seem to end or wind down before you jump into the action. When I read it I thought that that last sentence ("each card...") was maybe in the middle of his train of thought. That part just doesn't seem finished to me.

There are little grammar mistakes that I'm sure you'll catch when you revise. ('“How was your day, John” my wife Anne...' needs a question mark, things like that.) Other than that, I think it's pretty good.

__________________

mandax

Yeah, I see what you mean by that gap. There should be a space inbetween those two lines, but it still does kind of seem like a random jump. I'll work on that. Glad you found it interesting, and thanks for the response.