Dermit

Dermit has a skin problem. There is a name for his condition, but those who are blessedly free of it are oblivious to that name. They simply see Dermit’s splotchy red skin and put an extra foot of space between him and their own unblemished surfaces.
Dermit lives on the third floor. He rides the antique elevator up and down twice a day; once on his way to the post office where he works and once again on his way home. Occasionally he sees Tabitha from number 5 riding in the elevator to or from the second floor. When Dermit sees Tabitha his palms grow sweaty and the red patches of his skin feel particularly itchy.

Tabitha wears a goldenrod beret and matching crocheted scarf. Her pea coat is navy blue, her ballet flats are red and she wears a hue of lipstick that matches the color of the shoes. Her hair reminds Dermit of a dark polished wood like mahogany and maintains a stylish bit of waviness that he is certain comes naturally to her. Her eyes are remarkably blue. Dermit thinks that women with dark hair and pale eyes are a rare treasure.

Dermit wears his post office uniform. He covers his arms with a navy blue cardigan. He hides his legs in the dark blue trousers and avoids the shorts that some of his colleagues wear in the fair months. Despite this, the condition shows itself on the backs of his hands and sometimes flares up along his neck and behind his ears. He spends too much time in front of the mirror adjusting his wire rimmed spectacles and buttoning and unbuttoning the cardigan, helpless against the unwanted patches of irritated flesh.

Tabitha has noticed Dermit in the elevator, fussing with his sweater buttons and staring zombie like at anything but her. She has taken the extra steps to put space between herself and the guy with the rash.

One day, after work, Dermit boards the elevator.
“Hold the elevator please!” someone calls from the building entrance.
Dermit waits listening to the hurried scuffle of shoes on marble and Tabitha appears. Her eyes widen when she sees who it is she is boarding with. Dermit closes the accordion style gate and presses the number three button.
“You’re on two right?” he asks her.
Tabitha forces a smidgen of a smile and nods curtly. Dermit presses the button marked two. He begins to turn to stare into space as is customary, but suddenly looks directly at Tabitha and blurts:
“My name’s Dermit, I live in number 8.”
He extends his hand and Tabitha merely stares at it, at the red splotch that has swallowed it. After a moment Dermit retracts the hand.
“Sorry,” he says. “It’s... it’s not contagious.”
Tabitha swallows. Dermit tries again.
“I’ve just... seen you a lot and wanted to introduce myself. Maybe we could get a cup of tea around the corner sometime. It’s nice to know your neighbors.”
The elevator stops at the second floor.
“I’m really busy, a lot of the time,” Tabitha says as she opens the accordion style gate, steps out and closes it again behind her. She is already out of sight when the elevator resumes its ascent.

Alone in his apartment Dermit adds this year's special edition valentine stamp to his collection before feeding his cat, Archimedes. He vows to take the stairs for the rest of the month and looks for a new dermatologist in the phonebook.

One night after work, Dermit stops at the corner drugstore to pick up the cream his new dermatologist has prescribed. There is a woman in line ahead of him and it takes Dermit a while to recognize her as his unfriendly neighbor from the second floor. He abstains from greeting her.

At the register, Tabitha swipes her debit card to pay for the tampons and Advil she has brought to the counter. An uncomfortable minute lapses and the cashier says,
“I’m sorry. It says there are insufficient funds.”
Tabitha fumbles as she pulls out another credit card and takes the debit card back. She swipes it and is once again denied after an anxious wait. She tries again with the first card, her shoulders creeping towards her ears, her cheeks reddening. She can feel the eyes of those in the growing line behind her. As she takes the card back from the irritated clerk a fourth time, a man steps up beside her at the counter and hands the clerk his own debit card.
“Here, try this one.” Dermit says as the hot silent tears start slipping out of Tabitha’s eyes. “And I’m here to pick up a prescription for McLaughlin."
“Thank you.” Tabitha sniffs as the clerk turns to fetch Dermit’s cream. She is unable to look at the stranger beside her and instead stares down at the counter trying to stop the tears.
“It’s all right.” Dermit tells her.

When the transaction is complete Dermit hands the paper bag full of Tampons and Advil to Tabitha and she looks at him for the first time. She starts to cry silently again, walking with Dermit towards the exit. After a few sniffs they step out into the cool night and Tabitha says,
“Thank you again, uh, Dermit. I’ll pay you back. You said before that you’re in number 7 right?”
“Eight.” Dermit tells her, “But don’t worry about it.”
“No, I will.” They start walking towards their building together. In silence they pass through the lobby and board the elevator. Dermit presses the buttons for both floors. The elevator stops at the second floor and Dermit opens the accordion style gate for Tabitha.
She steps into the hall and presses her lips together. Her cheeks are still burning crimson.
“My name’s Tabitha.” she tells him. “I live in number 5.”
Then she vanishes down the hall, her ballet flats thudding softly on the carpet.

Collector

She walked the streets of the sprawling city, looking for the perfect bit of trash. She of course, did not call it trash, that was a word her mother used. To her, they were all orphans, forgotten remnants, alone on the sidewalk, waiting to be found, hoping for a loving home. In her purse, she had small plastic baggies full of used cigarette butts and empty matchbooks and carefully folded pieces of old newspapers. With her eyes trained towards the ground, she walked past blocks and blocks of the famous fashion quarter. Hardly ever did her eyes wander to the plate glass windows that held the spectacle of mannequins in a static state of style. Hordes of fashionable young women walked by her, their high heels provided the music to her quest. She heard them, she heard their squeals, their chatter, their laughter, but their image went past her like a blur. When she wasn’t crossing streets or waiting for taxi cabs to pass her like yellow bats out of hell, her eyes were fixed to the sidewalk, to the cracks where litter seemed to gather for the party, to the gutters where she always found delight, to the 90 degree angles where cement sidewalk and storefront always met. A perfumed woman passed her, both their minds fixed on a particular obsession, an accumulation of things…one looking for new things, the other searching for the forgotten.
She took in a big breath of the city air. She had not been out here for a while. Over the last few months, her free days had become fewer and fewer, until she was only able to hit the streets on a dedicated mission every couple of weeks. Yes, she did walk the streets every day, gathering milk and eggs at the market or taking her mother to the doctor, but it was never the same when she had a destination, the needed the space and time to make the day about the journey, when all her attention could be on the sidewalk and its treasures. She carried her containers with her in a little metal push wagon. There were glass jars and small cardboard boxes for leaves and plastic forks. What she found was categorized and organized. She didn’t wait for later.
She stood on the street, amid gray soldiers in business suits and delivery drivers and creamy white women. Those women were like her sister, they would never see her collection as tasteful, even after a careful explanation. The women who gathered new handbags and French perfume just could not understand why she carried the remnants of the city with her. She had tried before, years ago when she was still figuring out her methods for categorization, when she was just beginning to feel the itch of the hunt.
Today, she was walking along the many jewelry stores of the fashion district. This is where people with piles of money came to buy piles of things. This was her favorite hunting ground. In the center of extreme consumption, she delighted in the salvage. She would not let the wrapper be forgotten, she would not let the grocery list find its way to the sea. She had their brother and sisters, she had others like them, she was the orphan hunter, the subculture collector.
She spotted something round and green, she stooped over, calm, with the grace of a rescuing angel… she picked up the small bottle cap in her gloved hand. Against the brown of her leathered fingers, the cap glistened with beauty. She turned it over and over, feeling as best she could the ridges along the side, the light of the sun reflected off the green metal and gleamed. Fifteen years ago, she would have walked by the cap, oblivious to its existence. She too, had been a fashionable, perfumed woman. She would have never known its temporary home, she would have walked by, never seeing its green, never touching its shape, never pausing to see what was there.
Tasteful? That was a question that the germ-a-phobes and the critics could debate. Her days had become fewer and fewer, she didn’t have time to waste with questions. She knew what she needed to do. She knew her place among the denizens of the city. She was the self-appointed historian, the archivist, the matron. The women and men of the city might never know she had been here. On her walks, she took away any signs of her voyage, tucking them safely in her cart, either in a box, bottle, or plastic bag. She gave them a home, and the fashion district might never know she had passed by.

The Invisible World of the Random

The cellphone rang incessantly on her lacquered wooden nightstand. The light was just beginning to creep through the bubbling clouds, the bulbous blue shapes that defined the horizon of her dreams. The clouds had a touch of soft gray that whispered threats of rain and wind, but they were still friendly enough and rays of sunshine played at their edges and interrupted the whispers with small smiles and flirting eyelashes. The ringing barely disturbed her dreams and her round, pale face was relaxed and soft upon the feather pillow. The phone rang and was then followed by a couple minutes of silence, then it began again. Brrinnnnnggg! Brrriiinnnnng!!! She rolled over and pulled the pillow closer to her chest. Her mother was on the other end, overseas, feeding gold coins into a pay phone every ten minutes. She stood at a glass booth on the edge of a large blue lake that was surrounded by granite boulders. Sunbathers rested on the soft, organic shapes. The boulders were smooth and round, each one a unique interpretation of an oval or an egg. They were gentle giants, caressed by the water and wind for millennia and ending up here, and her open eyes surveyed the shapes with both awe and a small amount of panic. She had called her daughter six times this morning and four times yesterday. The tone of her child’s recorded voice, which sounded familiar, yet alien, entered her ear each time and sent a trace shiver up her spine. She was calling to ask about the letters, she was wondering if they had arrived at her daughter’s doorstep yet. They had been sent several weeks ago, had they crossed the ocean yet? Or where they among the thousands of other parcels in a bin somewhere, perhaps in Britain or New York, in a cold, white room waiting for a further reshuffling. Was a mail officer looking at the address right now, determining which route it will travel, which airplane it will enter and which man who would bring it to the door? "With the help of god", she thought mechanically, "the letters will arrive." As she hung up the cool plastic receiver of the pay phone, a sinking feeling mounted in her stomach. She was not a woman of chance. She did not like gambling, she did not enjoy being a houseguest or to be under someone else’s charge in any way. She controlled her life, no one else. The mail system was one of her biggest fears. It was chance. There were too many odds, too many hands that the letters passed through, too many machines, too many chances for error. There were too many opportunities for mistakes and she did not like the odds. She believed only in the certain, the things she could see with her eyes…the apple on the tree, the taste in her mouth, the words on a page written by a careful hand. The invisible was far from her world. To touch the invisible was a gamble, a universe with qualities and characteristics that were beyond seeing, beyond the absolute rightness of her senses. She had lived a short life of hunger and fear, at four years old, she had a moment of realization and from that, she determined she could only believe in things that were immediately in front of her, there was nothing else beyond her perception that could be trusted. Her third daughter was nothing like this. The pain of childbirth had brought an alien into her arms. A small piece of flesh with a full head of red hair that projected the energy of lightning bolts. The child had never cried. The little baby grew up to be the woman’s exact opposite, both in looks and personality. The dearth of their commonalties grew ever wider as both women aged. The young woman grew to appreciate the world of chance, seeing it as a mystery that continued to unfold with each breath she took. She never asked for explanations. They both lived among the reshaping of an old system, each reacting differently towards it. Humans had just built the first community on the moon and the girl was scheduled to depart in three days for her first lunar experience. Soon, she would take off, looking back at the dwindling landscape of America, seeing it clearly as a dot in the infinite expanse, her world one of millions of worlds among countless stars.