Between Genres | Waking | Canceled

Michael Chin

Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. He is the author of three full-length short story collections: You Might Forget the Sky was Ever Blue from Duck Lake Books, Circus Folk from Hoot ‘n’ Waddle, and The Long Way Home from Cowboy Jamboree Press. Chin won the 2017-2018 Jean Leiby Chapbook Award from The Florida Review and Bayou Magazine’s 2014 James Knudsen Prize for Fiction. Twitter @miketchin

Between Genres

A Quiet Place (2018): Blind monsters with super-powered hearing force any humans who hope to survive into silence.

—

When Ingrid first heard of the monsters who relied on sound to hunt their prey, she felt a certain kind of relief.

There were, of course, the unpleasant apocalyptic implications and the principle that even a quiet person was susceptible to the mistake of stepping on a crackly leaf.

But there was also the promise of silence.

It’s funny how quickly people get used to new ways of life. Big Todd removed the bell from the door at the Reel to Reel video store. He also invested in small televisions with headphone jacks to sell, and headphones of differing quality at different price points to go with them. He charged Ingrid with setting up displays, then stood over her while she worked. He grew more liberal about bumping his hands into hers or bumping bare forearm to bare forearm, knowing that Ingrid had trained herself not to yelp in surprise at the contact, not to recoil in a such a way that her body, out of control, might knock over the display.

People still wanted to watch movies. They’d risk their lives for it.

They were the people of the neighborhood, bound by an appetite for home entertainment, The people of the neighborhood only, because no one dared drive their cars with their noisy engines.

So it was a surprise when Rosaline showed up.

Rosaline, with whom Ingrid had shared a bench in biology lab sophomore year of high school. Rosaline, with whomIngrid initiated incidental-seeming contact of hand on hand and forearm on forearm while they dissected frogs and fetal pigs. They’d had a studio art elective together, too, senior year, in which they were supposed to sketch whatever they saw in a still life of pots and pans and old books and feathers, and Ingrid instead looked past it all, across the circle of desks, and drew Rosaline’s face.

The teacher snatched up the sketch before Ingrid could stop her and showed it to the class as an exemplar of thinking outside the box and investing in art. Ingrid felt her face flushing and endured it all, staring at the floor. She hadn’t had the nerve to speak to Rosaline since.

But in this new world, no one spoke.

In this new world, Ingrid caught Rosaline watching her from the far side of a video shelf, in the space between the top of the shelf and the banner listing genres—Romantic Comedies on Ingrid’s side, and the print that she knew read Action-Adventure on Rosaline’s.

Not just watching. Staring.

It seemed difficult to believe that Rosaline would come to the store just to see Ingrid. But then, how far must she have walked—or perhaps braved biking—to come to this specific video store?

Didn’t this post-apocalyptic world have everyone who survived ready for their own action-adventure? Ready to pursue romance—comedic or not—that they may not have had in the world they’d previously known?

Ingrid and Rosaline danced like this. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen, across the way from one another, Rosaline watching whenever Ingrid looked.

Big Todd came over. A drive by, brushing her breast with the back of his hand. He was growing bolder, more confident that, in a world in which she wouldn’t voice her displeasure, she was left in a space between the extremes of lodging a more formal, written complaint, or letting it all go.

Rosaline came to Ingrid next and passed her a note.

Then Rosaline carried her DVDs to the front counter, checked out, and was gone.

Ingrid secreted herself away to a back corner of the store to unfold the paper in trembling hands.

She read the words: Giant booger—left nostril.

Ingrid wiped the back of her hand against her nose. The big yellow-green sucker came loose at once, wet and throbbing, threatening to explode in a mucus-y scream.

But silent.

The thing dried on Ingrid’s skin before she made it to the bathroom to wash it away.

Waking

Inception (2010): Thieves who poach information from dreams try something new—planting an idea in the dreamer’s mind.

—

Ingrid became aware of Big Todd’s presence in her dreams in fits and starts.

In one dream, he described the car he droveas a 1965 Shelby GT350 with a V8 engine—a vocabulary of automobiles Ingrid could never have mustered, but that based on his swagger and what he said explicitly—this is one sweet ride—she understood him to be quite proud of.

In another dream, he took her out to dinner. You’re my boss, she protested, in a moment of clarity about the absurdity of being out at a fancy restaurant with her manager from the Reel to Reel video store, twenty years her senior. The candlelight and red roses and bottle of cabernet at the center of the table all affirmed this was very much a date.

You wanted this, he assured her.

A steak appeared in front of her. Pink, garnished with rosemary.

I’m a vegetarian, she told him.

Just try it, he said.

In the waking world, Ingrid had never been attracted to Big Todd. She wondered what he was up to in her dreams.

She couldn’t very well ask him at work. The obvious reason: that she’d sound insane for accusing him of infiltrating her subconscious. The less obvious reason: that if he knew she knew what he was up to, wouldn’t he only dig deeper, more careful about what he said and did in her dreams to lessen her suspicions, her defenses? 

She tried not to sleep.

A person can function on little sleep. Four hours and a lot of caffeine, at least for the short term.

Then there were the alarms. She woke herself every hour. Enough time to keep from dreaming at times, or to disrupt dreams as they took hold.

It worked for a couple days.

Then she was a zombie, left staring at a traffic light long after it had turned from red to green until a car horn roused her.

Then she fell asleep at work. A dream of work. Big Todd putting I Know What You Did Last Summer on the big display TV.

“Isn’t this too gory for the store?” she asked.

“It’s all right,” Big Todd said. “I’ll change it if any kids come in.”

A man with a hook for a hand showed up on screen sooner than he was supposed to, the movie scenes playing out of sequence.

“This is too scary,” Ingrid said.

“It’s OK.” Big Todd stood beside her. Very close. Hands touching. “You can squeeze my hand if you need to.”

He took hold of her hand. She hadn’t asked him to. She hadn’t reached out.

She woke. A string of drool connected her mouth to the front counter when she lifted her head.

Big Todd was there. “Are you OK?”

“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she said.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” He took her hand.

She woke.

She woke at Big Todd holding her hand. “I’m worried about you.”

“Leave me alone.” She pulled away, but he clung tight to her hand.

She woke.

Big Todd stood over her. Not touching.

“I’m here,” he said like a reassurance. Repeated it like an incantation. “I’m here.” Like a promise. Like a threat: “I’ll always be here.”

Canceled

The Truman Show (1998): A man comes to learn that his whole life is and always has been reality television. He knows nothing. He knows no one.

 —

Ingrid became aware her life was a show the day the network canceled it.

The people in her life—the actors, it turned out—went away. They weren’t getting paid anymore, and she got the impression based on the way they did not say goodbye—the way her mother muttered nice knowing you and avoided contact—that they’d never liked her very much.

Her friend Andie hung around. She said she would hang around until they made her leave, or at least until she had another gig. She said she understood it would suck for Ingrid to be alone. Andie said rumor went around her high school—her real high school, before she was on the show, in Ingrid’s high school—about her sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend, and, really, she’d only given him a handjob, but no one wanted to hang out with her anymore and it made her so sad. She didn’t want Ingrid to be that mad or that sad. Ingrid was her friend.

Andie wound up leaving, too. After lunch and in the middle of a game of Scrabble, she went to the bathroom and never came back.

It was a flawed concept, one of the producers told Ingrid. The production costs of the show were too high, the interest in watching an actual human doing actual human things was too low over a period of decades, after the cute years of childhood had long passed.

Then Ingrid was alone. The house was still furnished for the time being, but her family was gone. So was the electricity.

She curled up in bed. 

What happens after your show gets canceled?

Then Big Todd was there. She’d only ever seen him at work, but of course he knew where she lived—her home the biggest set piece, the closest thing to an iconic landmark the show had. Her mother had explained away the tourists who’d take pictures in front of the house on the premise that a president had grown up in it. Ingrid hadn’t thought to question why the string of visitors had thinned over the years, why she hadn’t seen any visitors at all any time recently.

Big Todd let himself in the house and sat down next to her on her bed. She didn’t like it when clothes she’d worn outside touched her bed, carrying with them filth and disease. Less so when other people’s outside clothes made contact. Her bed was supposed to be a clean space. Wouldn’t her show have made that clear?

But Big Todd rested easy and curled a big arm over her little shoulders, put a big hand over her skinny arm. “There, there,” he said as if she were crying. “Everything will be all right,” he said as if anything would be.

Issue 10.2