Bonsai Boy Chp. 2-3

Chapter 2

“What do you mean you can’t get the space? Listen here you incompetent sonofabitch I paid good money to have my work shown in that sad excuse for a gallery,” she listened intently with the phone glued to her ear; this was usual. So usual in fact that she had developed a sort of growth from the mass amounts of time that she spent with her phone attached to her ear. You know that sort of growth that wrestlers get after too many times of getting their heads bashed on the matt, cauliflower ear, it’s called. To wrestlers this formation is a symbol of the amount of time and effort they’ve put into their career and, in the same respect, her lobe lump, as she referred to it, attested to her determination as a struggling artist and insurance agent. “If I don’t get the space, I’m going to burn the fucker down. Do you hear me? You think I’m kidding; but I’m not,” pausing again to take in the reply. “As I’ve told you before, psychopaths are the people we should be looking up to. The fact that you’re a comparing me to one is a compliment in my mind… Don’t interrupt me you fat fuckin’ tard. You get that space. You get that space or you’re out of a job. I bet you understood that,” she slammed the cellular device shut with a quick flip of her wrist and tossed it into the passenger seat. She needed another cigarette. With her eyes on the road she reached over to the passenger’s seat fumbling for her pack of unopened Capri’s. “Aha,” she exclaimed as she found the untouched pack and quickly unwrapped it with the ferocity of a child opening their first present on Christmas morning. She laid the pack in her lap and reached into the left cup holder for her lighter. She always put it there. She liked things to remain the same. She longed for everything to remain the same, to remain static. If she reached for her lighter and it wasn’t there, well that would throw her whole day off. And if she made her daily run to the Kwik Sac on the side of Adams Lane and they didn’t have any more packs of Capri 100’s, well her day would be beyond repair. But she didn’t have to worry about that today. Instead, she was worrying about her gallery space; the gallery space that she had been planning to be displayed in for months. She had gotten a guarantee, a promise; and she did not take promises lightly.

When it was mentioned that this big black lung of a bitch, now named Vanessa, liked things to remain static, unchanged, familiar, it wasn’t revealed that she lived by a rigorous knowledge of facts and statistics. In college she had majored in Stats and minored in Art, so stats were her forte and she could spout them off like no one’s business. She knows that at this rate she will be dead in no time because:

A regular smoker dies 13 to 14 years younger than a non- smoking person.

Regardless, she doesn’t care, huffing and puffing on one cigarette after another all day long hardly pausing to let her lungs catch their breath. Yes in essence she is just one tall, yellowed, musty cancer stick awaiting her last puff of life.

The average human life lasts 25,000 days.

And with her reckless lifestyle and savvy stat smarts, Vanessa commutes from place to place and from person to person trying to imprint her own personal statistics into the textbooks, onto the span of history- just one way of transcending the 25,000 days of her pathetically menial existence. But the things you think you know, you don’t truly know, even if they are as honest and overused as a statistic.





Chapter 3

Vanessa was a plain woman, somewhat pretty but plain. She had shoulder length sandy blonde hair with blue eyes and was slender with long legs and perky breasts. As previously noted she smoked entirely too much, which caused her voice to be an octave lower than it normally would’ve been. Another unfortunate outcome of her addictive habit was that she oftentimes coughed up a mouthful of brownish-green mucus, which she hastily rolled into a ball between her tongue and teeth and spit on the ground.

The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.

If she was in the mall she found the little garden pots in the middle of the large aisle showcasing the stores and spewed out her decomposing cilia and lung lining discharge there; if she was in church she would slyly move to the edge of the row and trot to the bathroom where she could flush it down the sink drain; and if she was in the car, well, she usually just spit it into an empty cup. There was always an empty cup in her right cup holder, filled with mucus and smelling like cigarettes. Generally she kept the same cup there until it was overflowing with dark green mucosal globs, then she would slowly let all the mucus drain out, making sure she had an audience, and get a new cup. She liked the attention and she was a slave of habit, unchanging, familiar habit.

Other interesting facts about Vanessa, well, she cut her fingernails every two weeks and her toenails every eight. Of course she had her reasons.

Human fingernails grow four times faster than human toenails.

She also had an obsession with her weight. She weighed herself at least five times a day. After awaking while smoking her morning cigarette, after each meal of the day, and right before bedtime she weighed herself. Yes, many would say that she was a creature of pathetic and useless habit, but it got her through the day. Well those parts of the day aforementioned, the latter parts, the parts not yet mentioned, no amount of habit could regulate those parts. For now don’t forget to pay close attention to everything. Every word, sentence, statistic, all of them will help you to realize that what you think you know, well you don’t really know at all.