Emily LaLiberte, FSPA Short Story Contest 1
Philosophers and Slushies-
Alabaster sheets scribbled with partial clauses and run-on sentences that didn’t make the cut littered the carpet at a writer’s feet. Stuccoed to the wall, ruins and remnants of good ideas gone by stared down at her in a nearly accusatory way as she continued to pour her pitchers of thoughts onto a page that would be another fruitless grasp at prose. The writer lost her inner instincts to guide her somewhere in the maze of storytelling and instead decided to interrogate the paper with tired eyes and chagrin until some inner force pushed her hand to the page. Her eyes grew sore and tremors from her long unattended coffee made her hand jerk and throw more piles of wasted thoughts over the edge of her desk, trying to discover a breadcrumb trail leading her to motivation. “This is writer’s purgatory,” she thought to herself solemnly.
She now focused on the saccharine murmurings of Eckhart Tolle from a CD her dad purchased her for her fits of self loathing to clear her mind. She didn’t think the German man had ever been in the position of being a freelance writer, or he’d probably be out of his day job as an inspirational speaker. She then thought about her father, the man who should have been a preacher, listening to uplifting CDs in search for a calm way to keep the quiet on a family road trip to relatives’ houses. And how he interjected with his own philosophies on life like he carried on an open-ended discussion with each velvet voice that spoke through the tape. Opinions had more leeway when she didn't have any qualms to tell her father, unabashedly, that he wasted all the oxygen in their van through having a debate with Tony Robbins. The tough philosophies on life could wait until they all got slurpees from 7-11 so they just might have the high to deal with it for three more hours, she had grumbled. You could get a Big Gulp for Tony Robbins too. He took it on the chin and began laughing that chest-rumbling laugh that could move mountains. He hadn’t possessed the mental energy or time to care what people thought about him and, as he had always said, there's nothing that can't be helped with a slushie. They'd then throw punchy jokes back and forth as they filled up their cups, a Green Apple small for her and a Cherry Cola Big Gulp for him.
Childhood held those pinkie promises of indifference to what people had to say about her thoughts and how they spilled over opinionated lips. Anxiety didn’t tear her stomach apart or rattle her ribcage in her self-proclaimed tomboy years. The utmost important thing at the time were the summer softball sessions and her gem collection, which held the usual connotations for a little girl that grew up with three brothers, each a different circus act of the household. Now, writing tethered her to the earth and kept her expressions close by so she couldn’t lose part of herself in a sea of nerves. It became something of an extension of herself, her pen practically the siamese twin of her right hand. As an awkward high school sophomore and another product of the assembly line of divorced children, writing did for her what an over-compensating father couldn’t: provide her a means to float away. From that point on, she became happily wed to her writing and started to gain recognition for it, which led to her ego being bolstered and her need to please that much higher. It made her that much more afraid of disappointing every one. Now, she pined for the hay days of slushies and long, philosophical car rides.
The girl coveted the thought of calling her father, who always knew what to do to part the sea of anxiety that she swam through. He would give her some quote to help her wade through mires. He made her laugh so she could be a little more anesthetized to failure somewhat, as a man who looked at a crack in the ceiling and explained how it gave them a blessing in disguise because the tile hadn’t fallen on their heads would. Silver linings presented themselves in the smallest fissures of life for him. Any mediocre situation could be compromisable and remedied to him, being the shining example of the advocate archetype. He taught a college philosophy class and loved his job more than his own kids at times, though he’d never admit to that fact. He’d bring discussions of logic home to the dinner table and which kids in his class he admired the most: the ones who weaved together creative solutions to the Trolley Problem and dreamed forevermore. If he could see her now, pulling out her hair over the lack of words that flowed from the ink in her pen, chastisement would take on a new form. He would take on the form of Kafka, citing that antennas sprouted from her hair from the lack of harmony between mind and drive, from the lack of trust and respect in herself. Or morph into Sattre, saying her writing condemned her to ugly freedom and that the meaning of life is for her to write her heart out. Existentialism took on a new level with him. That in particular didn’t cease the waves of anxious terror from crashing over her, but at least the attempt was valiant. His amount of philosophical analysis of her person left her defensive as a child, but now she nearly craved it.
Negative philosophies must have metastasized in his brain from the divisiveness of a rough divorce, because not too long after, he received the diagnosis of stage three brain cancer. She had joked at the time that he pondered about life too much and that’s why he’d get mind splitting migraines. Now she wished she could take that statement back. He lived for a painful spell with it, holding on only for his family, until it carried him away just last year. The wound left fresh and oozing, his absence had left her a more crumpled ragdoll version of herself, anxiety seeping into every part of her day. She still kept the pamphlets they passed out at his funeral, which described such a beautiful life in such a terribly minimalistic way. She tacked it to the wall for the one redeeming quote that she had added, a summation of his mind and beliefs: “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, your way of thinking.” Anger manifested as a fuming sore in her chest, as her mother pulled a disappearing act, ‘mistaking the date’. Trolley Problem-solvers didn’t bat an eye over the church where the girl sat illuminated by crying, crystalline Marys, who wouldn’t weep for him either. The only thing that kept her afloat among the dust of the pews was the thought that he must be having some tough debates with Karl Marx on Red Fever in some far distant plane. The thought nearly bursted from her mind in the form of stifled, clandestine laughter, something her relatives wouldn’t have thought to be apropos in the quiet air of Saints and sinners alike.
The girl felt a rush of shame come over her, thinking how much he had overcome and done for all those he came into contact with him. How he lived his truth in an Existential light, and she dared not to write down her own truth in the fear of what might happen if she did. Sensing her own overwhelmingly pathetic state, she walked away from her desk and flopped her dead limbs onto her mattress. She wanted to steal his resilience away that he possessed in life, something to keep her moving at least momentarily. She would box up that strength inside of her in the hopes that it might help her to move on and no longer be angry about no big send off to someone that deserved a viking burial, instead of stuffy pews and an open casket. The CD came back into earshot with the fitting quote of: “Stop looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love- you have a treasure within you that is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.”
She understood why her father had picked out this track in particular. The girl, comforted by this, let herself melt away her writing stress into her duvet. She then glanced at the ceiling to see an intricate spider web of cracks patterning it, the silver paneling of the air vent peeking out behind it. Her father had finally decided to make his appearance again after making his rounds of discussions with the Philosophical Greats, so it would seem. The girl then hoisted herself from her bed, pocketing her keys from her nightstand and swinging her jacket from its resting place. As she made her way to the door, looking up at her newly damaged ceiling, she smiled. “Maybe nothing can't be helped with a slushie,’” she thought to herself. She'd bring back two: one Cherry Cola Big Gulp and one Green Apple small. Philosophers need their slushies, after all.