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I Did My Best · Original Short Story ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 2000–8000
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Bartown, USA
Mary was thinking of pints and shots when she walked into her usual haunt, a sports bar on the outskirts of a town which is itself on the outskirts of a city. The bar was a tiny building that had been renamed and reappropriated so many times it didn’t even have a name anymore. It was out of the way. If you didn’t know where it is, you might never find it at all.

The bartender, a failure at twenty (that was twenty years ago) who worked two jobs to feed herself and her mortgage, reached for the raspberry flavored vodka when she saw Mary walk in. Mary waved her off.

“What’s wrong?” the bartender asked.

“I ain’t drinking tonight,” Mary said. “Gotta keep a clear head for tomorrow.”

“Got a hot date?”

Mary sighed. “I wish. Yard sale. Selling some furniture. You should stop by.”

The bartender made a noncommittal noise. “I haven’t seen you since you came in with that one guy from the city. The cute one.”

“If you remember his name, don’t you dare say it.”

“That bad?”

“You have no earthly idea.”

“Well, I guess you’ll find another. You still on tinder? Just beep boop beep, ding--” She imitated a microwave oven. “New man. I got a match the other week. He was twelve years younger than me. Holy shit.”

Mary settled slowly into one of the dozen ratty barstools. Her eyes floated to the TV in the corner, which was playing reruns of some football game, then returned to the bartender. “That’s not for me anymore.”

“What, you like girls now?”

“Get bent. I just can’t be doing that throwing myself around game anymore.” Her eyes drifted again. “Hurts too much.”

The bartender poured Mary a glass of water. The place smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke, though she knew no one has smoked in here since the law was changed five or six years ago. Now all the smokers migrated outside to do their filthy business. They were supposed to stay eight feet away from the door. Unless it was raining, they generally complied.

“I was kinda hoping there’d be more people here,” Mary said. She put the plastic cup to her lips and gauged the taste. Bar water always tasted funny to her, but before tonight she just ignored it. Now her mind wandered to vague memories of radio talk show hosts ranting about all the weird chemicals you could find in your water. “Is this well water?”

The bartender shrugged. “Got it from the tap. I can sell you a bottle if you don’t like it.”

Mary shook her head. The taste of water was one more thing to add to the list of new worries. The list was long, and she was forgetful. That was equally worrisome. The list itself was making the list. Maybe she did need a drink after all.

She stood up suddenly. That thought was unforgivable. She promised herself three weeks ago to give it up. Looked herself straight up in the mirror and swore to herself and God that for the next nine months, not a single fluid ounce of poison would pass her lips. In or out.

Mary said to the bartender, “I should go. Sorry for not buying anything. I just wanted to let you know about the yard sale.”

“Remind me again, what’s the occasion?”

“I’m moving out. Gonna get a job downtown.”

The bartender made a face. “You thinking of moving down there? It’s awful pricey.”

“I’ve already found a place. I just need to get some more money saved between now and my move-in date. Peace of mind money.”

“I guess I can’t blame you. I’d love some peace of mind money.”

The bartender’s thoughts rang in Mary’s ears as she walked towards her car. Bars were palaces built to peace of mind. If not there, where else could it be found?




Mary got a weird feeling about garage sales. When she was little, she had to sell a bunch of her toys one summer to help keep the family afloat. Mostly it was things she didn’t really play with anymore, but she felt a strong attachment to those molded plastic barbie dolls. She spent the whole day locked inside her room, unable to bear the endless parade of cars rolling slowly down the street, faces peering out from behind the glass like hawks. All those strangers rifling through her stuff--it felt like she had been tricked somehow. Like she had helped a robber move her stuff into the getaway van.

Lots of things had changed since then, the most significant being she couldn’t lock herself in her room this time, lest someone help themselves to her unwatched stuff. In fact, she kept both doors of her single-story boomer bungalow locked just to keep herself outside. A single lawn chair rested next to the concrete slabs of her driveway. She could rest there periodically.

She got a few offers for the chair, none of which are worth the trouble. That chair was worth its weight in gold.

It was Saturday, so the neighborhood kids were running around in the yards or playing on their parents’ phones on shaded porches. Once, while a pair of tired-looking parents from out of town rifled through Mary’s worldly possessions for the best bargain, their child detached itself from its mother’s leg and walked over to Mary.

“Is all this yours?” it asked.

“Yep,” Mary answered uneasily. She looked at the furniture lined up in the grass, the plastic bins of clothes, the plates and silverware--anything but the child.

“How’d you get so much stuff?”

“Took awhile. I used to have a good job. I was lucky.”

“What’s luck?”

She chuckled. “Hell if I know.”

The kid frowned. “What’s Hell?”

Mary went wide-eyed and clamped her mouth shut. It was a shameful thing. Her first time teaching a child something she shouldn’t, and it’s some stranger’s ankle-biting nosy little monster of a child.

Mary said, “It’s nothing. You want to look at some toys? Got some toys you’d like.”

The child shook its head. “Got any games?”

“Games? Yeah, I got uno and some board games in that bin there.”

“Got any games on your phone?” the child clarified.

Mary couldn’t help but wonder if kids were like this all the time. She busied herself with unstacking some boxes, if not just to deter any more questions. It was only ten in the morning. She still had a long day of robberies to go.

The neighbors got curious and walk over around noon. The sun was hot overhead, so hot that even the shadows on the ground got burned away.

The neighbors made some polite jokes and tried not to make judgey eyes. It’s easy to judge someone by their garage sale. But everyone’s been there before. Either they need the money or they need the space.

Still, Mary could feel a little bit of judgement. It’s only natural, she told herself, and plowed on ahead with the pleasantries.

When she mentioned she’s leaving, her next door neighbor recoiled. Her name was Tam. She was an older woman. A failure at twenty (and that was forty years ago). Heavy. Bought a lot of fast-food subs because she thought they were healthy. Every party she’s ever hosted or attended, she would brought a big platter of party subs. She hovered next to them and took the lion’s share. That was the kind of person she is.

“I had no idea you were moving,” said Tam. Mary couldn’t tell if she was serious. “Where to?”

“Into the city,” Mary said. “It’s all worked out. The apartment I got is furnished. Kitchen’s stocked. I’m the only thing they were missing.” She shrugged. “Now they got me.”

“Oh, that’s good. You always took me as a yard type though. Don’t you think you’ll miss having a yard?”

“There’s a park nearby. Shouldn’t be so bad.”

Tam scoffed. “Parks in cities are dangerous. How big’s your apartment?”

Mary was already done with this conversation. She hoped the kid from earlier would come back and throw a fit. Anything to break up this conversation. Still, she soldiered on. “Six hundred square feet.”

“Oh dear. And how many people.”

“A hundred, just about.”

Tam clicked her tongue. “There are a hundred people on this street. Imagine puttin’ em all in a box. I’d want to roll up and die.”

“Good thing you’re staying here then,” Mary said.

“I suppose so. But I’ll give you one thing. I’ll bet whatever apartment you wind up livin’ in has great access to public services. Like hospitals. For--you know. You’ll need to be close to a hospital when the time comes. You can just run up the street and--ding, congratulations.”

Tam chuckled to herself and wandered off. Mary seized the opportunity to return to her chair, which she noticed was being eyed up again. No amount of money in the world could make her part with that chair. Not when there was still six hours until she shut the sale down.




Once things wound down, Mary moved all her unsold junk back into the house and stacked it in the living room. None of her neighbors offered to help. She couldn’t blame them--those boxes looked heavy.

The last thing to move was the one sofa she hadn’t managed to sell. It took some haggling, but she managed to get it through the door and into the front hall, where she promptly collapsed onto it. Whoever bought this house after her would just have to deal with the couch themselves. Come Hell or high water, this couch was gonna stay where it was. She could work around it. Damn the couch. Damn the house. Damn the front hall.

This day hadn’t turned out how she imagined at all.




How long she laid there, it was difficult to tell. When she got back to her feet, the sun was setting. She unshuttered the back windows so she could watch it go down, turned on some lights, and set about making some dinner.

She flinched when she opened the fridge. Sitting next to the canned tuna and mayo and lettuce and cheese was a bottle of red wine. She must have missed it in her sweep of the house last week. She had gotten the whiskey in the freezer and the beer in the closet. But she missed the wine.

All of a sudden the hunger returned worse than ever. Still, she forced herself to open the fridge again and pull something out. She wound up with just the lettuce and the mayo. Not great, but she could work with it. Together with some bread and turkey jerky from the cabinet, she had a sandwich.

She sat indian-style on the living room floor, surrounded by boxes. The first half of the sandwich went down without making any dent in her hunger.

Though Mary was pretty sure her body needed food, she couldn’t help but put her sandwich down and make her way towards the fridge again. Everything in her mind started turning around that bottle. One drink couldn’t really hurt, could it?

She stopped herself halfway to the fridge and rapped her knuckles on the countertop. Not happening. She returned to the remaining half of her sandwich. When that was gone, she wound up in front of the fridge again.

This time she cursed out loud and returned to the living room to sit on a pile of boxes and stare at the wall. She knew she’d break sooner or later. She always did. Stupid girl. She always broke.

Again, she walked to the fridge. This time she opened it up and took the bottle out. The glass was dark green, and the liquid inside looked black as night. The bottle opener was in the drawer beside the fridge where it always was. One drink. One drink to take the edge off. One drink to complete the cycle and start this whole wretched ride over again.

Mary snapped. She stormed out the front door, bottle in hand, and flung it into the recycling bin. A satisfying sound of shattered glass tickled her ears.

Suddenly she wasn't so hungry anymore. Just tired. Impossibly tired.

She had already packed up the bedding, so she settled down to sleep on the couch in the front hall.

In that moment, she had never felt so alone. She had no family to help her. No real friends to speak of. The neighbors were accessories to the houses they lived in. It hardly felt worth her time to worry about them when she already had so much to worry about herself. And her new family on the way.

She touched her belly where the bump would form. Her child’s name would be June. She may not matter to the world any more than Mary did, but that was the beauty of it too. If they didn’t matter, they could do anything. Soon they would be in a city. Making real money. No more scraping by. No more bars--at least for awhile. All that drinking money would go to a better cause. Every week she would think about going to the bars, count the drinks she almost ordered in her head, then transfer the money she would have spent to June’s new college fund.

So the habit could prove useful after all.
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#1 · 1
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There's not a lot happening here, but not a lot needs to happen. More than any other story in this round, this feels real and down-to-earth in a way that truly emulates real life--the ambiguity and aimlessness of it, how momentous changes are often made of a thousand mundane actions. Great stuff.
#2 ·
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So I whiffed on the reveal until it was actually revealed. Its fairly obvious in retrospect (the clues are all there), but it didn't click until it was actually stated.

Which raises an important question. Why wasn't it stated up front?

The reveal gives the story a decent amount of meaning in retrospect. The problem is that I had to read the story -without- that meaning first. We really don't have strong sense of why Mary is doing any of this. Like, they are arguably all generally positive life changes (moving to the city is debatable, but she frames it as positive, so we shall take it as such). But we really don't have any idea why. And there's really no stakes to it either, since nothing implies that these changes are anything but minor life improvements when you are reading without the reveal. She's not an alcoholic (maybe, the scene with the wine actually muddies that but the bar scene certainly implies that isn't the case), she seems financially okay and just interested in getting some more buffer cash, etc.

It's kind of the same problem that Hungry, Hungry Hippo was suffering from. The surprise reveal gives it some strength, but it doesn't really change that the rest of the text is a bit flaccid as a result. Basically, by the time I'm given any real motivation to care about the text (and don't get me wrong, its solidly written, I'm just more talking at a narrative level), it's over. The biggest conflict involves the wine bottle and, well, again, with the provided context up to that point, her warring with it is a little undermined by the fact it seems more like a mild active change rather than escaping alcoholism or anything. So we're stuck kind of wondering why it is being made such a big deal of.

There is good stuff in here. It is evocative and it has got heart. Its good! But I think you kneecap it a bit by hiding like, all the actual conflict and tension right at the very end.
#3 ·
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I'm left feeling unsure:

About whether Mary's lying to herself and us throughout the whole story. In the first scene, for instance, she tells the bartender that she's "gonna get a job downtown." But at the end she thinks that she'll soon be in the city "making real money," and the line in the middle of the story where she says she "used to have a good job" just muddies the waters even further. What is her actual employment situation now, and what's it going to be when she gets to the city? Does she have a job lined up, or is she going to be looking for one? 'Cause the story seems to be saying both.

And this exchange with the neighbor: "How big’s your apartment?" "Six hundred square feet." "Oh dear. And how many people." "A hundred, just about." To me, that's her saying she's sharing a six hundred square foot apartment with a hundred other people. I know that can't be right, but that's what it says. It made me wonder if any of the stuff Mary tells Tam about everything being "all worked out" is true.

So by the time I got to the end, I found that I didn't have enough reliable information to know what emotions the author wanted to inspire in me. Is this the story of a young woman finally regaining some control over her downwardly spiraling life, or is this the story of her downward spiral getting worse? I honestly don't know, and I'd like to.

Mike
#4 ·
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Yay, general fiction. This is my jam.

No offense to the other readers, but the line about "nine months" jumped out at me pretty hard, so the conflict wasn't a mystery, and there wasn't a reveal. Sure, that's just one experience, and for what it's worth, being more up front about the conflict probably wouldn't hinder my experience.

…I think.

Man, I don't know. I like subtlety. I like making connections for myself. So I take that back, I think the line about "not having any poison for the next nine months" is the right amount of showing and telling. I prefer hearing the little click in my mind as I'm reading it, and would have enjoyed it less if she said "I promised no more poison until the baby is born."

THAT would have blindsided me, and it's not that I think that being subtle is some general storytelling rule, but because this story is, at its core, very understated, and very much restricted to Mary's thought process, that it makes sense.

I just finished reading a story about a woman who is struggling to adjust to adulthood due to a childhood that was both generally traumatizing, and included a specific traumatic event. The protagonist spent most of the time in that story not telling us about all the trauma she went through, instead trickling out that information for us gradually, and even skirting around it at times. Sure, some of it was locked away in her psyche, so she couldn't tell us, but every so often she would say something out loud that was shocking, a small clue as to what she went through, and she never dwelled. Because why would she dwell?

And I think the same can be applied here. The story mentions the conflict and then moves on, because Mary wants to avoid thinking about it. She wouldn't be avoiding trauma so much as avoiding a reminder of shame and regret, but still, she wouldn't be thinking "boy it sure did suck that I got knocked up, and that I have to swear off the alc for a while." She would more likely rub her stomach and go, "Ugh, no alcohol, fuck." Which is why I think it works in this story. Her perspective gives us the right amount of info, I think.

Again, though, that's Just one opinion. Have fun figuring out which one of us to listen to, Author! SUCKER!

To go into some negatives, though, the yard sale scene was strange, and most of all the conversation with Tam. Looking back on it, it didn't seem to add any pertinent info to the story. It might fit if we were to actually follow Mary to her new home, and see if anything Tam said was accurate. But for the length it is, I don't think it should have been there.

Also, a hundred people to six hundred square feet? Pardon? Is that the area of the building itself? How many storeys?

The conversation with the kid was kind of strange, too, but mostly for the "Hell" gag. Well, mostly Mary's overdramatic reaction to letting the word slip. Kind of betrayed the understated tone of the story, and in the end, it wasn't such a big deal. Also, "luck" isn't exactly a concept only adults know about.

Yeah, the yard sale scene was kind of a misfire. The real conflict of trying to make changes to your life because you have no other choice is the point of the story, so you either need it to be more prevalent in the yard sale scene, or have another subplot that is just as interesting take the wheel for a bit.

But still, I liked this one a lot. So it's up there on my slate. Thank you for writing, Author. Good luck in the voting!