Taking the Plunge

by Mark McCawley

The noise from the street below was deafening, and the air smelled foul, yet still I kept the window open. Any air, even noxious air, was better than suffocating to death in the heat. For the past two days the temperature varied between discomforting and debilitating, and the humidity hovered around eighty percent. During both nights I soaked through two fitted sheets, and when I awoke, my underwear was seared to my buttocks like a second skin.

Swinging open the fridge door in my tiny kitchenette, I took out a bottle of beer, slammed the door closed, walked back into the barren bachelor flat that was my bedroom and plopped myself on the sofa bed. I studied my new lodgings. I did not like what I saw, not one bit. Yet what else could I get on such short notice? At least the woman upstairs had put her two baboons to bed. The two Tylenol they’d driven me to take were just beginning to kick in. I twisted the cap off my bottle and threw it in the general direction of the open window. It missed. I took two deep, long gulps.

Except for the one chair, a table and the sofa bed I was sitting on, Lydia had kept the rest. The furniture. The television. The stereo. The VCR. Most importantly, though, she kept the air conditioner. Whenever I thought of her moving about our old apartment, that air conditioner keeping her company and cool, I felt even worse. I don’t think I missed her as much as I did that blessed appliance.

It was her idea — a trial separation. Time to think things out, come to a decision about “the relationship.” Three weeks had passed, and still she hadn’t come to a decision. I had figured it was over between us after enduring the first muggy week of slow death by heat exhaustion. After three weeks, I cared more for that fucking air conditioner than I did for her.

I gulped down the rest of my beer, went back for another. Returning with a fresh bottle, I sat on my one chair at my one table. I twisted off the cap and threw it toward the open window. It missed. Beneath the open window, twist off beer bottle caps scattered across the floor. If I continued to drink at the same rate, I’d run out of beer before the morning was through. I’d have to go out and buy another case. Even though it was early morning, it was too hot to go outside. Like walking inside an asphalt oven. And I already felt a lot like poultry.

On the table lay a two day old newspaper. I opened it and began to read. On one of the pages was a photograph of a blonde woman, scantily clad in bikini bottoms and a cut-up T-shirt barely covering her breasts. Her interests were physical fitness, fast red cars, and dark handsome men with a great sense of humor. Why do women always want what they can never possibly get? I wondered. I’d settle for anyone with an air conditioner. I turned the page. One article immediately caught my attention:

MAN SURVIVES PLUNGE

A twenty-eight year old city man fell from his

20th floor balcony and survived an almost fatal fall by

grabbing cable cords as he fell floor by floor. The man

was discovered by a pedestrian, who found him

tangled up in cable wires. Early reports point out that

the man suffered a broken leg and other minor

injuries from his near fatal mishap. He is listed in

stable condition.

Immediately, I thought about all those people, on each floor, watching television as their cable reception went suddenly dead. I stood up and walked over to the open window. I lived on the tenth floor. I poked out my head and looked at the side of the building. Just my luck. There were no cables or wires of any kind. I looked at the building across from mine. On the balcony facing mine, a man was looking at the outside of his building. There didn’t appear to be any cables or wires on his side of the building either.

Mark McCawley is the founder, publisher, and in-house editor of Greensleeve Editions which publishes the online magazine of transgressive art, writing, and music, Urban Graffiti. He is the author of ten chapbooks of poetry and short fiction, most recently, Sick Lazy Fuck (Black Bile Press, 2009), Collateral Damage (Coracle Press, 2008), as well as Stories For People With Brief Attention Spans (1993) and Just Another Asshole: short stories (1994), both from Greensleeve Editions. His short fiction has also appeared in the anthologies: Burning Ambitions: The Anthology of Short-Shorts, edited by Debbie James (Toronto: Rush Hour Revisions, 1998) and Grunt & Groan: The New Fiction Anthology of Work and Sex, edited by Matthew Firth and Max Maccari (Toronto: Boheme Press, 2002). Most recently his work has appeared in Sensitive Skin magazine and The Toronto Quarterly.