"Ten Years From Now Or Reading Tom Robbins"

          He was laying in bed and reading Another Roadside Attraction and thinking that Tom Robbins was fucking ridiculous. He read: He was a magician and she was a palm reader. Or a fortune-teller. Or a psychic. And they drove a bus powered by grass and bourbon. And they had a baboon washing windows. And they made love like wild animals every night. And how could it really unfold that way? Unravel like that? Become or un-become in such a fashion? Future-tense itself so bizarrely?

          But ten years ago his English teacher had been talking Pulp Fiction in the hallway and showing off his teenage-speak and the girl next to him had been half-reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles and plotting out the points of her valedictorian rigmarole. Now she’s married to that same recently divorced teacher and picking up his kids up from grade school in a brand new gold-painted and gas-guzzling SUV. And ten years ago the girl next to him in choir had been singing operettas and playing Dorothy in a community theater production down the street and auditioning for ever-present all-state choir. But now she’s having babies with their once was drama director and wondering how hard it would be to restart her dangling vocal career. And ten years ago they were all driving to some stupid park to sneak cigarettes under dark wooden playground equipment and now he was living just down the way in a bright yellow house sided in cardboard but wishing it was expensive tan brick.

          So that under the shower now he reels back, letting it all out. Ten years from now he could be divorced and remarried and divorced and remarried and living in Bangladesh with seventeen adopted kids and a house made of stucco and mud. Ten years from now he could be an infamous bank robber or convicted of crimes against the state or eating a new fruit developed in Antarctic isolation and powering vitamin Q through his half robotic body. Or he could be dead. Or he could be a great-grandfather. Or he could be playing cribbage with a black man in Kenya while a baby deer snuggles his chest and a bottle of cantaloupe juice warms on a nearby electric hotplate.

          So shuffling the deck he was the king of spades or the two of diamonds or the eight of clubs or the queen of hearts. Or he was the joker. Or he was that pocket-sized wise man explaining the basics of five card stud poker. Or he was the thin air squirting out between all the wax-ridden squares. Or he was a sneeze held in. Or he was the dust causing the sneeze held in. Or he was the sneeze that caused the dust that was causing the sneeze held in. Or he was nothing and not even something at all. Or he was the ace of spaces. Or not. Or maybe both. Or maybe not.

          So that now thinking on he realized that he never imagined being an English teacher in a podunk school registering CSAP scores and thinking about the expensive ear medicine he’d have to pick up on his way home. He never thought to be gorging himself on cheap beer while loathing his growing gut and listening to the wind whistle simultaneously through NFL yellow flags and his elongated nose hairs. And he certainly never imagined being nothing. At least not until he lay in bed that night reading Another Roadside Attractionand thinking that Tom Robbins was fucking ridiculous.

J. A. Tyler has recent work in Elimae, Lamination Colony, Night Train, Underground Voices, & Word Riot. His chapbook The Girl in the Black Sweater is available now from Trainwreck Press and his debut novella is forthcoming from Ghost Road Press in 2009. He is also founding editor of the literary review Mud Luscious and a member of the Pindeldyboz editorial team.

SHELFLIFEMAGAZINE : issue #004