Erika

A short story

Erika was 40.

While, thanks to her genetic makeup, she didn’t look her age, she went out of her way to act as close to 40 as possible though she wasn’t quite sure how that was measured or determined.

From a young age, Erika had always been told she “was growing up right in front of our eyes” and that she “had her whole life in front of her” and to “quit looking behind you, these are only expressions”.

As a general rule, Erika was always looking over her right shoulder before rotating her head and looking over the other so as to avoid neck cramps.

They both excited and scared her as it had been neck cramps that had both started and ended her parent’s marriage.

Erika hoped one day to follow in many of her parent’s footsteps, just not all of them as how would one even do that.

She had done so much in her life.

Where others had lists of things to accomplish by 40, she ate lists like that for breakfast.

Literally.

Her friends and family were always telling her she could accomplish anything she set her mind to, though never at the same time, as their ability to speak in unison was poor and the message just ended up quite muddled and quite confusing.

Despite it all — her awards, her trophies, her laminated certificates that she used as placemats and, when raining, as highly ineffective hats — she had her doubts, so plentiful that, when the mood struck her just so, she was able to waddle in them, so well, that a local duck expert told her that she “nailed it”.

She was always nailing it, mostly to justify to herself why she spent 10% of each pay cheque on carpentry materials and equipment.

It would be incorrect to say Erika was unhappy; far from it. By any non-abstract definition of the term, she was a success and, on request of her landlord, she stopped utilizing abstract definitions entirely aside from Sundays.

Those Sundays were one wild, crazy, potentially hazardous ride and she loved every moment of them.

Yes, she was much more successful than even her wildest dreams as a child which, according to her therapist, “could stand to be quite a bit wilder” and “maybe try to stop reading books about accounting right before sleep” and “live a little — please, for my sake.”

But, even though she had done more work than most women, there was no denying that she hadn’t accomplished everything she had wanted to by the time she was 40. Up until the end of her 39th year, Erika did spend time attempting to deny this as well as her borderline-troublesome addiction to pork fluff, before abruptly ceasing.

Abruptly ceasing was what the police had listed as the sole cause of each of her five car accidents, as well.

Erika never stopped smiling, or at least looking that way, what with her whimsical application of lipstick and liner.

Her existence was littered with hard work, a checkerboard collection that a local chess enthusiast said was, “equal parts incredible and yikes” and scales of all shapes and sizes.

Erika had been raised to value the precision that only scales, and the occasional well-calibrated and trained neighbourhood child, could provide.

She just loved them the way many others loved particularly beloved household toiletry items and trained neighbourhood children.

How desperately she wanted to run home from work and, after catching her breath and enjoying a diet cola, spend time in close proximity to her bathroom scale and to weigh herself and, once her heart beat normalized, to weigh herself again. She always approached the scale with caution as she needed to avoid tipping the scales ever since the accident that was almost definitely due to her wantonly tipping the scales.

Oh, she had been so young and carefree the way many beguiling young women are when they are younger and less saddled down with responsibility and excessively-caked on makeup.

As much as Erika had tried, she was slowly turning into her mother who, in turn, was slowly turning into a clown. Her mother, at the ripe age of 65, had dropped everything — an already chipped teapot at the time — and run away to go to clown school. Thankfully, what with her bad hip, the college was a short 5 minute jog eastward.

Erika was now 40.

Her birthday wish, when she blew out the candles on her birthday cake, was to come full circle, not because she wanted to, but because she had always had a huge amount of misplaced jealousy towards others who had. Coming full circle was so hard for her as her circles were comically poorly drawn to the point where many friends argued, quite successfully, that they weren’t even circles at all and, instead, should be either considered sarcastically or as a poor commentary on the state of modern day political constructs.

Sometimes she hated her geometrically-exacting friends who were puzzlingly always eating store-bought potato salad that they were constantly complaining had a near-lethal amount of mayonnaise in it.

“Not lethal enough” she often muttered to herself as she took out the trash which, spooked no fewer than three of the nuns who always walked by her house on garbage collection day.

Erika tried to live her life as justly as she could even going as far as right justifying her sock drawer. But, as hard as she tried, the scales of justice always intimidated her mostly due to their size as she was raised in a household to always fear large scales, fish fillets and crown molding.

Crown molding almost led to her frail grandmother being deported — well that and her love of blatantly selling large amounts of amphetamines for profit.

At 40, Erika was single.

Yes, as a girl, she often imagined and wrote overly-graphic-for-a-preteen stories that she would act out using Barbies. In those stories, she would get married, nude on a fully-clothed horse, something that caused her friends’ parents to disallow their daughters to continue coming over despite how good and plentiful the snacks were.

But, she had never found the right guy at the right time. Sure, the right guy had appeared, multiple times, at her door, but the time had been wrong. And many other times, the clock struck the correct time, but the guys either had the wrong day or got lost on the way or were still locked up in a white collar prison.

How she longed to find the right guy and bleach his white collars.

Her older sister who’d been around the block more times than she could count — seriously, she was always going around the block — cautioned her to keep her longing to herself as it was a definite turnoff except with certain guys who, in her experience, were usually left-handed to a fault.

Erika spent what little free time she had weighing items using the tiny weights and scale her grandfather had handed down to her on his self-proclaimed deathbed that, thanks to modern medicine, turned out to be incorrectly labelled on multiple levels.

For starters, it was a table.

She just loved guessing how much something would weigh, checking using her scale, and then writing down the results in a journal she kept hidden behind the completely-ornamental, large sack of brown rice she bought on principle alone.

“Why do you enjoy using that scale so much — don’t you realize how this looks?” the t-shirt she had printed on a whim said. “Because I happen to love using scales — thank you so much for asking. And, no, that wasn’t sarcastic, I actually love using scales and, plus, I don’t have a sarcastic bone in my body or, just to be clear, outside my body” said a second t-shirt she had printed mostly as a rebuttal to the first and also because the young man at the printing shop was as cute as he was good at printing messages on shirts without asking too many questions.

She was fine with a few questions but found excessive questions as much as a turnoff as light switches when they were turned off, which was a lot.

Erika spent Saturday mornings running on the path by the beach. It was on those long runs when she felt most at peace. She would never miss a Saturday as those runs allowed her to reset. One time, when suffering from shin splints, she tried walking and felt incrementally less peace, so she purchased “the best orthotics money could buy” and resumed running.

After completing her run, she usually stood there, on the sand, gazing out at the ocean with a look that was described by random passersby she forcibly interviewed afterwards as, “A combination between jealousy towards the water itself and alert the authorities.”

Erika was now 40.

Her glass was always half-full.

She hadn’t even taken a sip in weeks.