Mandy orders random items in her sleep.
She has no recollection of doing so and is surprised when boxes show up. The mail-guy hands them over with a puzzled look as he asks her to sign for them. On Tuesdays he tries to glance past her in the doorway, wondering where she stores everything.
Some of the items she’s ordered include: a ninja costume, shampoo, vitamins, throwing daggers, and a miniature tacklebox in swirling pink and green plastic with a fish-shaped handle. She was surprised least by the box which held a set of items to build one’s own shamanic shrine. She was most surprised by the one which contained 3 books on Astrophysics, a bottle of strawberry-scented shampoo and a set of rainbow zipper-pulls of bias-ribbon.
She drank a whole pot of coffee working to remember what she had been dreaming the prior night.
Is it even related to her dreams?
She never is able to remember.
On the mornings she wakes remembering a dream, they seem mundane and dull. Certainly not anything that would prompt such strange purchases. In one dream she was invited into an enormous silo. It stood tall amid cropped fields of feed-hay. She followed the dizzying spiraled steps only to find an enormous pile of grain inside.
“Boring”, she thinks her dream should have been more interesting than oats.
Mornings she sits distractedly stirring her coffee and poking through the latest box. Most often she donates the items to friends, to random people she meets in coffee shops, to children. Almost never to charity. She thinks the charities have too much stuff already and they don’t really pay their people.
The boxes almost never hold food or candy. She has never received electronic gadgets. She wonders about this.
Is cost a factor?
Some of the items are expensive. There was the fancy watch with tiny blue gems rolling around inside the bezel, and the vase that arrived in a wooden crate, a first, tagged from three separate customs agencies.
Sometimes she sends items back. Only if the seller has a simple return policy. She likes that she can take items for return to one of several locations. She avoids the always crowded post office, where the credit card machines never work and she never has cash.
Her bank account never reflects the contents of the cartons. It changes randomly, sometimes up, sometimes down. Often it remains the same for months despite buying groceries, gas and toothpaste regularly.
This morning she looks out at the winter landscape. Tall pine trees remain dark green against the hillocks of snow. The gravel of the driveway curving out to the plowed, asphalt road. Red mailbox slightly askew from where the trash guy tapped it with his truck last week.
She drains her coffee, placing the mug on the table with a resounding thunk. Sliding sideways out of the nook seat she plans what clothing she needs for the dog-walk. She sips some water. She tries to drink at least four quarts a day. Often she only manages three. Sometimes she imagines drowning.
Once she saw an exhibition of photographs titled, “Not Waving, Drowning”. She likes to flip it around, imagining it as a 1940’s comedy of manners. Some leading man dashing into the sea to save a woman while she tries ineffectively to explain that she was only waving to her friend on the beach. Hilarity ensues.
This morning the open box holds several tea-towels of fine linen, a small clay piggy bank with a yellow and peach flower on the side, a roll of dog treats made to look like Lifesavers, and a hand-made birthday card showing a massively over-frosted cake with a funny-sexy guy jumping out of it. Inside the card reads, “I’m ex-ice-ted it’s your birthday!” She thinks this is terrible. She is probably right but decides not to mention it to anyone.
She does not talk about the boxes. She accepts that they arrive for her and stores them in the hall closet where no-one looks carefully. She likes that they are her secret.
Refilling her mug with the dregs from the French press, she picks up one of the tea towels and the floral pig. She grabs her phone off the counter while making tinny clicking sounds with her tongue. Spreading the tea towel on the table the design becomes a meadow for the pig.
Distracted, she looks for a few coins. They’d make a satisfying clink when shaking the pig. Digging underneath worn wire-ties, dusty rubber bands and several bent paperclips in the junk drawer, she finds a few dirty pennies semi-glued to the bottom panel. She pries them free, picking the dirt from the edges with her fingernail. Is that glue or gum? It’s indistinguishable from the general schmutz.
The coins now fit through the irregular opening in the pig’s back. They clatter, metal against baked clay. Too bad the pig won’t crack a smile. The phone is still propped against a sugar bowl filled with grey and green stones. Red button blinking “record, record, record…”
The pig wanders across the tea-towel, exploring the flattened floral landscape in awkward skips and jerks. She imagines walking the pig on a leash. Painted flowers wrinkling as its legs stretch out and out. Best to take the pig along the coast, ocean on the left, gorse, wild carrot, greenweed and saw-wort trailing over the hills to the right. The path undulating them both from cliff to cove and back up to cliff.
She moves the pig on the tea towel thinking of pigs in blankets. Perhaps she should drape a small piece of something over the pig. Tissue? Napkin? She settles for a torn square of paper towel with flowers in faint blue and yellow. The pig has reached the edge of the tea towel meadow. The phone records the journey.
Absently she tries one of the dog treats. It has no detectable flavour and a kind of damp crunch. The dog will not like it either. She flicks back through the video, adding animated flowers as the pig traverses the table. Maybe she’ll add narration.
Sunrays blast in reflection off the formica making it hard to see past the tabletop. Blinking, she shields her eyes, as she picks up cup, coffee press, spoon and puts them in the sink.
The pig remains stalled at the edge of the floral meadow awaiting directions.
