Toni Kochensparger was born in Kettering, Ohio and now lives in Ridgewood, New York, where they write jokes on trash that they find on the street. Their short stories can be found in Kelp Journal, miniMAG, Free Spirit, Alien Buddha, Two Two One, and Scribble.

Look for You

Marcy stands behind a man at the Dollar Tree with a shopping basket that is Sprite after Sprite and sleeve after sleeve of off-brand Oreos, entirely, like I mean like nothing else at all just several bottles of Sprite and several sleeves of these off-brand cookies and there’s an efficiency to the way he is dressed, yes: there is an efficiency to his pressed khaki shorts with cargo pockets along the sides, an efficiency to his graphic-less t-shirt, an efficiency to his orthopedic shoe. There is an efficiency with which he has opted, when it comes to just shaving his head, which shows only minor signs of male-pattern baldness and which otherwise only shows his age in the frequency of hue. The back pack on his shoulders, too, somehow screams of efficiency, although this feeling might just be a composite of all the other visibly efficient components, like the cleanliness of his self-manicure (on top of what are contractor or mason worker’s hands) describes an almost halo of zen, pulsing from his back pack like an unexplained cosmological aura, like how the efficiency of his tube socks tell you he’s so good at packing for the day, like FUCK ME DADDY good at packing, all things that feed into the river of discovery that is this basket full of only cookies and the most mild-mannered of sodas. She imagines this man consuming a respectable and predetermined volume of the basket per evening, and is even in line long-enough to dedicate quality imagination time to some kind of described form: like what is the shag carpet really like in his rent-controlled apartment where he first moved to Queens in the eighties, and how long has he lived there alone, and how long has he been developing the efficiency of this evening routine, like maybe he’s got each night’s movements calculated: the exact parallelogram of tube sock heights suggest a depth of domestic concentration in the form of both dance steps and breath work, like Marcy is sure the man is sure when the microwave will ding and when to press play on the DVD and just when, exactly, to draw the blinds. She finds herself sexually attracted to the 1:1 ratio of this person, how he is almost a reproduction of a standard mold, a human floor model on factory settings, still. She thinks a lot about how he behaves when something’s upsetting him, and she wonders whether it’s childish or pathetic or violent or like what. Does the quantity of cookies increase does the Sprite. Why not the name brand Oreo—like is it an issue of basic poverty or is it like how Marcy switched from exotics to mids when her drug intake increased to buying a half at a time instead of an eighth or like a dub in one of those strange little baggies her old plug used to tuck into what she hoped quietly were jean shorts beneath his sweatpants. Like what is his sense of efficiency like when it’s applied to vice. Like how any seasoned addict can appreciate another user’s economy of intake, and so the grocery basket even takes on this whole glow as he’s holding it in the Dollar Tree line, like Marcy has enough time to fantasize about her own objects of vice filling his basket, replacing his off-brand Oreos and Sprite, and she tries to guess how much bourbon and lemonade and mids this basket would fit—like what is the exchange rate between these addicts’ vices, and then she doesn’t imagine any Marcy groceries at all but instead imagines a basket they really do share, and standing next to him in the line, instead of wondering, and like intimately knowing his efficiency, like finding out what kind of lover the lover is who knows just when to close the blinds, the lover’s hands like carpenter hands like masonworker’s hands how the hands would feel of the lover who’s dedicated these extremities to the careful application of permanent material, like maybe when he says Get On Your Knees he really fucking means it, like he’ll be there when her parents have to go to the hospital, someday, like always be here, even, just in case they never meet but she still needs him there forever and always, standing in line to Sisyphianically refill his supply, like a good man she could rely on, and there was an involuntary flash of Phil’s features in her mind like a homework assignment you put off in high school, and she tries to play it cool in the line at the Dollar Tree only she involuntarily squeezes her knees together when he turns around and a brief eye contact starts happening, like the collapse of a star, its light hanging limp and impotent in the vast, empty space between our human eyes and where their godhood occurs, and her face turns this like bright red and she gets out her phone and drowns herself in its vacuum, and has to be notified by the person behind her that the line’s reignited its promised interest in forward momentum, snapping her out of the LCD screen just in time to see the man trading currency for these two goods only, as NEXT ON TWO is shouted at the line and he vanishes in her periphery as she de-baskets items, the sunbeams of afternoon rattling the windows between the Dollar Tree and the outside world, a threshold to cross, a transition of temporalities, a tossed coin in the lucky fountain all the teens leave their wishes in and the quiet sensation that maybe he was only a vision, a little break in reality: like a carnal need to grab the arm of any passing person and beg for the Time, she seeks the same validation the mad seek, someone please tell me he was really here like describe the articulate, efficient contents of his grocery basket for me but say it slowly like please like I need this like. In the vast, upsetting sunlight, Marcy hunts his ghost for blocks. At home she engages with pornography on her cell-phone, occasionally shooing away texts from Phil, embarrassingly typing “repair man” into the website’s Search and then even more-embarrassingly seems to only have actual sexual interest in the very most cartoon of these, such as when someone orders a pizza with extra thick Italian sausage only replace all that with plumber stuff and men who look like Jared Leto’s secret Orc army once they take off their plumber or their carpenter’s costumes, which Marcy does not believe the man from the Dollar Tree does, and anyway it does what it needs it to, and anyway no one needs to know, and anyway if she met him, for real, she would want him to take things slow.

It wouldn’t be like the movie at all. He would measure the weight of the room. He would move with efficiency.

He would take his time.