You Are Not Alone in Trying to Be.

He asked me to visit and talk.  He'd show me around so I could see, This is where studio A is, This is the production suite.  And in exchange he asked if I'd sit and talk with him for a little while.  Not about anything in particular, he just liked to talk to new people he thought were interesting, and get their points of view.  Something about expanding his circles of existence, or some transcendental spirit quest thing like that.  I said sure.

So I walked out of the dusty motel room overlooking the dullest highway in existence.  Being from the East and all, this exact center of the country's idea of a highway was laughable.  It was midmorning and the sun was staring too intensely, the wind was hot and ragged, and I stood there staring out across a great flat nothing.  Sure, to my right, there were buildings and people, but straight out ahead, I could see miles towards a shimmering horizon.  I slid on my shoes and started scuffing along the half mile to the address he had given me.  I didn't feel like telling him I didn't have a car; he asked me to come and visit, I wasn't about to impose for a ride.

A Glooming of Ketchup

Chicken strips are one of the only reliable things offered by my day job’s cafeteria.  They aren’t any good, but they’re the same each time I get them, so they’re reliable, and they always require ketchup.  I’ve come to collect the packets in my desk.  Well, 'collection' implies that I've been doing it purposefully, and this isn't so much a willing collection as it is a perpetual motion brain machine hiccup.  I overestimate how many I will need, throw the unused ones in a drawer because it feels wrong to toss them, and promptly forget I’ve done so.  Then, next time, I get some more.  And I overestimate how many I will need.  Rinse, repeat.

Once it became apparent that I have a small colony of ketchup packets living in my desk drawer, it crossed my mind that I should call it something.  Not Ketchupville, or anything like that.  It needed to be quantified, because it had grown past the point of simply being “a handful of packets” and I am too stubborn to thrown any of them, unopened, into the trash.  My brain tried to process this, starting with the basics.

Firstly, why did I feel the need to have word for this?  That one’s easy: I need a word because I have a lot of ketchup packets, I don’t want to throw them out, and the bizarre inanimate-object-empathizer part of me demands that I make it so… which leads me right into question two.  Aren’t “a lot” or even “several” good enough?  I just called it a colony a few lines up, didn’t I?  Can’t it be that?  This is the one I’m having the most trouble with, and after three days of unproductive deliberation, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that it’s simply more fun to come up with some egregious term for a cluster (another perfectly good word that won’t do) of ketchup packets. 

Because, I realize, it’s just that.  It’s ketchup.  It’s one of the most innocuous things out there, as condiments go.  It’s everywhere.  It’s been around forever.  It deserves a really odd word.

So, where to begin?  I had a pocket full of the latest additions to the cluster-colony of Ketchupville and my mind was off in the animal kingdom.  A pride of lions.  A school of fish.  A flock of birds.  “Flock of Ketchup” sounds pretty good, but also too much like a middle school garage band on a Disney Channel program.

Then I started going for the weirder ones, like a bike of ants, which is a real thing that I did not make up.  There are the ones that seem almost redundant – a glaring of cats, for instance, which is one of the most appropriate collective nouns I’ve ever read, and which gets upgraded to a Destruction if they’re feral.  There are the array of hedgehogs, the scourge of mosquitoes, and then, of course, the murder of crows and the unkindness of ravens.  I tested all of them and more.  And finally, after pattering around and imagining ants riding bicycles, I found it: a Glooming of ketchup. 

Doesn’t it sound nice?  Not as malicious as a Murder or Unkindness, but gives an appropriately foreboding air to something as bland as packets of ketchup.  Beware, it says, of my blandness.  Beware my love affair with your clothing.  Beware the glooming of ketchup. 

While I sat back, smiling to myself and adding more packets to my glooming, I realized there was one inherent flaw in my thinking.  It wasn’t, surprisingly, “Why am I putting so much energy into something so utterly ridiculous?”  No, it was “Well, now that that’s settled, what do I call a pile/cluster/colony/flock of mustard packets?”

I went through a similar thought process for these, so I’ll spare you.  To quantify them, as that was my original goal, I define these terms as being “any number of packets that are more than a comfortable handful and less than the carton, tray, box, or bin from whence they came.”

So, I present, for your consideration:

A glooming of ketchup,

A shrewdness of mustard,

A flight of mayonnaise, and finally,

A brood of relish.

I did cursory searches of all of these terms; as whole units, they do not seem to exist yet, until I hit Publish, of course.

People of the Internet, you know what to do.

-Emma

A Name Came By Night

A familiar feeling crept over me – it was that of the stagnant, sleepless tiredness that settles in nearly every night.  It was twelve-thirty, maybe one.  This was sort of normal.  I turned over onto my side with a sigh and pulled out my phone, browsing random images and amusingly drunken texts from other people to quell the last energies of the day.

And then, I started to feel… I’d call it “lightheaded” if it weren’t happening from my knees down.  It wasn’t the pins and needles feeling – it was of lightness, weightlessness.  It tingled slightly, the way it always does.  Once I realized it was there, and my brain focused on it instead of the vague haze it had been occupying, it spread quickly up to the bottom of my ribcage.  I was expecting it to go farther than that, and encompass my body entirely, but it stopped.  I felt it orient towards the edge of the bed… or the space between the bed and the window… or the cross I’d tacked up above it on the wall.  I’m not sure – somewhere in that direction, in front of me, as I was lying on my side.  Someone was sitting at my bedside, or standing watch over me.

I said, very quietly, so as not to disturb my bed partner, “Brigid?”

Nothing.

But, the feeling didn’t leave – I still tingled and felt like airy static.  I still felt the presence beside me.  That was something.

I could say I was recalling memories, but I didn’t think of them willingly – the images and sounds were brought to my mental attention from the outside.  I know how I recall things normally – and there is nearly always a “fade in” effect.  It is never a sharp, instant recollection, from beginning to end.  My memories and the way I think about them have a glaze of Vaseline, like the old movies.  This?  This was instant.  That’s how I know it wasn’t my willing these memories to the front of my mind.  It was a splice-cut highlight reel of the evening’s ritual.  I saw the circle; I saw parts of the ritual.  To a certain extent, I could see the airy static energies winging around the room – ones I could only feel when I was there.

I asked, this time silently in my head, “Is that you?  Have you come to visit me?”

In an instant, the images in my head changed.

They’re fuzzy now, and get fuzzier the more I think back on them, but they were of faces I did not recognize, of voices that were unfamiliar.  They were not the designs or costumes or actors that have been assigned courtesy of Hollywood.  But I saw them, sitting around a table, drinking and feasting and carousing.  I saw them in battle, armor shining out, the glory of their strength radiating with each swing of hammer and sword and shield.  I felt a swelling of pride in me, a wide grin split my lips, and the kind of happiness I have a hard time assigning a word to, as “joy,” “elation,” “ecstasy,” “euphoria,” and even “happiness” itself never really seem to cover it enough, or correctly.  And there was a name.

It came into my head in the instant before the tingling lightness in my body left, before I became aware again of the normal nocturnal soundtrack.  The name was Thor.