Janie

By Tyler Ayres

Janie pulls her day car into the bright lot near the trailhead every morning at 9:30. A security car drives past and the driver nods. She nods her bobbed head and smiles back tightly. She is glad the security people are around.

She puts the car in park. Even though the trailhead is a 35-minute drive from her cornfield cul-de-sac, Janie walks it at least twice a day. As the car settles to stillness, Janie reapplies a tastefully plumping lip tint and blots the edges with a napkin from a stack that is slotted neatly in the car door pocket for this occasion.

Next she cranes her neck as if she is stretching, checking for anything out of the ordinary. She gives it a minute and then checks again. After three or four more rounds, she unlocks the car door. She dons and adjusts an expensive-looking beret, untucking a purplish lock of hair. Looking in the mirror, Janie retucks the lock, untucks it again, twirls it in her finger two or three times, and then lets it dangle. The end of the lock now flares away just so from the place where Janie’s eyebrow used to be before she had it plucked out, lasered, and tattooed back on.

The coast seems clear, so she makes her exit from the car, a svelte little hybrid, reasonable compared to what some of these people drive. The lease is up in March. It’s November now, and Janie has been thinking more and more often about what to do next. Two or three leases ago she leased one and hadn’t spent enough time thinking about lease terms and the stress, gosh, she was in and out of the doctor’s four maybe five times with a dang bleeding ulcer.

Next time an 18-month lease, she thinks. Janie shuts the car door and air from its shutting puffs her carefully twirled lock upward. It settles back down at an angle much different. Her face warms as she appraises a squatter version of herself in the distorted reflection of her car window. She resists re-twirling the lock of hair and tries to work with it, slants her beret slightly, and is now a sort of woman-on-the-go. She turns from the car window, smooths-rumples-smooths again her warmish-day October microfleece jacket, and is ready to begin her walk down the trail.

A few dozen yards in, Janie realizes that her gait is not consistent with that of a woman-on-the-go. Her mind had briefly wandered to her son and his birthday and she slipped into a more buttoned-up gait. She tries to get it right but there is still dissonance, and it’s the microfleece, she realizes, it’s Seattle late ‘90s, which is fine for a woman-on-the-go in late ‘90s Seattle, but in the Midwest today?

The pants are ‘90s buttoned-up, the lock is classic on-the-go. It’s too cold to take off the microfleece. There’s just one thing to do. With great effort, Janie fights to adjust her gait to straddle buttoned-up and on-the-go. She loses this latest battle, and the loss is another hairline crack in the wedding gift china of her life. 

When the crack happens, her back begins to spasm brutally, an old cheerleading injury. Her gait has now changed into she doesn’t know what. Janie is told most days that she looks far younger than she is, but she knows her years are now advertised loudly and clearly.

Janie wills her spasmodic walk toward something publicly consumable. She is failing, another failure failing, and the failing stabs her stomach and she hiccups and tastes rust. Through the pain and the rust Janie stretches her fractured attention to include her son’s birthday, which is where it was supposed to be in the first place. 

The topic of this walk was supposed to be cataloging all the gifts that she’ll bring to her son’s house later this evening, just in case she might be forgetting anything. The gifts were from Janie’s magazines. The warmish-day October microfleece was from her magazines, the beret was from her magazines, the svelte hybrid day car, too, and the twisted lock of hair, the eyebrow tattoos, her various gaits, everything. The world would be a different place if people read magazines the way Janie did.

She hiccups again and again the rotten iron bubbles into her mouth. The thought of going back to the doctor makes her quiver with shame, the shame stabs again, her stomach rusts further, and so on. She removes her hand from the grip of the small pink pistol that she always keeps clutched on these walks and finds a tablet of something for her stomach. She read that with the border and everything else women should always be armed but so far had been too scared to go to the firing range. Anyway, Nebraska changed the law last month, so you didn’t need a permit to conceal a handgun any longer anyhow, thank God!

As Janie chews the tablet, she pauses at a bench to stretch her screaming back. A hand each on her solar plexus and sacrum, she gently tries to release her fascia like she read about. As she rubs her pained body waiting for something to happen, she calms herself by thinking about her son’s gifts.

The most recent purchase was two 48-packs of pre-workout hydration salts, one of which was the For Her edition. The For Him salts are for her son, she wasn’t going to get any for herself but there was free shipping. And then there was the article about the benefits of sensory deprivation tanks for people like him. They help with insomnia, she read, and Jeanette bought her husband a 10-float punchcard at the float place, so Janie got her son a 20-float punchcard, they never expire and it was cheaper that way, and anyway it would be good for him and his sleeping. 

She just couldn’t bear the thought of her boy going without gifts on his birthday. Even though he begged her not to buy him “any more junk,” you can’t just stop buying things, she’d told him, and a birthday comes but once a year. Besides, did he really think she would buy things if they weren’t good or useful? Of course she wouldn’t, certainly not for her own son she wouldn’t, and he loves hiking so much that she got him an outdoor survivor subscription, it’s a box every month and this month had a handsome little plaid hatchet, a flask, a bottle of cedar aftershave, a chunk of waterproof magnesium metal for she didn’t know what, but she’s sure he’ll be out there chopping and drinking and anyway so she knows he’ll love it, and men don’t know what they want, let alone what they need, especially sons, and there’s science behind that which she read about too, so she bought him one of those meal prep kits, his wife is really into her “career” and if that suits her then great, Janie had her feminist phase, too, after all, but no son of hers is going to eat McDonald’s for dinner. She found a coupon from the website Sue showed her, 21 meals were only $49 more than 13 meals and she knows how his stomach gets, and if you got the 21 meals they sent you a promotional insole kit, only the first 200 buyers and she made it just in time, his knees had been acting up, and what they do is send you real NASA foam that you step in and then you send it back in this smart little resealable box and in 10 business days you have these amazing shoes, Janie read that they apparently balance something called prana or was it qi, and she’s been doing a lot of reading about prana or qi and suspected it had something to do with how her son was, and then there was the sweater she bought him last Christmas that he said he wouldn’t wear and gave back to her so she has that to exchange, too, the store credit is always more than the cash refund, so she’s going to buy him a different color of the same sweater or maybe a different pattern, but does he have Woolite? Because she sure hasn’t gotten any for him and the Good Lord knows his wife didn’t, neither of them know how to take care of good wool, so she has to buy him some Woolite, too, and while she’s there she can’t forget to look for—

Janie swallows and struts back toward the direction of her day car and is lightly stabbed again as she reaches once more for her tablets, which have cruelty-free prebiotics and were 20% off.

****

For source material, Tyler has been a machinist, an English instructor, a fine dining waiter, an intelligence operator, a café musician, a freelance editor, a Mandarin translator, a yoga teacher, and a knife peddler. He lives for the moment in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is an MFA candidate at Chatham University. onayres.bsky.social