Bob, 26, Ithaca
>>The prompt: 400-word autobiography
Born to parents, grew up with childhood, check, we’ve seen that, but it was different for me, I once ate a very good apple indeed and went to the circus and saw the Beach Boys sing California Girls and someone gave me a bearskin rug with buttons for eyes, but later on there was a fight on a green lawn in the dark and a piece of paper that said “you should not be living at home anymore with your parents” and so I didn’t, that is I stopped and went somewhere else where we danced like pieces of paper with lost shopping lists written on them and made a web out of drunken yarn and I said intelligent things about the squirrels to a girl who smoked many cigarettes and read a book with a flashlight and while doing all this I fell in awful tumbling confused love and then one day it wasn’t and she said “you should not be living in me anymore” so I drank mouthwash in a room with posters of ironic kittens and stared at letter openers and chopsticks for several unhappy days until there was a piece of paper which said “you should not be living here anymore either now” and they all shook my hand so I went somewhere else and found a job humming Patsy Cline songs at a Taco Bell somewhere in the world where I was found by a girl who said “you should come and live with me now” and so I did and we lived in an apartment across the street from a store that sold Eskimos to igloos, and she would make salads of pure genius and I would pour wine into paper bags like magic tricks, and by day she worked as a bridge mender and I taught castanet lessons and lost phone numbers, and then sometimes at night I would wild flamenco sweep her body and she would giggle like cartoon mice and one day it was wonderful stabilized straightforward love and other days it wasn’t and there was yelling but it would stop and I felt her breath on my neck like a washcloth right out of the bathtub and she dreamt of goldfish with enormous attention spans and I listened to people outside in nosereddening cold singing drinking songs like the beautifulest Christmas carol forever.
Bob—Age 26—Ithaca, NY
from 400 Words, Issue 1–Autobiographies
page 26
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