{"id":21385,"date":"1992-10-15T20:30:52","date_gmt":"1992-10-16T02:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/?p=21385"},"modified":"2023-05-07T15:08:18","modified_gmt":"2023-05-07T21:08:18","slug":"short-story-shamrock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/1992\/10\/15\/short-story-shamrock\/","title":{"rendered":"Short Story: Shamrock"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shamrock<\/strong><\/p>\n

by Richard R. Barron<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Life is like a really expensive cut of beef that you’ve just\u00a0overcooked.”<\/em><\/p>\n

At 9:30 p.m. Greg was just finishing his shift, and Shelly was\u00a0about to start hers. He removed his grubby red polyester smock\u00a0and tossed it in a ball on the floor under the cash register.\u00a0As it was most nights, it was spattered with grease from the\u00a0fried chicken bin. Greg hated that smell, and its ugly\u00a0polyesterness made it that much worse, so he almost never wore\u00a0his smock home.<\/p>\n

“When you use profanity, you are being something rather than\u00a0saying something.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Shelly looked at him enviously. Eight hours of uninspired boredom\u00a0lay ahead for her. She buttoned her own red uniform shirt. Over\u00a0the pocket it read “Shelly” in script letters, the stitching\u00a0a reward for six whole months of faithful service to Texaco\u00a0and Big Bad Bob’s Quick Country Mart.<\/p>\n

“Church keeps God and man from ever meeting.”<\/em><\/p>\n

No one named Bob had ever owned, or had anything to do with,\u00a0Big Bad Bob’s, but the name seemed to fit, so no one changed\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

“The most real feelings are hate, fear, and nausea.”<\/em><\/p>\n

It was cold out. Shelley found it refreshing, in the same way\u00a0one might find narrowly escaping the swing of a wrecking ball\u00a0refreshing.<\/p>\n

“Cold world. Bundle up.”<\/em><\/p>\n

“We’re outta premium unleaded,” Greg said, leaning on the door\u00a0on his way out. Removing the tattered red work shirt now revealed\u00a0a tattered green camouflaged “Nugent Rules” T-shirt. “Truck’ll\u00a0be here in the morning.”<\/p>\n

“Don’t resist change. It’s the only thing you’ll always have.”<\/em><\/p>\n

With the quiet hissing of the hydraulic arm of the door closing,\u00a0he was gone.<\/p>\n

“Food is the opiate of American simpletonhood.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Shelly took a deep breath. How she ever ended up in this dumpy\u00a0convenience store baffled her. And she was stuck on the night\u00a0shift. Six a.m. seemed an eternity away, and not just tonight,\u00a0but every night.<\/p>\n

“Some things you never get over, and love takes even longer\u00a0than that.”<\/em><\/p>\n

She looked around the store. Spread before her was the peeling\u00a0dirty white countertop, worn from years of service and lack\u00a0of maintenance. It formed a ring around her seat, with the cash\u00a0register at one end and the beef jerky rack at the other. It\u00a0was a barrier, her protection, she imagined, from would-be bad\u00a0guys. Under the counter near where Greg had tossed his shirt\u00a0was a .41 Magnum that belonged to the owner. It too, she\u00a0imagined, was her protection.<\/p>\n

“Inspiration never really comes to you. You must come to it.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Outside her little haven stood the usual convenience store\u00a0shelves filled with Mars bars, liquid smoke, Vienna sausage,\u00a0and motor oil, all of which was priced about three times higher\u00a0than anywhere else in town.<\/p>\n

“Happen to life. Don’t let it happen to you.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Shamrock, Texas, wasn’t that big a town, but it did have a\u00a0grocery store and a Wal-Mart. Most of Shamrock’s existence\u00a0centered around its proximity to Interstate 40, just half a\u00a0block from Big Bad Bob’s, and from Shelly.<\/p>\n

“Overpowering fear overpowers overpowering rage.”<\/em><\/p>\n

With no customers currently in the store, she pulled out her\u00a0ragged paperback, The Complete Philosophy of Hampton Simple<\/strong><\/em>,\u00a0and continued reading…<\/p>\n

“Is the inherent knowing of knowledge the result of the seeking\u00a0of that knowledge, or the result of the pre-knowing of the known,\u00a0of knowing to know, or otherwise having known, or to know, or\u00a0having to known the known knowledge?”<\/em><\/p>\n

Shelley squirmed a moment in her seat. It seemed that when she\u00a0read this book, given to her by her half-sister Regina at a\u00a0Christmas party, the lines got smaller and began dancing around\u00a0on the page until nothing made sense.<\/p>\n

“An army is basically a tool designed to target the flow of\u00a0adolescent anxieties, passions and unconscious homosexual desires\u00a0into a killing juggernaut.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Unknown to Shelley, the book was a gag gift. But when no one\u00a0laughed, Regina decided to keep the gag to herself. Shelley\u00a0had drawn the name of her ex-boyfriend Steve. It was the seventh\u00a0Steve she’d known romantically, and the only one with whom she\u00a0remained friends. Shelley gave Steve a hand-bound volume of\u00a0her own poetry written under the pen-name S. S. Minnow. Shelley\u00a0thought that was really hilarious.<\/p>\n

“Giving love to another person is like giving lettuce to a cat.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Shelley wished, passingly, that Hampton Simple would explain\u00a0his thoughts just a bit more.<\/p>\n

“Blood is thicker than water, but less useful around the house\u00a0on a day-to-day basis.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Moments later, the heavy glass front door opened and in strode\u00a0her least-liked beast-like best friend Lilac. Lilac seemed to\u00a0be hanging her head a bit. And, Shelley noticed, she wasn’t\u00a0wearing her favorite tattered sweatshirt. Unknown to Shelley,\u00a0Lilac had given it to her mother to try to get some of the\u00a0lint balls out of it.<\/p>\n

“Hi, Lie. Where’s your old faithful sweatshirt?”<\/p>\n

“I gave it up for lint,” Lilac answered, a sheepish grin of\u00a0someone trying to be clever growing on her round face.<\/p>\n

“Lent.”<\/p>\n

“Oh, you’re right,” Lilac answered, “I lent it up for lint.”<\/p>\n

“No. ‘I gave it up for lent.'”<\/p>\n

“Did you really?”<\/p>\n

Shelley suddenly remembered why Lilac was her least-liked beast-liked best friend.<\/p>\n

“HEY!” came an angry voice from outside, “turn on the damn gas\u00a0pump!”<\/p>\n

In her effort to ignore Lilac, Shelley also ignored the beeping\u00a0of pump number one. She looked up abruptly, wondering for an\u00a0instant where she was, what she was doing, what year it was.<\/p>\n

It was still 1984. “Sorry!” she said. All the man outside saw\u00a0was her mouth move and her hands frantically scramble to turn\u00a0on the pump.<\/p>\n

“Lilac, I’m busy. Can we do this later?”<\/p>\n

“Do what later, Shel?”<\/p>\n

“Um, uh… this. You know.”<\/p>\n

“Yeah,” Lilac said and headed for the door, “I know.”<\/p>\n

FFFFMMMMOOOOSSSHHH… the door closed. Shelley picked up her\u00a0book and again tried to read.<\/p>\n

“Essentially, all solid matter is nothing more than empty space\u00a0and magnetic fields. The actual material that makes up our\u00a0reality isn’t really real in it’s reality.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Really? she wondered.<\/p>\n

The man who had yelled at Shelley opened the door, catching\u00a0the sleeve of his maroon letter jacket on the metal handle.<\/p>\n

“Son of a bitch!”<\/p>\n

“It is only in utter, abject ignorance that we can believe we\u00a0have any grasp of reality.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Shelley could see that it was Bobby Thomas, a senior football\u00a0player at Shamrock High School. “Hey, babe, why don’t you get\u00a0that thing fixed?” Bobby paid for his fuel, and left, vanishing\u00a0into the quiet night.<\/p>\n

“If your life is threatened, you’ll take steps beyond your\u00a0imagination to preserve it. Your instinct for self-preservation\u00a0is the ultimate driving force in your being. Forget love. Forget\u00a0the soul. Forget belief. When it all comes down, all you are\u00a0is the instinct to survive.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Bobby Thomas was not just an offensive lineman. He was an\u00a0extremely offensive lineman. At 314 pounds, he was almost exactly\u00a0three times heavier than Shelley. In fact, no woman in Shamrock\u00a0weighed more than 110 pounds.<\/p>\n

“When teenagers complain, it’s ‘growing pains.’ When adults\u00a0complain, it’s complaining.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Shelley had never seen a picture of Jesus laughing.<\/p>\n

“Just getting through alive doesn’t count for much. Almost\u00a0everybody can do that. There’s got to be more.”<\/em><\/p>\n

That’s when I came in, I guess. She had dark hair and blue eyes,\u00a0and sat behind a pile of books. Meditations<\/em> by Marcus Aurelius.\u00a0Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus<\/em> by Carl Jaspers. The Koran<\/em>.<\/p>\n

She hid behind them.<\/p>\n

“And isn’t it ironic that the only true driving force in your\u00a0being is the one that will most certainly be taken from you\u00a0one day?”<\/em><\/p>\n

And of course there was The Complete Philosophy of Hampton\u00a0Simple.<\/p>\n

“What you are thinking is what you are becoming.”<\/em><\/p>\n

I on the other hand was in no mood to wax metaphysic. I was\u00a0five hours out of Albuquerque, where I’d spent four days in\u00a0Motel 6 trying to console my girlfriend, whose elevator, it\u00a0turned out, didn’t go all the way to the top. She was so moved\u00a0by my kindness and compassion that she dumped me on the spot.<\/p>\n

“The beauty of egg nog: You take the last drink and set it down,\u00a0but five minutes later you have more egg nog because it slowly\u00a0drains from the sides of the glass.”<\/em><\/p>\n

I was still trying to pick up the pieces of a broken heart.\u00a0They were so squishy.<\/p>\n

“Time goes on, unaware it swallows you like some beast.”<\/em><\/p>\n

I had spent the last hour and a half or so listening to the\u00a0National League Championship Series on the radio, but if Shelley\u00a0had asked me who was winning, or even who was playing, I couldn’t\u00a0have told her.<\/p>\n

“When you kill time, all you end up with is dead time.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Dairy cow. That would be the life, she thought. You get to sit\u00a0around and moo, eat grass, and wear a cool polka-dotted jacket.\u00a0Every morning you get your breasts sucked by a machine. Yea,\u00a0she thought, I want to be a dairy cow.<\/p>\n

Really, though, this isn’t my story. But I’m in it, since there\u00a0I stood with a bag of chips and some chocolate milk in one\u00a0hand and my wallet in the other. Shelley peered out from behind\u00a0Hampton Simple<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“99% of failure is fear.”<\/em><\/p>\n

She rang up the stuff… I always got the same thing on the\u00a0road…and sighed. “One eighty one sir.”<\/p>\n

I could tell she hated her job. I could tell she thought she\u00a0deserved better. I could tell she had a heart and a brain and\u00a0hunger for more in her heart. I could tell not from her voice\u00a0or her manner or her eyes. I could tell from the way our hands\u00a0touched when she handed me the nineteen cents.<\/p>\n

That was it for me. I pushed the heavy glass door open and\u00a0stepped into the night. I was gone.<\/p>\n

“Everyone gets what he deserves, but no one thinks they deserve\u00a0it.”<\/em><\/p>\n

She fancied herself to be the philosopher as well. She pulled\u00a0one of her own stories from under the cabinet…<\/p>\n

Tissue by S.S. Minnow<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The smartly-dressed man stood in the center of a large\u00a0room, surrounded on all sides by beds containing dying people.\u00a0He’d come to visit one of them, and he was summoning his courage.<\/p>\n

He thought for a moment about his own son. Would this happen\u00a0to him? How could he stop it?<\/p>\n

Nervously adjusting his silk necktie, he stepped to the\u00a0bed where his friend lay dying.<\/p>\n

“Sebastian? How are you?”<\/p>\n

“Worse.” There was an awkward pause. “Um, worse.”<\/p>\n

The smartly-dressed man shifted stiffly and tried to think\u00a0of something to say. He loved his friend, but now this disease\u00a0had turned him into a monster. If only he could help Sebastian;\u00a0if only he could donate something, some blood, an organ, some\u00a0tissue from his body.<\/p>\n

“Listen, I gotta go,” he blurted, “I just came by to say\u00a0hello, to see how you were.”<\/p>\n

“And how am I?”<\/p>\n

The smartly dressed man smiled and looked at his friend\u00a0with tears welling in his eyes. Then he abruptly bolted from\u00a0the large room. He found his way to an elevator.<\/p>\n

As he rode alone, he faced the back of the elevator and\u00a0pulled a tissue from his overcoat.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It was her favorite story.<\/p>\n

Trust: The five-letter four-letter word.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes she felt like a swimmer. Her life was a pool,\u00a0shimmering below her, waiting for her. Then she would dive in,\u00a0and instead of being beautiful and peaceful, it consumed her,\u00a0surrounded her, devoured her.<\/p>\n

“Get your mind on the present. Eventually your heart will\u00a0follow.”<\/em><\/p>\n

…she was feeling the way a kid feels about numbers before\u00a0a math test…<\/p>\n

L Y I N G<\/p>\n

L 0 N E L Y<\/p>\n

A L 0 N E<\/p>\n

0 N E<\/p>\n

“Nobody falls in love on purpose. It just happens to you, like\u00a0an industrial accident.”<\/em><\/p>\n

On the drive to work just hours before, she held her hand out\u00a0the window and thought that the wind felt the same on the hand\u00a0of the driver in front of her, but everything else was different.\u00a0She imagined not being blown by the wind, but being the wind\u00a0itself, moving in swirls above the trees.<\/p>\n

“What is loss? Loss is not getting your way.”<\/em><\/p>\n

She believed she was not the body she saw in the mirror, nor\u00a0the soul the church said was inside her. She was all the things\u00a0she said, and all the things she failed to say.<\/p>\n

“Let go of boredom. It’s not really necessary in order to\u00a0accomplish things you might otherwise find boring.”<\/em><\/p>\n

She wanted to be loved, but knew that being loved wasn’t about\u00a0who she was, but about who she wanted others to be.<\/p>\n

“The basic emotion of the public is fear.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Pain, she thought, is the perfect pet. You never need to feed\u00a0it, because no matter how much you give it, it will still be\u00a0hungry.<\/p>\n

“The future is exactly like the past was before it happened.”<\/em><\/p>\n

She could hear God say, “One, two, three,” and blow into Life’s\u00a0microphone.<\/p>\n

“Blankets are cold. You are the warmth.”<\/em><\/p>\n

She had truly twisted dreams, or so she believed. Once she\u00a0dreamed of some men playing football on the edge of the world\u00a0above an eternal abyss. One of them went out for a long pass\u00a0and fell off, but they kept playing until two plays later, when\u00a0the ball fell off.<\/p>\n

“Sympathy is not understanding. Perception is not imagination.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Shelley considered herself to be both an optimist and a\u00a0pessimist. An optimist says a glass is half full. A pessimist\u00a0says the glass is half empty. Shelley says it’s both, and yes,\u00a0thank you, she will have a drink.<\/p>\n

“The biggest lie you’ll ever tell yourself is that other people\u00a0are judging you as harshly as you are judging yourself.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Shelley and her next-best friend Herman, a 350-pound man with\u00a0the world’s largest collection of meat loaf recipes, were\u00a0confident of the notion that there was something fundamentally\u00a0wrong with the Universe.<\/p>\n

S.S. Minnow’s Flawed Universe<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. McCarthyism.<\/li>\n
  2. Water pistols shaped like AK-47 assault rifles.<\/li>\n
  3. Pine-scented insecticide.<\/li>\n
  4. The French.<\/li>\n
  5. Rubber dogshit (specius canis fecum).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Special emphasis should be placed on the last of these,\u00a0as when it is seen in a socio-industrial dynamic, the nature\u00a0of things just sort of falls apart.<\/p>\n

    Life is a story problem.<\/em><\/p>\n

    Beep beep. Midnight. Two hours had passed. She straightened\u00a0her neck, stretched a bit. It was going to be another long night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Shamrock by Richard R. Barron “Life is like a really expensive cut of beef that you’ve just\u00a0overcooked.” At 9:30 p.m. Greg was just finishing his shift, and Shelly was\u00a0about to start hers. He removed his grubby red polyester smock\u00a0and tossed it in a ball on the floor under the cash register.\u00a0As it was most nights,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-short-stories-and-other-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21385"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30478,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21385\/revisions\/30478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}