Nothing Is Terrible by Matthew Sharpe

Author:Matthew Sharpe [Sharpe, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55869-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

Pitter-patter goes the rain

He’ll mend your umbrella

And blow out his brain.

It was eleven A.M. I was agitated and could think of nothing to do. This was standard for eleven A.M. of that period of my life. Some people would make food in this situation. I had seen people make food often enough—women, mostly—and it didn’t appear to be a waste of time. I thought I could manage a grilled cheese sandwich. Because I was fearing the stretch of time between eleven A.M. and whatever came after eleven A.M., I took the most circuitous route to the kitchen, making stops in all the other rooms of the house. I also crawled on my hands and knees instead of walking upright. As I crawled along the hard brown floor from room to room, a stinky smell gathered in my nostrils. It was the smell of Mittler’s cleaning fluids, of which he had left a thick, drying coat on every surface in the house, the way a dog might leave urine. As I crawled headfirst down the carpeted stairs, my eyes teared up and my nose ran and the skin on the palms of my hands first tingled and then burned. The knees of my pants became damp and the skin underneath them began to burn also.

I crawled back upstairs and changed clothes again and walked down to the kitchen on my hind legs in a pair of stiff, thick-soled hiking boots that had cost Skip Hartman $300 and that I had not used for hiking. In our household we liked good, supportive shoes, even if the hiking boots turned out to be overkill in terms of footwear to make grilled cheese in. I couldn’t eat the sandwich because every time I opened my mouth it filled up with the taste of bleach and ammonia. I was angry with Mittler. I had expected more from him. As I was about to throw the grilled cheese in the garbage, Skip walked in.

“What the hell is going on here?”

“I made you a grilled cheese sandwich.” It was 11:38 A.M. Her eyes and nose began to water.

“You’re a child,” she explained. “From now on I mustn’t let you sway me in decisions better left to an adult, such as whom to hire to clean.”

“Ah, but you must.”

“First I hire Stephen Samuels, who cleans not at all, then I hire Mittler, who cleans too much.”

“It’s not Mittler’s fault. I distracted him.”

“Did you now?”

I know that I have tried to document the expressive activities of Skip Hartman’s hair and face, but I think I have not yet spoken in particular of her nose, correct? It was a straight, medium-sized, practical nose that had the slight advantage over her hair of being an organ of both expressive and perceptive capacities. She tilted her head back now and vertically scrunched her nose. She seemed to be trying to sniff out events other than cleaning that had taken place in the house while she was gone. “And what exactly did you do to distract him?”

“I threatened him.

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