The In-Between
by Maya Jewell Zeller
University Hero was having a hard time making up his mind.
And Office Girl, well. In between bouts of extreme productivity—for instance, powerwashing the whole roof, reorganizing everyone’s offices alphabetically and by color, creating an original strand of wheat, and running marathons—Office Girl kept intermittently weeping.
Some days, University Hero was all Oh Yes and other days he was all But My Loyalty to My Job and But My Loyalty to My Cape! and other days he was all People Out There Are Counting on Me.
Office Girl kept trying to explain that she wasn’t asking for anything, but her eyes were big and doe-like and University Hero could not help but see her as a liability.
You’re not responsible for my emotions, she would say, then shut herself in the men’s bathroom and cry for hours.
When University Hero was sad he would go to the (now very shiny, power-washed) roof and watch the stars, munching a fresh croissant Office Girl had baked during her time that morning on a Tuscan cooking show. University Hero would summon Office Girl via text and she’d climb the ladder (less like a vagina now and more like a culvert) and sit by him and pat his knee and rub his back. There there, she’d say. Even a Hero has an off day. He loved it when she treated him like a person. He loved it when she acted like a Woman.
Pretty Soon Office Girl noticed a pattern with her weeping. Each time she wept, or, rather, after she was finished, she noticed she had strange new powers. Like, one day, climbing to the roof after another summoning, she noticed how she just took all sixteen feet of rungs at once, one rung, then shazam, on the roof. Poof! It smelled everywhere like orange roses.
That was quick, remarked University Hero, not turning around. You must have been already in the tunnel when I texted.
Office Girl said nothing. She didn’t want him to feel he wasn’t special, but c’mon, that was sort of superheroish on her part, ascending like that. And the rose smell, too—there were no gardens up there—from whence did that lovely smell originate?
Another time, Office Girl was slightly angry, and exploded some bricks right out of the wall. Oops, she said meekly. No one was around; she did her best to mortar them back together and into place. And when she brushes her fingers against that spot, she thinks, I did that. I did that.
MAYA JEWELL ZELLER is the author of the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017), the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015), and the poetry collection Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011); her prose appears in such places as Brevity, Bellingham Review, and Booth. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation as well as a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya teaches for Central Washington University and edits, with Sharma Shields, for Scablands Books. Find her on Twitter @MayaJZeller.