// creative //
December 2015
Janice and the Stain
Kalman Victor
Janice wakes up at 6:30, when the sun is just beginning to cast shadows through the cracks of her window blinds, and her eyes land on the dusty wall across from her bed. It’s a place she must’ve stared at for hundreds and hundreds of minutes in her lifetime, the resting stop for her mind as it catches up to her body’s alarm-induced jolt.
She’s been going to the county clerk’s office to answer phones every morning like this for the past 16 years. She hasn’t been late since the one day her bullterrier died, and she hasn’t been sick since she got over shingles three years ago. But today she notices a small splotch with a brownish hue floating alone in the sea of white drywall, a small island—she’s never registered it before. She gets up with an alacrity that’s seldom accessible to her at this hour, and the thought doesn’t escape her that it’s a banal discoloration that’s responsible.
My life is boring, and it always has been, she thinks as she walks closer. Even that very thought is something she’s said to herself the same way, at the same time, most of the days she can remember. But now, as she shifts out of bed, forgetting her slippers, she can’t suppress the feeling that this morning might be different, that the marred white is some grand cosmic signifier: the rupturing of her pristine and predictable life is beginning.
As she gets closer, it starts to look like a coffee stain, maybe mildew, but these things don’t materialize suddenly without the sole inhabitant of the apartment, particularly neat and particularly vigilant, having some sense of their origins.
Janice walks up to the wall and drags her finger over the stain, which proves to be just as dusty as the surrounding white space. It’s been here a while, she thinks, and shudders with delight at the inexplicability of this sudden perceptual shift, this bizarre morning in which she wakes up and, for the first time, notices something that’s been right in front of her for God knows how long.
She sticks her nose against the plaster and inhales the white space, then the brown, and she can’t detect a change. Her smile is widening and she gingerly extends her tongue. No difference in taste, either.
The feeling of being stumped is such a rush, and she starts pacing as her limbs seem to buzz on her body She needs to tell someone, so she calls her high school girlfriend.
“Cheryl.“
“What the…what time is it?”
“Cheryl, there’s this stain and it’s been there, but I haven’t seen it.”
“Is this Jan? Leave me the fuck alone. I swear I’ll call the cops again you crazy fucking—”
Click. Janice laughs out loud at the ignorance of the Cheryls in the world, at their inability to do what she is doing right now, to deracinate her assumptions and routines without a trip to The Poconos or a new big-screen TV. She lies back on the bed and falls into the folds of her floral duvet, content with being herself for the first time in as long as she can remember.
When the super comes to the apartment three days later to investigate a neighbor’s report of a putrid smell, he does not notice the stain.
//KALMAN VICTOR is a Senior in Columbia College and the Creative Editor for The Current. He can be reached at [email protected].
December 2015
Janice and the Stain
Kalman Victor
Janice wakes up at 6:30, when the sun is just beginning to cast shadows through the cracks of her window blinds, and her eyes land on the dusty wall across from her bed. It’s a place she must’ve stared at for hundreds and hundreds of minutes in her lifetime, the resting stop for her mind as it catches up to her body’s alarm-induced jolt.
She’s been going to the county clerk’s office to answer phones every morning like this for the past 16 years. She hasn’t been late since the one day her bullterrier died, and she hasn’t been sick since she got over shingles three years ago. But today she notices a small splotch with a brownish hue floating alone in the sea of white drywall, a small island—she’s never registered it before. She gets up with an alacrity that’s seldom accessible to her at this hour, and the thought doesn’t escape her that it’s a banal discoloration that’s responsible.
My life is boring, and it always has been, she thinks as she walks closer. Even that very thought is something she’s said to herself the same way, at the same time, most of the days she can remember. But now, as she shifts out of bed, forgetting her slippers, she can’t suppress the feeling that this morning might be different, that the marred white is some grand cosmic signifier: the rupturing of her pristine and predictable life is beginning.
As she gets closer, it starts to look like a coffee stain, maybe mildew, but these things don’t materialize suddenly without the sole inhabitant of the apartment, particularly neat and particularly vigilant, having some sense of their origins.
Janice walks up to the wall and drags her finger over the stain, which proves to be just as dusty as the surrounding white space. It’s been here a while, she thinks, and shudders with delight at the inexplicability of this sudden perceptual shift, this bizarre morning in which she wakes up and, for the first time, notices something that’s been right in front of her for God knows how long.
She sticks her nose against the plaster and inhales the white space, then the brown, and she can’t detect a change. Her smile is widening and she gingerly extends her tongue. No difference in taste, either.
The feeling of being stumped is such a rush, and she starts pacing as her limbs seem to buzz on her body She needs to tell someone, so she calls her high school girlfriend.
“Cheryl.“
“What the…what time is it?”
“Cheryl, there’s this stain and it’s been there, but I haven’t seen it.”
“Is this Jan? Leave me the fuck alone. I swear I’ll call the cops again you crazy fucking—”
Click. Janice laughs out loud at the ignorance of the Cheryls in the world, at their inability to do what she is doing right now, to deracinate her assumptions and routines without a trip to The Poconos or a new big-screen TV. She lies back on the bed and falls into the folds of her floral duvet, content with being herself for the first time in as long as she can remember.
When the super comes to the apartment three days later to investigate a neighbor’s report of a putrid smell, he does not notice the stain.
//KALMAN VICTOR is a Senior in Columbia College and the Creative Editor for The Current. He can be reached at [email protected].