Writing Contest Winners

1st Place

Secrets

by Robert Rini

AT NIGHT, the Mail Annex is jammed with the same boredom and brutality as Dayshift, but you come in vulnerable after sitting by the swings in the park, or going to school, or toying with a plate of green curry chicken. The noise hits you first, then the heat, then you pass into a drafty hangar of a hundred Big Machines, catwalks, banks of blinking white lights, warning buzzers. You gulp down your heart and say it's nothing. It's nothing. You flip down your shades, set your headphones right. Thinking doesn't help, so you streamline your thoughts, ignore the ice water trickle in your guts, and focus on your machine.

Trouble is, you can't. The Hazardous Materials are taking down the tent in the parking lot.

Balaganda tapes her hands like a boxer, thwacking green friction tape off a roll. She's lean and mean and the color of mahogany from Bengal, Benares, somewhere you can't remember that reminds you of flying fish and spice trees. Dark beauty. She could dress in scarves and jangling coins and ride an elephant in moonlight with a red dot on her forehead. Instead, she squats in pink flammable sweat clothes on Loading Dock 17, cupping a cigarette like a weary soldier in an old newsreel.

Against all odds, you think you love her.

She operates the Big Machines. She studies ESL during breaks, and after work her husband picks her up in his ice-cream truck. He looks like a Bombay schoolteacher with his gold wire-rimmed glasses and moustache, a neat brown man who walks as if pulled by his drawstring, a forward-falling shamble in the same flammable sweat clothes as lovely Balaganda. He works loading cargo at Sea-Tac Airport. He studies engineering. Weekends, they drive to Alki Beach and sell Creamsicles, Nutty Buddys, Rainbow Pops, Atomic Bombs.

Balaganda. Creamsicle. Dove Bar. She wants to be called Bobbie like a "real American." She hardly notices you. Not much to notice. Your fingers are wrapped in green friction tape, too, and you're pushing two and a half tons of packages in a Gympack—a rolling metal cage, an eight-foot cube of boxes on wheels. Headphones on. Mahler. People expect something strange because of the hair, but Mahler is one of the little secrets you keep to preserve your sanity.

You got secrets:

You tell people you boxed Golden Gloves, but you never really got that far. You got pasted in the preliminaries by a southpaw with the Virgin of Guadalupe tattooed across his chest. You drive a beater Toyota pickup to work, but in your garage at home there is a cherry 1970 El Camino SS with a short-block Chevy 359 engine. Secrets. In another city, on another planet, you dropped out of a doctoral program with all the course work done, your dissertation nearly complete. You just walked away.

In your heart of hearts, way down deep, you want beauty, truth, a night of Mozart and stars.

You sit beside Balaganda in the break room and she offers you sticky rice and a plum. Your heart lifts on silver wings. You offer to get her a juice, and strolling to the dispenser, Raymond the Crazy Expediter cuts you off.

Raymond is an Expediter, maybe 6' 6", who looks exactly like Lurch in the Addams Family and sucks blue jawbreakers until his mouth is a huge blue hole. Always blue. Ex-military jarhead, typical postal trash, you want to stiff-arm him down a flight of stairs. Don't deny it. Okay, all right, admit it; you're trapped by all these stupid cultural male roles, all that macho training scrimshawed on the walls of your skull.

"Are you knocking boots with that little savage?" he asks.

Something explodes, and suddenly you've got Raymond against the condiment table and you are breathing death into his face. You can't speak. You can hardly see. Everything freezes up, the time thing. Raymond's Lurch head leans back with a few tiny relish cubes on his eyebrow from the condiment tray. His big blue mouth hangs slack.

"Never," you finally manage to say, every word a clenched fist. "Never say that."

"Let me the fuck up," he says.

And then it's over, things start moving again, your peripheral vision returns, people return to their curries and apples and noodles and the sounds of the Factory floor come clamoring into your mind. Raymond storms out of the break room.

"Oh, boy," says the Mad Monk. "You really did it now."

Here comes Jinx with big Texas strides. Jinx is 18 years old and has spiked hair the color of Orange Crush and black-thorned vines tattooed around her biceps. She can do one-handed push-ups and regularly beats the Mad Monk at chess. She has to be from a slave planet of gladiators.

Today, she's all angles and edges, muscle taut and thrumming like the rubber band on a balsa wood airplane.

"So," she says, tossing another envelope at your head, "that bitch Raymond says he's gonna seriously fuck you up. Dude, he's serious." She glances around. "What are all these army men here for?"