Plastic by Scott Guild EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Scott Guild
- Language: English
- Genre: Absurdist Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
A DOLL’S HOUSE
The episode opens on a plastic woman driving home from work.
The camera follows her from outside the car, filming her through
the window, showing her hard, glossy face inside the dim sedan. She is in
her twenties, a pale figurine, with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, nylon
hair cut short above her ears. Houses whisper past on the street beside her,
the sun setting over their rooftops, their shadows long in the last hour of
twilight. Her surface, smooth and specular, reflects the fading light; her
fingers, bent at their hinges, grip the upper rim of the wheel. The name tag
pinned to her polo shirt reads, Erin: Ask Me Anything!
She rolls to a stop at an empty crosswalk, drums two fingertips idly
against the wheel. A single drone is swimming through the smog above her
suburb, like a fish seen from the bottom of a frozen lake. Then, as she
glides through the intersection, Erin’s voice begins to narrate on the
soundtrack. It is a quiet but expressive voice, just louder than the hum of
the tires on the pavement.
A year ago, she narrates, I was a very different person. On a night like
this, a Friday, I’d be hurrying home from Tablet Town, dying to hang up my
uniform and start the weekend. Patrick was in my life back then, a reason to
get through the hours on the sales floor. I thought—no, knew—that nothing
could ever take him away from me.
The street that scrolls beside her car is dusky and deserted, no vehicles
in the driveways, no pedestrians on the sidewalks, no curtains open behind
the barred windows. The houses slide past her in a continual sequence, like
a succession of blurred photographs, each different in their color scheme
but not in their basic construction, shades of pastel siding on the same onestory frame. The backyards are also identical, save for an occasional razor
wire fence that glistens above the hedges.
The camera leaves the street, cuts to a close-up of the plastic woman.
Shadows drift across her molded face.
Last year, if someone had asked me—that other, naive Erin—I would
have told them my life was perfect. And it’s true: I was happy, in my own
way. Each night I drove home to Patrick, hid from the world in his arms. I
stayed in with him every weekend, barely went out except for groceries. Oh,
Patrick. I lost him in the end, of course. Like I’d lost my father, my sister.
Like I’ve lost almost everyone else.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB