I. Venus de Milo
The Birth of the l o o C by Jason Cruz
2 MONTAGE
From across the alleyway where drunken dudes pissed after a night out at the neighborhood pubs, he heard her singing. A throaty mezzo-soprano embellished by the haphazard trumpet notes of one Miles Davis. The music meandered in the brisk air between the graffiti stained walls of their buildings like a poindexter on the gym floor during his first school dance; a feeling Obadiah knew all too well. Try as he might, O-tomatic, as he preferred to be called on Xbox Live, had trouble figuring out the lyrics; the vocals were muddled by the saran wrap that kept the windows airtight and the apartment at an enjoyable seventy degrees. But he hummed along anyway as he shoved the Totino’s pepperoni pizza into the old school oven and set the timer for thirteen minutes. It only took him three and a half large steps, or eight one-foot checkerboard ceramic tiles, to get from the oven to the porcelain sink attached on the opposite wall. There, he carefully cleaned his Buddy Holly eyeglasses and then took a minute to peer out the window and scan the exterior of the other apartment. All he saw were closed curtains and the shadows projected onto them. None of the apparitions looked like the vision he has in his head (the stereotypical obese opera singer cross-dressing as Erik the Red), so, instead, he focused on his main quest that evening: rescuing the pizza cutter from the evil confines of Dish Mountain. He looked into the sink and sighed. Staring back at him were two months worth of dirty dishes, glasses, and silverware stacked so tall that they nearly reached the tip of the faucet. He had organized the pile, all of it a collection of Christmas and birthday gifts from his mother, to be more spaceefficient by using his mad Tetris skills—even having the false hope that the right combination would make the pile disappear—but it just made locating a specific item nearly impossible without toppling the tower onto itself, or, worse, the floor. Obadiah knew that he only had himself to blame. He always hated washing the dishes. He remembered how his mother, with her height advantage and her piercing brown eyes and her refusal to wear her false teeth at home, forced him to do the dishes every night from when he was age eight to age twenty-five. One time she even took away his Game Boy, Pokemon Yellow cartridge still attached, for a whole month after a still chubby ten year old Obadiah went on strike by banging pots and pans and chanting the newly-learned phrase Taxation without Representation over
MONTAGE 3