An August Afternoon

Sarah Joyce busied herself with the dirty dishes in the sink in her small apartment in the West End on a late summer afternoon in August. Her hair was tied back in a red kerchief to keep it off her shoulders, and her neck cool. There was no air conditioning in her small apartment. She stopped scrubbing the remnants of a vegetarian meatloaf off of her mother's old china with a brillo pad and glanced out the window over the sink at the sunset that was lighting the clouds magnificently. Breathing a sigh of contentment for the beauty of nature and discontent for the ugliness of tofu-encrusted china, which came out sounding like a muffled cough, she bent her head again to her work, when there was a knock on the door. The door!
Was it Tuesday night!? It was! She'd asked Boris to come over tonight! How could she have forgotten!? "One minute, Boris!" she called as she pulled the drain in the sink and started stashing still-dirty plates in the cupboard under the sink, and scanning the apartment for embarassing debris. There, a pink bra hung on the reading lamp next to the couch, two copies of Little Orphan Annie on dvd sitting in plain sight on the coffee table, next to her newest Japanese anime novel. "I'll be right the-ere!" she called through the door as she lifted the couch skirt and threw the offending items underneath to join her thigh-master, an empty pizza box, and assorted pieces of an old monopoly game. She stood, and exhaled, and took one last look around, and then reached for the door only to realize she was still wearing her dishwashing gloves! She whipped them off and flung them down the hallway towards her bedroom. The bedroom. Well, that was another story altogether, she wouldn't worry about it unless things went better than expected with Boris tonight. She opened the door. "Hello, Boris! Sorry to keep you waiting. I was...just drying my hair..." Sarah glanced up to her red kerchief as her voice trailed off. Boris stood in the doorway, a stocky guy with close-cropped black hair wearing a grey t-shirt and jeans. He blinked away his confused look as he stepped into the apartment and took a covert look around, not wanting to offend Sarah, who, after all, had invited him over out-of-the-blue after he'd spent two weeks trying to build up the nerve to speak to her. The tiny apartment was painted an ugly puke-yellow that clashed with the brown-and-blue plaid couch and pink shag rug, but certainly no worse than his own apartment two streets over furnished mostly with milk crates and two-by-fours. The back wall, however, had been painted over with whitewash and a quotation was written in poorly executed, but clearly painstakingly done, script in brown paint; "The only reason why God created man is because he was disappointed with the monkey. -S. L. Clemens" There was a drip of paint trailing down the wall under the 'y' in "why" and streaks in the big 'g' of "God" but the quotation seemed comical and thoughtful in an entirely appropriate way. A bird in a small cage hung from the ceiling just under the painted message. Boris spun slowly on his heel to face Sarah who was still standing with the door open to her fifth floor landing, and said, "That's an interesting quote. Why did you paint it?" Sarah smiled at him and said excitedly "I had dreams of training circus monkeys when I moved to the city, and I ran out and bought the paint the first day I moved into this place! I thought that the quote was perfectly ironic and philosophical for an aspiring monkey-trainer." Boris walked over to the back wall, and said "So, you have a monkey too?" Sarah smiled sheepishly at him and moved her hand to toy with a strand of hair that had fallen out of her kerchief, "Well, you see, I bought the paint before I bought a monkey to train...and, monkeys are really expensive! So I bought a parakeet." Boris smiled at her. Then turned and smiled at the little bird in the cage. "I'll bet you named him Sam, right?" And Boris and Sarah both looked at each other and grinned goofy grins and she said "Yes." and shut the apartment door.

-t inspired by wikiquote and music