Thursday, July 16, 2009

Evil Queen Magda

Mark Lisanti turned me on to a funny blogger named Evil Queen Magda about six months ago. Her tagline used to be "Now with 30% More Evil," which I found hilarious. I typically reblog her commentary on her dating life for the LuvvBugg Blog. Here's one of my favorites about "how not to pick up a girl jogging besides you."

Every once in a while she mixes in a short story and she's been doing it much more frequently lately so I thought I would give you, Dear Reader, a heads up. It turns out she's a professional writer and she knocks out some really good stuff. I liked her most recent piece, Exit Aisle and I'll reprint it below. She had another good one, among many, called Terminal which you should check out too. Enjoy!

Exit Aisle

She heard the electricity crackle and looked up at the wires. It was unexpected; she associated this crackle with some place rural. Some place where telephone poles interrupted the landscape. In the dark, the hum drew her attention to the space above and she winced as the base of her head met the top of her shoulders.

She had woken with a headache behind her left eye so strong that it had muscled into her dreams. It was a typical plane-going-down-everyone-into-the-life-rafts scenario, but she awoke more alarmed by R’s presence than the (recurring) theme of near death. It seemed that her subconscious couldn’t be trusted. The conscious, at least, she could beat into submission, beat like the tiny mental box into which she placed her feelings. This imaginary box was metal with latches, and she’d hit those latches with a metaphorical hammer so that they would be too mangled to pry open. Except, it seemed, in case of emergency. When the plane was going down, those latches would spring open and out he would pop. The Jack-in-the-box of things better left unsaid.

The left side of her head still throbbed. Pain, thick like dish soap, rolled through her skull as she stared at the wires. Maybe they were the culprit. Maybe those nutjobs who believed that people should live in yurts, as far away from microwave rays and cell phone radiation as possible, were onto something. Maybe she could blame the electricity for her headache, could blame the tangle of wires for the way the latches malfunctioned.

She briefly considered taking an axe to the telephone pole, but that was the irritation of the headache talking. Instead, she resolved to replace the metaphorical hammer with a metaphorical axe.