An excerpt from the published short story “Indifference.”
Shyla looked down at her desk. Lying there, holding a pen, were hands she didn’t recognize. They were thin and speckled with dots of melanin. The nails on them were long and manicured but wiped clean of any polish. Still, some nails looked more distastefully beige than others. The knuckles on each of the fingers were thick and fat, though the skin embracing them looked paper thin. The hands were soft, but not in a pretty way. It was as if they hadn’t ever been used. Like someone sat them up on a shelf, encouraging them to deteriorate a long time ago. Over the years, they became hollow and useless. Surely, they were useless now.
The hands, still stiff and rigid, tried to grip the pen and failed. The utensil slipped onto the table and slid to the floor, rolling under the desk and out of view. In the silence, Shyla could have sworn she heard the black ink sloshing around in its dull, plastic container. She sighed and looked down at her desk once more. A plain white envelope stared back at her. It grew more menacing by the second…
© Sophie Matossian 2022
Visit the 2022 Edition of WALL Literary Journal to read the full story.
https://www.wallaliteraryjournal.org
An excerpt from the short story “Thursday Night.”
9:00 PM
Jenna had always been fascinated with the party scene. She loved nothing more than to dive into the cocktail mix of baby heels, beanies, and kids that probably shouldn’t be driving ten of their friends in their mom’s minivan. One could find almost every kind of person at a high school party. There were the experienced drinkers, the kids who had nothing better to do than to get stoned on a Thursday night, the goody-two-shoes’ that used the “designated driver” excuse, the weird underclassmen who somehow got the address, and the host who was starting to regret not moving the glass coffee table before fifty people showed up. And then there was Jenna.
Jenna decided to walk to the party—not because of its close proximity to her house, or because she thought she was going to go home with someone else, but because tonight, she was getting shit-faced. And she’d be damned if she had to trudge home at midnight with a half- working bike on her hip.
She unfortunately arrived exactly at nine, which was uncool in the worst way. The only people at the party at this hour would be the five best friends of the host and whatever group of girls they had invited to pregame. And there was absolutely no way someone of Jenna’s status was going to make that much of an entrance. She would be crowned “Queen of the Amateurs” and the judgmental looks at every future party would never subside. Not that she didn’t already get looks.
Jenna was very thin for her height, and not because she threw up her lunch everyday like some girls. She was blindingly pale, and not because the days were cold and gloomy this time of year. Her thick orange hair was forever an unruly mop on her head, each curl on twisting in a different pattern and direction. She had let it grow past her shoulders this year, despite her mother’s wishes—because of her mother’s wishes—and it was well on its way down her back, making it even more of a burden. Still, she would rather tell her mother how much she loved and appreciated her than cut it again.
Jenna wore very little makeup, especially to events such as these. She thought the caked- faces looked cheap and desperate. They screamed, “Look at me! Tell me I’m pretty,” as if the rest of the room couldn’t tell they had spent hours getting ready. Jenna could imagine the stench of overused flowery perfume and hairspray hitting her like a wave of allergy-provoking toxins. Her nose itched just thinking about it.
Jenna stopped a few houses before her destination and plopped down on the front lawn of a dark house. Relieving her tired shoulders of the worn backpack full to the brim with cans and bottles, she listened to the faint booming of an unoriginal bass line a couple hundred feet down the street. She could make out a few girlish voices shouting the words over the music. Jenna unzipped the black Jansport and opened something labeled “Mouth-watering Melon.” The condensation burned the back of her throat. Oh yes. Tonight, she would get down-right plastered.
© Sophie Matossian 2021
An excerpt from the short story “Old Ms. Marnie.”
Sundays are my least favorite days, because Sundays are the town’s designated grocery days. Two blocks down, after the one morning service at the aging church building, each townsperson, like a pack of well-dressed zombies, paraded down the center of town to stock up for the apocalypse. It was always the same.
Ms. Marnie was the first to arrive. Every unrelenting Sunday, Old Ms. Marnie, widowed by her dull husband at least ten years ago, left church early to get her shopping done. She took a unvarying seven minutes and bought the same six things: bread, bleached of all color and flavor (fittingly representative of Old Marnie’s steady expression); milk, nonfat and diluted with enough water to make it look more like the grayish white tint of her uneven bob cut; bananas, always past the point of browning and too ripe; instant oatmeal, probably eaten plain and soaked in an unnecessary amount of water; an entire rotisserie chicken, which she undoubtedly made last the whole week in her bare fridge; and prune juice. Prune juice.
Every Sunday, Ms. Marnie would gather her items in a basket (she could never remember to grab one at the entrance) and shuffle discontented and half bent-over down to the cash register. Every Sunday, I’d smile half-heartedly and step to one side so that my employer could ring her up. Ms. Marnie never liked me. Six years ago, when I moved to this shit town in the middle of nowhere and took the one and only job opening at this health code violation of a grocery store, Ms. Marnie would scrunch up her nose and wait in line until “Roger Dear” came out from the back— doing God-knows-what—to ring her up. And every Sunday, they would have the same conversation:
“Morning, Ms. Marnie.”
“Good morning, Roger Dear. How are the kids?”
“Just fine, thank you. How was the service?”
“Just fine.”
“Will this be all?”
“Yes, Dear.”
“Have a good one, Ms. Marnie.”
“Yes, yes, yes…” And off she went, without so much as a nod of recognition towards me.
And the bustle of zombies came sauntering in as she left. Sunday after Sunday came and went just like this. Like there was no where else in the world. Like this was all there was. Like the world was only Old Ms. Marnies and prune juice.
© Sophie Matossian 2021
An excerpt from a short story titled “Peanuts.”
The tired sun glared down at me in cold judgment. There was no warmth in her rays. She was there but I could not feel her. I could only feel the ever-imposing disappointment that even ninety-two million miles away pierced me with ferocious disdain.
The tips of my fingers and toes were frostbitten but it was barely October. My starchy socks were too thin and my pale pink jacket too tight. The zipper had broken the year before but I hadn’t the money nor the energy to mend what had been lost. There were no leaves crunching beneath my feet, as if even that would interrupt the unending trail of uninspiring thought. The only cracking I heard came from my unsuspecting ankles that had fallen victim to the uneven pavement. Chunks of rock stabbed at my heels, undoubtedly breaking apart under my feet and somehow phasing through the soles of my beaten blue Converse. I shoved my fists back into the disproportionally small pockets, trying to shield my wrists from the vengeful breeze.
It was like I had never felt anger before. There was a nagging unfamiliarity in the tea-kettle whistle ringing in my ears. Just minutes before, I had unwillingly, and not without muttering several explicit phrases, taken the advice of my mother’s grating voice living in my head and ventured out into the bitter cold.
The outside world was empty. It was emptier than the lonely rooms of my shitty apartment.
© Sophie Matossian 2021
Sophie Matossian 