Cold Fire

in front of her desk.
    “No, Tommy. Talking to myself.”
    “You? Gee, what've you got to be unhappy about?”
    “My life.”
    He stopped and leaned on his broom, crossing one long leg in front of the other. With his broad freckled face, jug ears, and mop of carroty hair, he looked sweet, innocent, kind. “Things haven't turned out like you planned?”
    Holly picked up a half-empty bag of M & Ms, tossed a few pieces of candy into her mouth, and leaned back in her chair. “When I left the University of Missouri with a journalism degree, I was gonna shake up the world, break big stories, collect Pulitzers for doorstops—and now look at me. You know what I did this evening?”
    “Whatever it was, I can tell you didn't enjoy it.”
    “I was down at the Hilton for the annual banquet of the Greater Portland Lumber Products Association, interviewing manufacturers of prefab pullmans, plyboard salesmen, and redwood-decking distributors. They gave out the Timber Trophy—that's what they call it—for the 'lumber-products man of the year.' I got to interview him, too. Rushed back here to get it all written up in time for the morning edition. Hot stuff like that, you don't want to let the bastards at The New York Times scoop you on it.”
    “I thought you were arts and leisure.”
    “Got sick of it. Let me tell you, Tommy, the wrong poet can turn you off the arts for maybe a decade.”
    She tossed more chocolate morsels in her mouth. She usually didn't eat candy because she was determined not to wind up with a weight problem like the one that had always plagued her mother, and she was gobbling M & Ms now just to make herself feel more miserable and worthless. She was in a bad downward spiral.
    She said, “TV and movies, they make journalism look so glamorous and exciting. It's all lies.”
    “Me,” Tommy said, “I haven't had the life I planned on, either. You think I figured to wind up head of maintenance for the Press, just a glorified janitor?”
    “I guess not,” she said, feeling small and self-centered for whining at him when his lot in life was not as desirable as her own.
    “Hell, no. From the time I was a little kid, I knew I was gonna grow up to drive one of those big damn old sanitation trucks, up there in that high cab, pushin' the buttons to operate the hydraulic-ram compactor.” His voice became wistful. “Ridin' above the world, all that powerful machinery at my command. It was my dream, and I went for it, but I couldn't pass the city physical. Have this kidney problem, see. Nothin' serious but enough for the city's health insurers to disqualify me.”
    He leaned on his broom, gazing off into the distance, smiling faintly, probably visualizing himself ensconced in the kingly driver's seat of a garbage truck.
    Staring at him in disbelief, Holly decided that his broad face did not, after all, look sweet and innocent and kind. She had misread the meaning of its lines and planes. It was a stupid face.
    She wanted to say, You idiot! I dreamed of winning Pulitzers, and now I'm a hack writing industry puff pieces about the damn Timber Trophy! That is tragedy. You think having to settle for being a janitor instead of a garbage collector is in any way comparable?
    But she didn't say anything because she realized that they were comparable. An unfulfilled dream, regardless of whether it was lofty or humble, was still a tragedy to the dreamer who had given up hope. Pulitzers never won and sanitation trucks never driven were equally capable of inducing despair and insomnia. And that was the most depressing thought she'd had yet.
    Tommy's eyes swam into focus again. “You gotta not dwell on it, Miss Thorne. Life … it's like gettin' a blueberry muffin in a coffeeshop when what you ordered was the apricot-nut. There aren't any apricots or nuts in it, and you can get tied up in knots just thinkin' about what you're missin', when the smarter thing to do is realize that blueberries have a nice taste, too.”
    Across the room, George Fintel farted in his sleep. It was a window-rattler. If the Press had been a big newspaper, with reporters hanging around who'd just returned from Beirut or some war zone, they'd have all dived for cover.
    My God, Holly thought, my life's nothing but a bad imitation of a Damon Runyon story. Sleazy newsrooms after midnight. Half-baked philosopher-janitors. Hard-drinking reporters who sleep at their desks. But it was Runyon as revised by an absurdist writer in collaboration with a