here’s this week’s unedited version of timeline.
BONUS: each week immediately flowing timeline will be a bonus snap fiction piece from a collection I keep under my bed called: “This Perfect World.” This week’s included breaking and entering. Let me know what you think….

If there’s someone you can live without, then do so.
And if there’s someone you can just shove out, do so.
— Barenaked Ladies

10:10 a.m.: Sales guy, who has been sulking for days, tells me he’s trying to get over some woman. I know the woman he’s talking about, but … Did anything ever even happen between you two? I ask. “No,” he answers.
10:11 a.m.: So what the hell are you getting over?
10:11:28 a.m.: “Oh, what could have been, what should been, what I wanted to happen.”
10:11:34 a.m.: Has anything you wanted to happen in life ever happened?
10:11:44 a.m.: “No.”
10:12 a.m.: I didn’t think so.
10:22 a.m.: Decide to storyboard my whole day like they do for movies. Currently have about 11 scenes drawn. “How do you even know what’s going to happen ahead of time?” new guy asks me. Oh, I’m not as spontaneous as my arrest record would make you think, I say. I’m very calculated. Very scripted.
10:41 a.m.: “What’s that?” new guy asks. Oh, that’s me drinking tuna on the banks of Coconut Creek at 12:17 p.m. while children wade offshore with homemade nets to catch baitfish and old household appliances that have been discarded in the water.
11:02 a.m.: Marti, the new supervisor, is in an argument with the music guy over some assignment. “It’s not my idea,” Marti says. “The boss wants you to do it.”
11:02:10 a.m.: “So that’s how it’s going to be?” music guy snaps.
11:02:22 a.m.: “I serve at the pleasure of the boss,” Marti replies.
11:03 a.m.: On my storyboard, music guy gives her the finger.
11:03:14 a.m.: There it is.
11:18 a.m.: Tiara is distraught about her future and says she has given up all hope. Hope isn’t for people like us anyway, I tell her. Hope is only for finalists, when the odds really get narrowed down to your favor. Like when you make it to the Final Four in the NCAA tournament or say you have a cousin who dies and has left his money to either you or one of your two brothers. Then, at least you have a shot. Otherwise, hope is an illusion.
11:31 a.m.: Sales guy has his arms folded and his head down on his desk like we all did in seventh-period social studies in high school. Hey, do you open your eyes down there? I ask. I used to like to open my eyes and count the hairs on my arms while Mr. Hanley talked about the civil rights movement. “I just called her,” he says, popping up. What’d you say? “I told her that if she’d give it a chance, I’d promise we’d have fun … forever.”
11:32 a.m.: What did she say?
11:32:22 a.m.: “She said, ‘I like fun. I just don’t like you.’ ”
11:33 a.m.: Good line. I like her. I think I’ll storyboard her up, make her all coltish and wily and untouchable.
11:44 a.m.: New guy challenges me to a text-messaging contest. OK, I say, who do we have to get to first? “Art guy,” he says. “Eight words, 25-letter minimum. Go!”
11:44:19 a.m.: Art guy throws his arm up. “It’s Shine,” he yells. “ ‘I serve at … the pleasure of the boss.’ ”
11:45 a.m.: “Double or nothing,” new guy shouts. “To Carrot. Three words, 12-letter minimum. Go!”
11:45:09 a.m.: Carrot stands up at attention, raises one finger and says, “It’s Shine: ‘Fuck you … loser.’ ”
12:11 p.m.: Go to lunch and eat alone.
12:16 p.m.: Someone gave me a pouch of tuna as a gift, but I’m not sure how to eat it.
12:17 p.m.: So I drink it.
12:21 p.m.: Buy a rusted-out blender from a kid named Toby D for $1.25 and sit on the riverbank, picking the muck out of it.
12:32 p.m.: Think I’ll make everybody smoothies this afternoon.
1:01 p.m.: In foyer of office, sales guy is at the bulletin board, plucking the phone numbers off a homemade ad for a 2003 Toyota Corolla someone in the building is selling. I can hear him mumbling, “She loves me; she loves me not.”
1:02 p.m.: This is not healthy, I tell him. You just need to shove her out of your life. Think about all the mean things she has done to you. Think about how she throws French fries at the homeless and calls cripples “losers.” Think about how she’s a loyal Bushie and a Brooks and Dunn fanatic. Think about how she goes to that diner in Dania Beach and meets jai alai players for nameless sex.
1:03 p.m.: “Only two of those are true,” he says. “And it’s not ‘nameless’ sex. She says she just can’t pronounce the names. Anyway, you’re not helping.”
1:04 p.m.: Picture her with a mustache, I say, holding up a storyboard.
1:04:13 p.m.: “That’s a start,” he says, perking up.
1:17 p.m.: Spot tech girl heading out to her new sports car. Hey, give me a ride, I say. “I’m just driving around back to set my digital compass,” she says. “But you can come if you want.”
1:19 p.m.: As she drives around the building, she reaches over to pull out the instructional manual. Oh, I can do that and talk you through it, I offer. “Have you ever successfully helped someone with an instructional manual?” she asks. No, I reply. “I didn’t think so,” she says.
1:20 p.m.: She finds a wide-open area and starts reading from the manual as she one-hands the wheel. “OK, first, I initiate this, and then, I just have to circle until the setting stops flashing and … ”
1:21 p.m.: Excellent, I didn’t expect 360s and doughnuts on my first ride, I say. “This should just take a second,” she explains.
1:23 p.m.: But we’re still whipping in circles, and the settings just keep flashing. At first it’s dizzying, but then, we get into sort of a mixing-bowl rhythm, and I’m glad the digital reading keeps blinking.
1:24 p.m.: “Do you really think hope is an illusion?” tech girl asks. No, but I like to depress people, I say.
1:25 p.m.: “I was going to do this tomorrow, but I saw it on the storyboards,” she says. “Are you still going to make swampy smoothies for everybody this afternoon, too?” Definitely, I say. I like to make people happy.
1:25:14 p.m.: “It’s kind of a shame that even the unpredictable has become so predictable,” she says. Yeah, nothing just happens anymore, I note. That’s kind of sad.
1:26 p.m.: “This dialogue is getting pretty heavy,” she observes, shifting into overdrive. Yeah, but its mixed with action, so it’ll work. Can you go a little faster?
1:27 p.m.: I close my eyes, and the sensation feels like we’re now up on two wheels. North, south, east and west have converged, and if I open my eyes, I’m sure I’ll see nothing but sky.
1:28 p.m.: This is going to take all day, tech girl says. I better drop you off.
1:28:09 p.m.: No, no. Don’t stop, I say. I think this could be fun …
1:28:12 p.m.: Forever.

e-mail me at tshine@citylinkmagazine.com

This Perfect World:

Amy With a Y

The sensation comes and goes. I feel my bare foot on carpeted stairs and everything feels ... not all right ... but better.
It started two weeks ago, when I turned 23. I was sitting in the one-bench park across from my apartment building scribbling in the margins of the newspaper. I was playing with my name like I did in middle school, trying different versions: Amy, Aimie, Aimee. I remember when I thought that could change everything about me.
Anyway, I was looking down at the loopy letters and noticing how I still used open circles to dot the i’s, when I saw the picture of the parents sitting on a frilly canopy bed. The couple was thin and orangey-tan, as if they played tennis every day. But they seemed awkward among the fat and fuzzy bears that sat beside them on the colorful quilt. Hanging from one of the bed’s four posts was a white sweatshirt — a “hoody” — and another post was striped barber-pole style with blue and gold crepe paper.
I read a little. Apparently, blue and gold were their daughter’s school colors and her first name was the same as mine. Amy with a Y. But then I went back to the photo. The vanity set had one of those three-legged, fairy-tale chairs before a large oval mirror; tasseled pillows were everywhere. All the furniture was cream-colored, and atop a wall-length bureau were small trophies with blue metallic plating. I couldn’t tell exactly what they were for. From one angle, the figures on them looked like itty-bitty archers aiming arrows. But when I put my face real close to the paper, they just looked like tiny, gold-dipped girls with their backs arched proudly, swanlike.
The gist of it was that Amy Brennan was gone. She was killed in one of those accidents where the driver was doing 800 mph with 11 kids in a Mazda Protégé or something. Seven of the kids died and the 18-year-old driver got manslaughter for being stupid or whatever, because he wasn’t drunk.
This was the one-year anniversary of the accident so I figured they must have asked all the parents how they were coping and Amy’s parents were the only ones who must have wanted to be in the paper. I wanted to feel sorry for them because they went on about her SAT scores and how she’d already been accepted at some place called Dartmouth and that she never even got the chance to ride the mountain bike they bought for her 17th birthday, but my eyes just kept going back to the room.
It was near the end of the article that they mentioned it was a two-story house, and that’s when I started feeling the carpeted stairs under my feet. Every place I’ve ever lived has been a one-story. The apartment I share now isn’t even an apartment, really. They call it an “extended efficiency” because it has a full-size refrigerator; otherwise it would just be an efficiency. I almost had my own room when my oldest sister moved out to Sacramento. Not to go to college or anything, just to go. “I’m going to take one giant step,” she said. And that’s what she did. From Boynton Beach, Fla., to Sacramento, Calif. One giant step.
I was going to have my own room, but then my parents divorced and I ended up at my aunt’s house, sharing a room with my mom of all people. I quit school and moved out when I was 16 and a half. At first, I thought about going to Sacramento but I hadn’t even heard from my sister since she left. A friend she went to high school with told me she was selling yogurt.
For a while, after I moved out, I lived with a friend’s parents. She had her own room until I got there and then she hated me in two weeks. “I can’t stand it anymore. I keep stepping on you!” she screamed one night. Before I left her house, I would lie on the floor in a sleeping bag dreaming of what my own giant step would be.
But once I left, I seemed to make only little steps that led to nowhere. I met this older guy who I thought was going to take care of me but he got fired from his job for stealing a case of Dustbusters and things were never the same. I did get this neat job taking photos of people getting on the river tour boats. I really didn’t know anything about photography but this lady taught me how you just line up their faces with the life preserver ring and everybody’s happy. She moved to Boston to work in a bridal shop and I took over. Nobody ever complained about my pictures but the people were so ugly and from Ohio that I started to get sick of it pretty quick. Plus, the captain started touching my hair all the time. So, I quit.
For the past three months, I’ve been working for this auto parts place but they’re a bunch of jerks, too, and I was thinking about quitting last night while I was walking past the Brennans’ house. It’s about the fifth time I’ve been by there in the past two weeks. After reading the article again, I thought I knew the area in Delray where they lived, and I was right. It even says “The Brennans” on the mailbox. It’s the only two-story on the block and when I went by in the early evening the first couple of times, the whole upstairs was black. But after 10, the lights go on in one bedroom and I’m sure Amy’s room is the one facing the street, because it’s always dark.
The second time I came, I was going to knock on the door right away, maybe ask directions or something to see what they were like and peek up the stairway. In my head, the steps are maroon, but I’m hoping I’m wrong. I’d prefer beige or another airy color. Anyway, I chickened out and thought it better if I returned on another night and was honest about it. Tell them I saw them in the newspaper and how their daughter’s room was lovely and my name is Amy, too, and those trophies — were they for archery? I couldn’t tell. And I’ve dreamed of having a canopy bed to hang my “hoody” on and being surrounded by fluffiness and an army of fat, loyal bears because then ... I don’t know. I think I would feel safe and ... better — better than I’m feeling right now. If I could just sleep in that bed for one night and you would love me and I would love you back. I could make that promise.
I wanted to say all that but they would probably freak and think I’m weird. And maybe I am. So, I chickened out the next time, too.
But tonight, something is going to happen. It doesn’t even look as if anyone is home and the sensations are coming in a wave now — I feel my fingers on the cherry-wood banister, my face in the pillows, my sanity beneath the quilt. The gravel walkway leading up to the side door is sharp and coarse but I have already taken off my shoes.
The carpeted stairs will be so soft.