Charlotte Truman: Issue 1

Charlotte sat with her feet pressed against the edge of the coffee table. She felt discredited. The room smelled of cooking spice and body odor, and something like vanilla that was just a little off for having been exuded by a slowly desiccating candle. Her sweater neck was chaffing. Wishing she were somehow more engaging, or maybe better liked, she sunk the tender pads of her feet into the age-worn edge and gripped even harder with her toes until they were flat and white against the pitted brown wood. Today Charlotte couldn’t quite find the right time to interject. Or, perhaps it was the interjections themselves that were sub par. Whatever the case, the people in the room with her never seemed to find what she was saying quite interesting enough to look at her when she was speaking, and this made conversation, from her perspective, very difficult.

It had been like this all day.

It had been a very long day.

Charlotte was tired. And something, somewhere, kept popping. It was as though God were inside of her head, clearing his ears by holding his nose and swallowing with deliberate care. Charlotte imagined God pinching his nose. She grinned and glanced around. The people didn’t notice, so she swallowed her spit and tried to take a more active interest in what they were saying. To her left a girl in a purple sweater and a 20-something male seemed to be a part of the larger group discussion but had succeeded in affecting such an intensely disinterested casual interest in each other that the rest of the group was entirely excluded. This was an A + B conversation, it was plain to C.

Across the room, someone had started a private conversation with the person next to him as though it were going to be the next topic of group discussion, which resulted in one of those awkward moments when everyone not intended to be part of the conversation realizes that they were never intended to be a part of the conversation and then feels awkward that they are blatantly and expectantly eavesdropping.

Somewhere through the currents of conversation that eddied vertiginously around her and the rasp of orange merino wool on her throat, Charlotte became aware that she was touching the person next to her. She froze self-consciously until she realized that the reason she had become aware that her knee was pressed against the man on her right was that he had taken his left hand and placed it on her thigh. So, she thought, this probably did not seem awkward to him. Unless, she thought again, he had done it unawares. A subconscious, unintentional, knee-jerk reaction… as it were. But then, she continued to think, if she allowed her own knee-jerk reaction – namely, to jerk her knee away from his corduroy covered thigh – he might realize what he had done and feel embarrassed. He might say something awkward and further alienate himself from her, thus further alienating Charlotte from the group at large since this interaction, intentional or not, was the most attention anyone in the room had paid her in at least twenty minutes.

Charlotte did not like to be alienated. Nor did she particularly enjoy alienating the men with whom she came into contact, however brief, or unintentional, that contact was. This was rooted, as most logical social considerations of the opposite gender, and nearly all illogical neurosis, are – in the paralyzing insecurity that she would never meet someone who was not incurably alienated by nearly everything that she did and, most of all, by who she was regardless of what she happened to be doing. Given her history, and the un-happy returns of the day, this did not seem an unfounded fear. In fact, what it seemed, if anything, was a certainty. Charlotte Truman was doomed to be alone for most of the rest of eternity. That is, at least until she finally fell upwards into the stars, sometime shortly after her death.