A Story Where Nothing Happens
- Mar 8, 2024
- 2 min read
by Cathy Ulrich
I’m writing a story where you grow up in a blue house. Periwinkle blue, with white trim and a green yard and sprinklers that make a sound like chk-chk-chk. And every morning, you wake up to chk-chk-chk and the chitter and rustle of fluttery birds with round black eyes and soft brown wings.
And there are flowers of course, in this story I’m writing. Pretty little flowers that bow in the wind and shine with morning dew.
Your neighbors wave when they see you, wave and call you by name — hello there, they say with their smiling mouths. No one locks their doors at night or, if they do, it’s because they heard of something bad that happened, something somewhere else, something far away.
No one calls the cops in your neighborhood, but if they did, if they had to, the cops would be gentle but gruff, like on TV, they’d say how can I help, they wouldn’t shoot first, ask questions later, wouldn’t leave you in your driveway to die.
In the story I’m writing, you have a hamster, a little brown one with a stubby tail. You name him Rollo and he likes to sit in your hand and chew on carrots, crunch-crunch-crunch, and you will never hold his shuddering body as the life goes out of it, never bury the wither of his remains in a bank box in your back yard. Rollo will never die.
You will never die.
In this story, you watch Jeopardy with your grandmother, all smiles and scent of apple pie. Between the two of you, you know all the answers. Alex Trebek will gaze out from the television screen with his wise eyes, Alex Trebek will never die, you and your grandmother and Rollo the hamster will never die.
And this story I’m writing, it’s a quiet story, where nothing happens, except maybe you go out for ice cream with the boy across the street. Maybe the ice cream has rainbow sprinkles and you eat it with a pink plastic spoon and look out the window of the ice cream shoppe, listen to the hum of cars, your mouth burning with the secret of your first kiss. And the ice cream is so good, so, so good, it’s the best ice cream you’ve ever had. The best you will ever, ever have.
Cathy Ulrich knows it’s not nice, but sometimes she says “Why couldn’t it have been Pat Sajak instead?” Her work has been published in various journals, including Gastropoda, Washington Square Review and Bluestem.
