Double Points

new fiction from Claire Hopple

collage by Kyle Anderson

DOUBLE POINTS

by Claire Hopple

Wait, this can’t be right. By the looks of it, I’m sitting out back of a pizza parlor with a horde of rabid opossums beside me. Big mistake.

It’s a Wednesday, which doesn’t mean anything. Especially not to me. Not anymore.

We appear to be eating what I can only assume is leftover pizza. I want to claim it all for myself and give these opossums the dumpster crusts, but they’ll know. They’ll test. Just look at them.

The pizza parlor was a nice place once.

As you can probably tell, morale is low. I’m regretting my major life decision to let myself make major life decisions.

Last thing I remember is picking up a few things at the grocery store. The usual stuff. Not much to speak of. A disembodied voice spoke overhead about getting double points of some kind. These points are highly valued for the obtaining of an acrid liquid that poisons us and our surroundings but makes us impressively mobile. Double the points gets you double the liquid gets you double the poison gets you double the mileage to a destination that ultimately makes you feel anxious. Even if you love it there, you’ll want to leave and return home as soon as possible. This liquid is called gas, which is not a gas at all, but a liquid, as we’ve already established. That’s what the grocery store spokeswoman should’ve said over the loudspeaker, but she wasn’t even willing to show herself in public. And I didn’t have any coupons. I haven’t had any coupons for quite some time. Maybe I can build up to it.

Now I’m throwing pepperonis at opossums. So this is what companionship looks like. Maybe they’ll show me some illicit trash they’ve stored in a special hiding spot, that is if they don’t bite me first. Depends on whether they have something to prove. But really they’re no longer paying attention to me.

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I do remember the grocery store smelled like money, like there was some kind of shakedown right before I arrived. I always miss the action. Money used to smell like pennies, back when pennies were considered money. These days pennies are considered parking lot litter, or at best some glove compartment percussion for your commute. Pennies smell like copper because they’re made of copper. And copper smells like blood, which should be where the term “blood money” comes from, but it means something else entirely, which is a little disappointing.

What I was really doing at that grocery store was casually spying on someone. But I was also studying the rest of the shoppers at random intervals, noting how many layers they’d shellacked overtop their quiet desperations.

Earlier that day, I had tampered with company policy. I was reworking some stipulations and got a little carried away. The thing about tampering with policies is that you can turn companies into time bombs. I added a line or two about the boss being required to pop out of a giant cake in order to fire someone. And including mini bottles in the vending machines. That’s all.

Oh, and I might’ve punched a guy out.

“You call those exploits?” I think I hear the Grand Opossum say, but I don’t know how to break it to him that he can’t speak English.

When I punched the new guy for trying to teach me a life lesson, all my workmanship fluttered to the ground, those beautiful nonsense sentences falling on his feet.

“Too bad about your nose. That dent oughta help,” I said to him while he was still grounded, learning how to breathe through coagulated carpet fibers.

Turns out that altering company policy and attacking a coworker does nothing. They didn’t care. Somehow everyone was buying it. Low morale? Low morale.

There’s no law against spying on your boss, attempting to determine whether she’s going to pop out of a cake just to terminate you in the proper fashion. But there is a law against starting a physical altercation. You get what I mean.

“Does it make a difference? Nothing can be done about it,” I say to the empty space where the opossums are no longer convening.

The secret to a good marriage is never coming home, and that’s exactly what I’m doing. The missus and I got married at the Mall of America, back when they still had a Chapel of Love. Back when my wife was still getting married competitively. I was Groom Number Six. She taught me how to cheat death along with some other practical skills that shouldn’t be mentioned here because you’d get bored reading them.

Maybe my boss has lost all her power over me. Maybe she’s still struggling to scan a barcode in the self-checkout line, skirting around the periphery of her disdain for me. She has no pizzazz. She’s never had any pizzazz. When someone doesn’t have pizzazz, everybody else knows it. She’s probably the reason that morale is low.

She does this every day, the thing with the numbers. Crunching them. She can really crunch, and she will not let you forget it.

A pizza parlor employee in a stained apron busts through the back door for a cigarette break, takes one look at me, and runs into the woods. That’s more like it. Now I really have this place all to myself.

For my next trick, I’ll become a celebrity under an assumed name. Hold seances for all those people who never learned how to cheat death. Develop an exercise book. Whatever it takes. When the time is right, I’ll make a move. But you can never be sure with me.

CLAIRE HOPPLE is the author of six books. Her stories have appeared in Southwest Review, Forever Mag, Wigleaf, Cleveland Review of Books, and others. More at clairehopple.com.

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