Seasonal Work

By Andy Hollandbeck

Seasonal Work is the first collection of short stories from author, editor, musician, and father Andy Hollandbeck.

Many of these bundles of words first appeared on his blog, Logophilius, and were run through the editorial wringer once again before added to this e-book.

Seasonal Work also contains half a dozen or so other stories that are appearing in print for the first time.

Here, you'll find something to satisfy you all year long -- hate, fear, anger, robots, joy, love, and all the other things that make being a human the frustrating wonder it is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andy Hollandbeck
• Release date: May 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301033324

Andy Hollandbeck

Writer, editor, father, musician, social media junky, tech addict.

Book preview

Summer

The Passport

When Hillary’s passport was new, each fresh expedition brought the thrill of the unfamiliar and the hope of a lifetime of new experiences around the world. And there were many experiences on many expeditions. For instance, in Japan, one of the passport’s first destinations, it was handled delicately by the long, gloved fingers of a smiling young woman who bowed incessantly. But in Greece, a sweaty bear of a man with greasy, furry fingers barely glanced at the passport before smashing his great ink stamp onto one of the pages.

Big hands, little hands, even hands missing fingers; Russian winters, summers in the French Riviera, monsoon season in Southeast Asia; rain forests, deserts, glaciers, jungles — Hillary’s passport had experienced it all. Everything a fresh young passport could hope for.

But after a few years, the passport began to realize that its youthful dreams were naïve. All that travel was wearing the passport down.

Over the years, it had seen countless airports and been stowed in numerous hotel safes. It had passed through hundreds of hands — from thick, calloused, sausage fingers to dainty, manicured digits. Each new handling brought with it a new inky stamp, smearing the passport’s pages with letters from Greek and Cyrillic alphabets; logograms in Korean, Mandarin, Japanese; and collections of numbers marking a long chronology of world travel.

So frequently was the passport handled that the capital P had been worn completely off the cover, and Hillary had taken to calling it her assport.

It was sometime around the second trip to Greece that the idea of home reached the passport. It was an odd idea at first: a single place that one could always come back to. A stable, predictable, familiar place where one could just relax and be. No strangers’ rough hands. No stamps.

But Hillary’s travels continued, and the idea of home haunted the passport so much that it thought it might throw a staple from the longing. It didn’t want anything special, just a sock drawer, or a shoebox in a closet, or even the dusty space behind a refrigerator, anyplace where it could cease its constant movement and manhandling.

Soon, each expedition brought, instead of thrills, a dark sense of distress. Of misery. Of remorse. Until finally, one evening in the cold darkness of some Parisian hotel room safe, it decided it had had enough.

Hillary’s passport was done with travel . . . but wasn’t that really up to Hillary?

The aromatic mix of salty ocean air and street vendors’ spicy meats was immediately recognizable as soon as Hillary stepped out of the airport: Jamaica, one her favorite vacation spots.

The plane had been delayed in Miami, and Hillary’s hurried gait indicated a packed schedule that she was already falling behind on. Freshly stamped, the passport was dropped into the hodgepodge of personal items in Hillary’s oversized shoulder bag. She slid into an automobile of some sort, and the passport, practically mad from the month of solid travel since its decision to stay still, foresaw another short sentence in a dark hotel safe.

It was surprised when the door opened and Hillary emerged, not in front of her usual fancy hotel, but onto the beach. Gulls cried, children laughed, and the sounds of a steel drum wafted into the open top of Hillary’s bag, along with the brightest sunshine ever to reach the world-weary passport.

The bag soon landed on a hard floor that swayed slowly back and forth in a way that the passport remembered from other boat trips. An engine fired up nearby, and the passport sensed forward motion. The engines grew louder as the boat picked up speed, and soon the rocking motion was replaced by rising and falling as the speedboat skipped across the waves. With each jump the wallet and the coin purse jockeyed for position at the mouth of the bag.

The boat must have launched from a particularly large wave, because when it thudded down, Hillary’s bag fell sideways. Through the bag’s opening, the passport no longer saw empty sky, but the white, spreading foam of the boat’s wake slicing through glistering blue sea. The beach was a shrinking white line backed by old, green trees and the clean angles of resort buildings that climbed into a clear azure sky.

It was the most beautiful thing the passport had ever seen, and the passport had seen a lot.

The boat came down hard again, and the contents of Hillary’s purse shifted, pushing the passport closer to the open top.

And it saw an opportunity.

The passport concentrated on pulling its covers together, closing itself as tightly as possible. When the next wave came, it opened its pages hard, springing from the bag.

For a moment, the passport was airborne and surrounded by light. It was a thrill like none the passport had experienced since its very first travels. Behind it, the passport thought it could hear the plaintive cry of a worn-down red-brown lipstick: Take me with you!

Then it hit the water.

The boat’s engine noise receded. The cool waves rocked the passport wildly so that it started feeling dizzy, and it liked the feeling.

Even as the passport enjoyed the sun, the constant movement, and the susurrus sloshing of the waves, its pages absorbed the salt water, softening and thickening. That, too, was a new, thrilling feeling.

Before long, the water-logged passport sank under the waves. The sunlight danced across its cover as it drifted downward, passing wide, colorful creatures and schools of tiny, shiny, silver slivers shifting in unison. As the passport sank, the light dimmed, and the ocean shifted slowly from a transparent blue to a dark green.

The passport floated down, down, down, coming to rest lightly on the ocean floor. White sand wrapping around its edges as if the world had caught it and held it there. Above, the environment was alive with movement, strange new creatures traveling in all directions to unknown locations, while the passport just rested and watched.

It was home.

"Passport" was originally published January 10, 2013 at Logophilius. It was the result of an experiment in which I asked the Twittersphere simply for a non-human character, something the character wanted, and something standing in the way of that desire. I think it turned out well.

The Examination

In retrospect, I was totally unprepared. I blame my parents, as all children do.

I recognized but did not know the white-coated man feeling my neck, listening to my heart, pushing on my stomach to feel my innards. His fingers were cold. I didn't know what I was expected to do, so I laid there on the cold exam table and tried to be as still as I could.

More than anything else, I hoped he didn't bring out any needles.

So I played statue on the table in the center of a mostly dark room, a harsh white light shining on me, whiter than white, like the lights they use in spy movies when they're interrogating the secret-agent protagonist, and you just know that sometime in the next five minutes, he will kill all the shadowy men sitting comfortably in the dark.

The room smelled antiseptic, a word I didn’t known at the time. When I was that young, I would have said it smells like a hospital. Even then I hated hospitals. Six steps into the cold tiled halls of a hospital and I could feel my lunch trying to make its way back out, one way or another.

The only sound in the room was the heavy breathing of Dr. Whatshisname through his thick moustache. Was that cigarette smoke I smelled? Slightly better than the hospital smell, yes, but it still made my toes curl.

My mouth was completely dry, and had been since we left the waiting room. I wanted to ask for a glass of water, but didn’t want to break protocol. And since I didn’t know what protocol was, I didn’t want to do anything in case it was the wrong thing to do. So I laid there, stock-still, while he poked and prodded.

Just when I thought he couldn’t possibly check any other nook or cranny on my body (except the feet — feet are never part of the routine), he uttered the words I wasn't expecting: Pull your pants down.

Had I known the word fuck at that young age, I would have said it three or four times in the string of questions and exclamations I wanted to scream at him. But, of course, I